40 Days: Songs and Suicide
Maybe the new year isn’t the best time to breach the topic of suicide. Then again if Robin Williams’s tragic death taught us something it’s that…
MUSINGS
valentine: there’s no escape from the beat…
“Someone please turn that s*** off!” I could barely stand it. It was the summertime in the early ’90s and there was only one beat on the airwaves. Even if you didn’t listen to the radio you’d hear it spilling out of the car next to you or blaring at the party you just […]
half asleep
Under the collective roof of 1616, my private bedroom was right off the public living room: its door revealed a still-life of the late-night: dreams and insomnia, insecurity and creativity…
promiscuous sax
The soprano sax made me promiscuous. No, not in that sense (or maybe in that sense). What I mean is musically free. After abandoning my alto the masterplan was to switch to B-flat horns (like Coltrane) first with a soprano then a tenor. Carrying around the soprano was too easy: no bigger than a violin […]
16:16 an imaginary intersection
Some of these songs go too deep into ’90’s New Wave territory, but like a rescued cat, I love them anyway. I don’t know if it’s possible to write tunes like this today without being retro, ironic, or both. But back then they were honest New Wave. When Erik Carlson (aka Area C) and I […]
the art of ambience: volume not decibels
Before there was the 1616 house there was 516. Sandwiched between neighbors (and our forgiving housemates) this is where Erik Carlson (aka AREA C) and I learned the basics of sonic-psychology: That ‘volume’ and actual decibels can be separate aspects of sound. While we didn’t crank it up to fill the space, our tools of […]
the art of portability
“See it’s fine,” Erik Carlson (aka AREA C) stated matter of factly as he punched the side of his small vintage fender amp to stop it from crackling. We had just walked half a mile with our guitars and gear to plug into the flickering street light at our favorite abandoned intersection in downtown Charlottesville… I […]
new wave and reverb: forever together
I’ve gone on about giving up reverb. But like other mind altering substances it’s hard to shake. Even when you’ve sworn off the addiction, the enveloping space sneaks back into your life with a vengeance… NewWave and reverb are too intertwined: Sometimes I wonder – did the invention of digital reverb give birth to an entire generation of […]
Fretting Less
The fretless electric bass is a transcendently expressive instrument all to itself. It’s also a bastard instrument: born from the electric guitar (not the double bass) in the 1930’s it was only later ‘defretted’ for the first time in 1961 by Rolling Stone legend Bill Wyman who merely yanked the frets out on his existing […]
being judged
Ever been in a relationship where you constantly felt like you were being judged? The great thing about 90’s new wave is that it can get all emo and go there! Although the vignette captured in this little tune could very well be about one’s boy/girlfriend it’s actually a scene I witnessed between mother and […]
#ThrowbackThursday: New Waves
Whether you’re 15 or 50, New Wave is always about adolescence. Adolescence in its most raw, awkward, and optimistic state. New Wave is also a moving target (otherwise it wouldn’t be new). It’s the transitional moment before a band goes ‘pop,’ the shiny day before you graduate from high school, college, your job… and the […]
Seoul Report: Musicians as Global Curators
Although the independent music scene in Seoul is relatively new, it seems to be proliferating into new creative forms that we have yet to imagine. Like what my architect alter-ego discusses in his book Convergent Flux, similarly in music there is no organic progression that parallels the North American development of blues to jazz to […]
tired of strawberry leaves
And as Wept fell apart as all bands do, this song became a metaphor for distance – for that mad and meditative commute between two vastly different…
going dry
Many failed attempts at writing a ‘dry’ song on guitar and voice revealed my bad technique. So I turned my back on the gilded god of reverb, bowed and gazed at my shoes like any…
the blind piano tuner
jack sprinkle was a talented, blind piano technician that for years would tune our family’s small upright and make it sound like a grand. one day i played him thelonious monk’s ‘straight no chaser’ and asked him to help me get that thick smashing of chords while keeping the clarity of the high solo runs. […]
Backwards and Forwards
My architect alter-ego shared an interesting story with me recently: Usually during the holidays he receives bajillions of effusive cards from colleagues claiming how amazing the last year was and how the next year will be even better. This year the cards were a mere handful, literally a 10th of what usually arrives. Most sneaking […]
shadow men
just when i was about to step forward into 1989, a lost recording from 1986 emerges… ‘shadow men’ was recorded live with myra pearson who performed the sensual voice and wrote the mysterious poetry. myra was just beginning her jazz career in dc and we all thought she was super cool playing smoky clubs that […]
Infrastructure to Nowhere
“He’s a real nowhere man…” Admittedly there’s not much content on this site (at least until the new music gets posted beyond the work from 25 years ago)… But the scaffolding behind the scenes is now pretty much there. As I was creating the pages, it was clear that this would be another ‘wallflower’ site, […]
The Silence Before the Storm
OK, so I now have an avatar, an alter ego, a mascot, a mask, a doppelgänger. Through this medium I will speak in tongues of multiple musical idioms. A reverse chronology of songs from the past dating back from 1986 will soon be uploaded. Various comments will accompany the titles. There will be also some […]