While the conjunction of a major mid-month work crisis and a major renovation effort derailed my original plans for Two Moon Sky, do not despair. I’ve decided, in the spirit of symmetry, to record the rest of the album over the last five days of this lunar cycle. That will balance nicely with the first five tracks, done over the first five days of said cycle.

So, since this month’s Blue Moon falls on the 31st, I’ll be doing the rest of the album on the 27th through the 31st. Still not the piece-a-night opus of my original plan, but it’s a compromise I can live with.

Stay tuned!

Just as a counterweight to my last post, I thought I’d share some highlights from the weekend:

1. Great food at the HOB (good drinks, too)
2. PT’s opening act 3 were pretty cool. Their sound is an interesting fusion of nu-metal, 80’s hair metal, space noises, latin percussion (!) and synthy beeps and bloops.
3. A lovely drive around Lake Erie to Geneva, where we met up with a gentleman who is going to try and reanimate my dead Moog
4. Spent a few minutes in downtown Geneva buying chocolates and esoteric books – including a nifty pocket-sized copy of Liber AL vel Legis (although not at the same store, alas).
5. Another lovely drive back towards home through northern Ohio farm country where we found, much to our surprise, a multitude of vineyards. I didn’t know that was wine country, so when we go back up to retrieve the Moog there’s more exploring to do.

Um, OK, obligatory disclaimer here: I am a huge Porcupine Tree fan. My first exposure was In Absentia, quickly followed by their back-catalog, and then Deadwing, which we saw live at the HOB last year. They, as much as any other recent band, rekindled my interest in prog (in the sense of progressive music, not in the made-from-a-kit nu-prog vein).

That said, I have to run against the grain of apparently every critic on the Interweb, and state that Fear of a Blank Planet – their latest release – does absolutely nothing for me. I’ve listened to it 6 or 8 times in the last two weeks, and saw them live this past Friday, and it’s just not grabbing me by the ear like I’ve come to expect. If anything, it comes across as forced and passionless. I understand this is an album with a specific message, one of alienation, isolation, consumerism, etc., but that’s no excuse for the writing, playing, and production to be completely bloodless.

I had high hopes for the concert, thinking “Maybe it’ll come through live.” Nope. Sorry, Steven – I love your work, but I’m not feeling the love for this one. To be fair, there are some good components, the polyrhythmic Opeth-y bits are present (again!?), RB’s keyboards are lush and dramatic – maybe even moreso than the last two albums, but there’s just no “Wow!” here for me.

Granted, you can’t please everyone, and there are certainly plenty of folks who hold this album in high regard. That’s cool. Me, I’ll be the guy listening to Lightbulb Sun while I wait for their next release.

Here’s a video clip from 1960 of John Cage performing a piece live on a TV game show. Given how hard it is even today for experimental/avant-garde art to be taken seriously, imagine the courage it took to do this in front of a game show audience three years before the Beatles were ridiculed on American Bandstand because of their haircuts.

…so the big dumpster showed up on Friday, as expected, and we started tearing the fixtures and fittings out of the bathroom that evening. Yesterday (Tuesday), the last of the plaster & lath came out of that same damn room! Between Friday and Tuesday, the following happened:

1. Learned toilets are much easier to remove with a hammer than with a wrench (note: toilet not reusable after this technique).
2. Two hours wrestling a cast-iron tub out of the house and into the dumpster – ended up dragging tub through the house on a moving pad and flinging it down the front porch steps.
3. Discovered bathroom ceiling had been dropped about 18” to hide disintegrating original ceiling.
4. Ripped out vinyl tile, plywood, 60’s tongue-and-groove, tarpaper and original tongue-and-groove before we hit non-water-damaged subflooring. We now have a two-story bathroom (or an oubliette, depending upon your preference).
5. Found out how far off my original estimate of effort for this project was. It took both of us about 3 1/2 days to gut the bathroom, and completely filled a 10 yd (that’s 10 cubic yards, BTW) dumpster with the debris.

In the midst of all this, we decided to go ahead and call in an electrician to move our meter (out of the way of the planned deck) and install the new breaker box. We found a local outfit who have been (a) prompt (b) reliable© competent and (d) reasonably priced. It’ll be nice having that out of the way, it’ll mean I can get the rest of the new circuits run.

In other news, we watched Stranger than Fiction last evening. It’s like a Douglas Adams pastiche shot through an M. Night Shyamalan lens. Funny, touching, and dare-I-say-it moving. Bears almost no resemblance to the trailers, highly recommended.

I’ve fallen far behind on Two Moon Sky – haven’t recorded anything since Sunday night. It’s amazing how easy it is to lose momentum on a project like this. Speaking of recordings – I’ve moved all my stuff to the recordings section of the site. This place is still a work-in-progress – I’m trying to figure out the best way announce new pieces on the front page while keeping the article (and the tune) in their own section.

My job has been insane this week, plus I’m stressing over next week’s construction work. We’re having a big dumpster dropped off on Friday and I’ve taken next week off so we can gut three of the downstairs rooms. The plaster & lath walls in those three are shot, so they’re getting demolished down to the studs and completely redone. The plan is to at least get them gutted, rewired, and insulated next week. I’m actually looking forward to doing the work, just a little worried about getting everything done in that timeframe.

On the bright side, we’re going to a Porcupine Tree show next Friday in Cleveland – I’m not in love with their new album yet, but they kick major ass live, so it’s all good. Plus, there’s a guy in Cleveland who repairs vintage synths, so I’m taking my Moog up to him for a rebuild.

Tonight’s installment is another 10 minutes of bleeps, bloops, and swooshes, plus! thumps and clicks. If you’re keeping track, this is the first of the series to include a rhythm section (of sorts):

Nonsingularity

It occurred to me, while working on this piece, that what I’m actually doing is creating instruments, then performing and releasing a piece on that brand-new instrument.

I realized this by observing my creative process: first I select, connect, and configure the sound sources and processors I want to use, then I screw with that setup for a while until I figure out what it does, then I roll tape. I must give this more thought.

Here’s the 4th in the series:

Fear of Silence

It’s about 10 minutes long (yeah, I’m lookin’ at you, Tony), and is an attempt to work with a little more dynamic range than I have in the past.

Inspired in equal measure by Spyder’s description of a run-down carnival and an NPR story about a archaeological find in Ireland, tonight’s installment:

Dogman

Here’s the second track for my May marathon. Check it out:

Augmented Vision

Interestingly (at least to me), a few patterns/rules/guidelines are beginning to show themselves. So far, I’ve identified three:

1. No factory presets. All sounds and settings must be tinkered with.
2. Each piece in the series must reuse, in some fashion, components of a prior piece.
3. No formal composing. Pattern, interaction, and improvisation are the watchwords.

In other news, I tried my hand at Indian cooking for the first time tonight, turned out quite tasty. Plus, while searching for ideas on what to do with yellow split peas, I came across this horror. You really have to look at the larger version of the photo to get the full impact.