Embarrassing admissions about luxury items

I am normally given to enjoying and admiring those small and perfect things that the world presents to us free of charge or those things which are the gifts of attention. While I'm sure that insanely expensive hotel room on the shores of Lake Locarno is very nice, this cup of coffee has its charms, too.

Having said that, It gives me some vaguely guilty pleasure to type the following phrase:

prescription varilux bifocal Oakley sunglasses

There. I've done it. Move along, nothing to see here.

Spark trio performance now online

It's taken me a few days to get around to getting it up, but an MP3 version of the trio performance with my pals Brad Garton and Terry Pender at the 2007 Spark Festival is now online and available on my new and expanded MP3 downloads page.

Part 1 (15:25)
Part 2 (12:39)

Reasons for a lack of stardom...

...a lack of talent? Possibly, but that's not what I wanted to say.

I am in the process of working on some new material and patchery, and I have realized what one of my problems is; I spend too much time listening to things in their raw state. This week, it's been revisiting and enjoying the pleasures of Nathan Wolek's granular toolkit for MSP, reminding myself that the whole granular thing may well appear to be "overused" because people only opt for a tiny subset of what's possible [as Marcel Wierckx' work suggests, which was always my view of FM synthesis in earlier times]. To that end, I'mve been taking materials I'm really familiar with and rather exhaustively tweaking parameters very slowly in various combinations, and spending a good amount of time living inside/alongside the results. For hours and days.

I expect that by the time I think I've got it figured out, some part of me thinks that no one else will be interested; my inner midwesterner shows up, pronounces the results "nothin' special," and moves on. This "slow preparation, fast execution" stuff is tricky.

How I missed on-air fundraising

Owing to the spectacular snowstorm this past weekend, I was effectively trapped in Minneapolis. I am extremely grateful to Dave Pederson for filling in for me.

Things were fine when I drove up earlier in the week to participate in the annual Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Art, where I was going to perform with both of the live ensembles I'm currently working with - a trio with Tom Hamer on percussion and Mark Henrickson on visuals, and another trio [for this occasion, a quartet - hooray!] with Terry Pender on mandolin, Brad Garton on laptop and Luke Dubois on visuals. The quartet with Brad and Terry and Luke went swimmingly, and we even managed that particularly miraculous situation of being able to turn the bed in Brad and Terry's room into a recording studio for some sessions while Terry was in town.

Things got a bit interesting later in the week. Due to circumstances beyond their control, neither Mark nor Tom was able to make it to Minneapolis, which meant an impromptu solo set. Luke Dubois came to my aid and provided some visuals which I believe went a long way toward distracting the audience in instructive ways, but all seemed to have gone well (note to self: a consequence of playing with great people is that you feel all the more exposed when you return to solo work). The Spark Festival is a great collection of stuff, full of very friendly people and interesting music, and very short on attitude. My thanks to Doug Geers and his crew, and to J.P. Hungelman and his band of merry clubsters.

Given the storm and all the unpleasantness between Minneapolis and Madison, there was no way I was going home on Sunday, which is why you turned on the radio and got Mr. Pedersen instead of me. I made a cautious dash home yesterday, and things are kind of back to normal, except for the shevelling. Next week on RTQE, it's back to business as usual, thanks to our listener sponsors.

How to ruin an-air fundraising(and save your evening)

Last night was the first of two weeks' worth of on-air fundraising for WORT-FM, when all good radio hosts talk a lot more than usual and wait for the phones to ring.

The normal and appropriate thing to do is to go with shorter pieces [for me, that means "less than 10 minutes," in case you're wondering] that are exciting and upbeat.

But that sort of bothers me. I'm quite well aware of being so generally unexciting, thanks - the Q stands for "Quiet," after all. But it's more the idea that the normal goal something that stops one in one's tracks. So I decided that I'd try to integrate this into my fundraising appeal... to play something that would bring things to a standstill by the force of its Ch'i/prana/integrity/whatever.

And I had just the thing: Susanna and the Magical Orchestra's 2006 all-covers release Melody Mountain on Rune Grammofon. Go buy the disk. No, really. Susanna Wallumrod [yes, she is related to that guy who drums on ECM discs] and Morten Qvenild from Jaga Jazzist, very minimal instrumentation, and a production job from Helge Sten that displays the Prince, Leonard Cohen, Joy Division, Kiss, and AC/DC covers like diamonds on inky black velvet.

I played her cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," and it even fetched people from other parts of the building/phone answerers into the studio to ask, "What is this? It's exquisite...." And, in honor of a later pledger, I ran her take on "Love Will Tear Us Apart Again."

Upbeat and exciting? Well, maybe not. But music that is about what I think I try to do on an ordinary evening? Oh my, yes.

Disk death (a chance to listen again)

My preparations for the Boston workshop last week were enlivened by disk death, which involved two important things: the arrival of a new Macbook Pro, and the death of my iPod library. Well, actually, the death of part of the library.

So I now have to start reloading a large portion of my iPod library from CD again. Not something I look forward to doing, but it's been an interesting chance to look at those shelves again.

One thing I didn't expect to consider is my habit of what I put on the iPod. Previously, I had this notion that I'd be going through my library and keeping only the cuts on a given recording I liked. But going back to reloading stuff, I'm struck again by hearing the things that I left off the first time. The last specific example was some material from Talk Talk's "Spirit of Eden" that didn't make the original cut.

What was I thinking? Probably saving space. But I've decided to be more selective about including entire albums, and leave off the individual cut selection for a while.

In turn, I've been thinking about the notion of novelty vs. diffusion; My reloading puts me in the interesting position of simultaneously adding new work alongside things that have been off my radar for a while. The verdict: diffusion trumps novelty. There's just more in the past to be surprised by.

Don't just look out the window - check the curtains

I'm in Boston to do a workshop, and did the Hotwire thing to find a hotel room. Owing to the insane cold snap that blankets most of the east and midwest scrambled my flights, my flights were retimed and rerouted, but (apart from a theme-park-ride landing) all went well. The hotel I'm staying is pretty nice. I was particularly drawn to the historically themed curtains. Never thought of putting historical documents on my curtains. Ah Boston, crucible of our liberty....

This reminded me of a little song about Curtains by Peter Gabriel. Just a fragment, really - it shows up on the B-side of the Single "Big Time," I think (Yep... Ah, online discographies).

Oh, draw the blinds
We can shut out the night
Oh, pull up the blankets
Pull the blankets up tight

And there are angels on our curtains
They keep the outside out
And there are lions on our curtains
They lick their wounds
They lick their doubt

The image of the vanquished nursing their hurt and doubt has stuck with me.

The last place this showed up was in a computer game - Myst IV. No kidding. You can see the sequence (and hear the tune) here.