quiet please

2010-12-23T15:03:00.001-08:00

GAME OVER

7:47

That which passes for blood these days:
Patients static while others, shunted
oftentimes tardy waistcoats
echolocate and free-fall in to
oncoming traffic
triage
webs of incandescence

High frequency alarms
sub urbane squawks shouldered
to pavement, young thugs

A caller on the line,
short-breathed with
urgent tonality
:

"here
is bleeding
here"

Vendor hums harmonics
restless feet pattern in curb slush
makes a bee-line
twine parchment and cosines
last wills
at last
no more
at last
ex-aspirates
:

"you weren't played
he's strict rules man
game on, he says
or was it? game
overman
had six on the edge
now it's
overman"

7:49
Slides on the facedown
slip shouldered
to pavement, young thugs

2008-12-10T09:54:00.001-08:00

monday's solid sleep companion
brushes my cheek with its sleeve
gets me out of bed early
to walk the beach with the dogs

i don't want to say it
but the room compels me to
a window blows open
to reveal the city below

i've been here
just over
a year;
doesn't seem
that
long

2008-01-08T16:00:00.000-08:00

a little poem:

today a threadbare quilt lies
unremarkable
on the settee

(in a previous century
this would be considered
a woman's industry)

a perfect replica
of false victoriana,
it confesses
sweatshopp'd labour,
synthetic dyes,
and fibers
of unknown origin

2007-07-10T21:19:00.000-07:00

Something new: I'm in a band, again. This little outfit calls itself The Creaking Planks and has a frequently shifting line-up: accordion, banjo, ukulele, sax, washtub bass + suitcase percussion, and many more. I'm playing the santur and contributing vocals now and then. This is a good opportunity for me to dust off a neglected instrument and attempt to rework a bizarre repetoire of covers. Fortunately, not every tune turns into a polka. I'll be playing a few songs with them this weekend at The Western Front as part of the BC:Clettes bicycle dance troupe fund-raiser. That's right, I said _bicycle_ _dance_ _troupe_.

2007-03-06T19:53:00.000-08:00

This time of year, my ears are attuned to a new kind of sound in the skies. On the west coast of Canada, as I'm sure is the case in many other parts of the world, birdsongs come in waves, following the migration of each flock. Right now I'm hearing robins, sparrows and stellar jays. In May, my favourite bird makes its first appearance -- the Swainson's Thrush. I love the way this bird's ascending call reaches up into the highest octaves, quite possibly beyond the threshold of human hearing. (For a sample, listen to KPLU's snippet on birdweb.org.)

Although I was originally searching for examples of Siberian and Tuvan throat singing, I came across a piece of music on ubuweb's ethnopoetics archive of what's essentially music with words that have no inherent meaning. In the section on celtic mouth music, I came across an old recording of Bird Imitations by Annie Johnston [mp3]. About two-thirds of the way through the piece, the bird calls start to get more percussive. As I was listening to the sample, I was amazed by how much this sounded like Sheila Chandra's Speaking in Tongues [mp3] which draws on the Indian vocal percussion style, often used in the instruction of tabla.

I'm wondering if Annie Johnston was ever exposed to India's vocal percussion tradition or if this is one of those serendipitous, coincidental connections? I can't find much about her, except that she was from the west coast of Scotland. I'm interested in finding more examples of celtic mouth music and will be exploring ubuweb's collection in more detail.

2006-12-30T19:16:00.000-08:00

Just caught the documentary, "Touch the Sound" on the Documentary Channel (how I love that deep, deep cable). If you haven't had the good fortune to see (and, more importantly, hear) this doc, I can tell you that it's about Evelyn Glennie, the deaf Scottish percussionist. Glennie is nothing short of amazing. Her theories of human sense, from the point of view of someone who is "lacking" one, is engaging and inspired. "Hearing is a form of touch," she explains — not so much a physical sensation of two objects coming into contact but, rather, the ability to make a connection, beyond sensation. Glennie began to lose her sense of hearing as a child and eventually gave up on hearing aids. She can still "hear", because hearing isn't about having a working set of ears. It's about being sensitive to vibration, and letting the mind interpret that vibration... as sound, feeling, colour, smell, whatever.

One of the themes Glennie touches on in the film is the connection between breath and sound. As a singer, I've been aware of my breathing since I first began singing lessons as a child. A stronger, fuller breath meant you had more control over the note, and could produce a more powerful sound. When I started practicing Iyengar yoga, I discovered another way to use my breath — for meditation, slowing the pulse, and focusing the mind. I'd like to explore the relationship between breath, sound, and the mind. The next step will be to record some breathing, segment it, and work with its rhythm. Can you influence the breathing patterns of the listener by manipulating the sound of sampled breath? How will this affect their state of mind?

2006-11-27T09:41:00.000-08:00

I'm merging accounts all over the place. Blogger + gmail, flickr + yahoo — it's all coming together. Some day the web will be owned by one person, and that person won't be me.

Just finished reading an interesting book, This is Your Brain on Music by David Levitin. It was a little light on the science, but provided some insight into the cognitive and emotional aspects of music. I'd recommend it to anyone who is just starting to get a handle on the principles of acoustics, like me.

Now I'm back to reading Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage. This is my second attempt to get through it. I can't say I'm a big fan of Cage, however, I'm fascinated by his methodology... particularly the fact that he leaves (almost) everything up to chance and treats silence with as much reverence as sound.

This is almost impossible to believe:

Cage's Organ² / ASLSP is currently being performed near the German township of Halberstadt; in an imaginative and controversial interpretation of Cage's directions for the piece to be played "As Slow As Possible", the performance, being done on a specially-constructed autonomous organ built into the old church of St. Burchardi, is scheduled to take a total of 639 years after having been started at midnight on September 5, 2001. The first year and half of the performance was total silence, with the first chord -- G-sharp, B and G-sharp -- not sounding until February 2, 2003. Then in July 2004, two additional Es, an octave apart, were sounded and are scheduled to be released later this year on May 5. But at 5:00 p.m. (1600 GMT) on Thursday, 5 January, the first chord progressed to a second -- comprising A, C and F-sharp -- and is to be held down over the next few years by weights on an organ being built especially for the project.

2006-08-27T09:20:00.000-07:00

G. came over yesterday for a quick practice and regroup after many months apart. This summer has been busy for all of us, and I don't think we've been motivated to go through the same old material again. I showed G. and T. some of the pieces I've been working on and they were able to come up with some nice keyboard and bass lines. G. also had a few in-progress song segments that he swapped for my Live files. He's encouraging me to work on what he's got, but I feel like I'm still a novice when it comes to using the software. At least I now know how to play a clip backwards (which I could have figured out if I read the help files...).

I think we'll continue to work on these pieces through the fall and winter and, hopefully, start playing shows again in the spring. I'd like to rent out the Western Front again and do a more freeform acoustic + experimental electronic show. Not sure if we'll have some of our friends play with us (Rowan? Brooke?) but that would be very cool. Time to drag out the santur, I think.

2006-08-25T15:35:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a bit of work on the project over the past few weeks. Most of my time has been spent getting my studio up and running. I picked up some nice monitor speakers, brought up the big keyboard and small mixer from basement studio, and hooked up the ozone midi controller with t.'s powerbook. The final piece -- a digitech vx300 vocal processor -- arrived last week (a very early birthday present). The processor is floor-mounted so I can cycle through and adjust vocal effects with my feet when my fingers are otherwise engaged. I know guitarists have been using these things for ages, but it's new to me.

A few songs have started taking shape. I've decided to work on a cover while I re-learn how to use Live... it's been a while. There's another piece in the works that involves some loops of drones, sitar, distorted guitar, and minimal percussion. I'm working in a diatonic scale and will try to lay down some plainchant-inspired vocalizations this weekend.

What I'm reading: Harmonies of Heaven and Earth: Mysticism in Music from Antiquity to the Avant-Garde by Joscelyn Godwin. Professor of Music at Colgate University, Godwin's book is thoroughly researched, academic in tone, meandering and, at times, completely incomprehensible. Still, it's exactly what I need to be reading right now. His vision the future of music is particularly inspired:

"People such as myself, trained in rigorous tradition and thereby brainwashed into thinking that it is the greatest thing in the world, will become fewer and fewer. The symphony orchestra will eventually become a specialized vehicle for historical performance-practice. All the genres will mix and cheerfully adulterate each other as a new musical world emerges. I would like to see the barriers come down between professional and amateur, composer and performer, Western and non-Western music, popular and 'serious', creation and improvisation. Above all, I hope that more attention and respect will be paid to the act of listening... John Cage has taught us to listen to every sound and its encompassing silence; the Sufi in ecstatic audition 'hears' from every object in the universe. How different would be a civilization in which hearing, not sight, became the primary sense, and in which we dwelt more in the inner space of tone than in the illusion of the exterior world!"

I like to think I'm participating in that cheerful adulteration of genres... if only I could learn to hear from every object in the universe. What would that sound like?

2006-08-08T08:48:00.000-07:00

This is where it begins.

The purpose behind this journal is to document the development of a new music project. While I've been writing and performing original music for over a decade, these compositions feel like they were created in vacuum, with little or no thought to their structure or relationship to one another. This time around, I'm aiming for cohesion, and I'm doing my research. Ideas I'd particularly like to explore: non-standard scales and tunings; eastern modes and dissonant harmonies; rhythm and its correspondents in mystical/alchemical traditions; exploring the future of sound.

I hope to keep this blog updated regularly, as a way to keep myself on track and review the progression of the project. Right now, the ideas are incubating and I've just started working on producing some actual music. I'm using a basic setup with a midi synth and laptop running ableton live to build the foundations. These pieces will focus primarily on the voice -- as that's the instrument I'm most comfortable with -- accompanied by pure tones, drones, percussion, loops and samples. Once I've got the structure established, I'd like to bring other musicians in to record and, with any luck, perform these pieces live.

Although this blog is primarily intended for my benefit, I always welcome comments and suggestions. And if someone else is doing something similar, I want to hear about it.