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Monday, June 29, 2009 Bad Album Titles I've been brainstorming titles for the new album - and I have to say, it's much easier coming up with bad titles than good ones. Here are a few fun entries: The Anatomy of Pipe Dreams Moonies Kool-Aid Dawn is the New Dusk Memorex CDRW We Call This a Headache And some great rejects, courtesy of Google Trends: Dead Fox News Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism Razorfish Stone Weight iPhone 3Gs Overheating And there's my favorite bad-album-title-that-somehow-became-reality: Fiona Apple's When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks Like a King What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight and He'll Win the Whole Thing 'Fore He Enters the Ring There's No Body to Batter When Your Mind Is Your Might So When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand and Remember That Depth Is the Greatest of Heights and If You Know Where You Stand, Then You'll Know Where to Land and If You Fall It Won't Matter, Cuz You Know That You're Right. The runner up? Cher's Not.Com.mercial. ^ Top | 6:34 PM | | | 
Tuesday, June 23, 2009 Recording and Chinese Instruments Today's session was incredibly productive, in spite of the fact that the music I sent to Chihsuan never made it to her inbox (good thing I brought music anyway, just in case). Chihsuan Yang plays violin and erhu, the latter of which made an appearance today on seven of the eleven songs that are going on the new album. Few people on this side of the world are familiar with it, but the erhu is the Chinese equivalent of a violin - it's a two-stringed, fretless instrument that actually sounds fairly similar to a violin, though it looks like no instrument Westerners are familiar with. Where it differs acoustically is an encouragement of pitch bending (think bluegrass fiddle, if there's to be a comparison - this quality, which can sound amazing, also makes the instrument fiendishly difficult to keep in tune) and a more melancholy, haunting sound. My already pensive piano pieces seem more mournful. On a whim, we also experimented with pizzicato erhu on a Philip Glass-inspired reworking of a traditional Chinese folk song, which worked surprisingly well as another textural layer. I've been listening to the roughs for the last hour, and they sound fantastic - I'm excited for you all to hear the finished product! Labels: Asian culture, musical styles, musicians, recording ^ Top | 10:13 PM | | |
Thursday, June 04, 2009 Recording, Day 2 The band breezed through the session - we finished all of the upright bass, piano, and drum parts! Quote of the day: "Now play with yourself." Labels: recording ^ Top | 6:38 PM | | |
Thursday, May 28, 2009 Uptown Recording, Day 1 "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture." To that end, here's a short video about what it's like to hang out with us in the studio. For reference, the non-introduced people are Joe (the drummer, who's bouncing around like a madman) and Rob (the engineer, who is hard at work - unlike the rest of us). I'm behind the camera. Apparently I'm constantly laughing. What can I say - I'm amused by the world. We actually had an extremely productive session today - the fingers on my fretting hand hurt, but we finished recording the majority of parts for the guitar songs. Labels: recording ^ Top | 9:34 PM | | |
Saturday, May 23, 2009 Recording! After a rather lengthy absence from the blogosphere, I'll be posting regular updates for the first time in months. It's actually been a nice, if unintentional hiatus. But I want to keep you up to date with some exciting news - I'll be starting to record that long-promised album next week! My trio, which consists of Joe Chellman (drums) and Cory Biggerstaff (upright bass), will be heading to Uptown Recording in a few days to work with engineer Rob Ruccia, who worked on a Grammy-nominated project combining Indian musicians with Miles Davis alumni. I'll be producing the album, which will feature some extra cast members (there may be some collaboration with musicians from other parts of the country), Uptown's new grand piano, and a slew of new material. So count on regular posts on the recording process - I'm hoping to have the album finished in its entirety by the end of the summer. ^ Top | 4:04 PM | | |
Saturday, February 28, 2009 Randomness Turns Seven As of today, Randomness has been around for seven years! Back when I first started, few people knew what a blog was, much less why someone might want to read one. Flash forward to 2009 and print media is slowly transitioning onto the web, for better or worse, and political pundits give bloggers real credence. And with the advent of Twitter, news outlets love picking up stories about "micro-blogging." (Which, in my personal opinion, is a little ridiculous - the term strikes me as rather forced.) But happy birthday to Randomness - who knows where the internet will be in another seven years? Labels: blogging ^ Top | 3:55 PM | | |
Tuesday, December 30, 2008 Ronda, or Middle Earth  People tell me skydiving is scary. I've gone skydiving, and it didn't produce nearly as much fear in me as staring straight down the gorge in Ronda, Spain. Ronda is an old town built on a plateau--two, actually--separated by a sharp, 330-foot drop. The fear reaction that looking down from Puente Nuevo (the "new bridge" that took 40 years and 50 lives to build) produces is a visceral one--people do sometimes fall to their deaths, but much of the space any normal person would wander through is walled off or enclosed with iron grates. We weren't normal. Lauren, Jason, and I climbed down the slippery stairs that went down to the bottom of the gorge and wandered away from the more standard path to one winding directly underneath and through the bottom section of the bridge. (I don't think most tourist sites in the US would ever leave the path we took open for fear of lawsuits.) The path offered amazing views (the photo on the right was taken from it), but at any moment it would have been a little too easy to trip and fall--most of it was only two feet wide, with a long, sheer drop on one side and perhaps a shorter drop on the other. There were some railings, but they were flimsy (a single line of wire, rather than actual rail, just thick enough to grab, but of dubious help if you actually did fall, and a couple of sections had chain-link fencing), but many of the fence posts and attachments were loose or had fallen off.  There were a good number of beer and pop bottles even further down than we went (read: where there was no path at all), so I suspect that the town's teenagers (who all apparently frequent one otherwise intriguing Arabic-styled cafe) must run up and down the rocks. Ronda's beautiful, but there wouldn't be a lot for a teenager to do there after a couple of weeks.The town itself is amazing--it was Roman, Moorish, and Catholic all in turn, and pieces of each conqueror reflect themselves in its architecture. From one point, you can see the old Arabic bridge (which is still used), the Roman bridge (also still used), Arabic baths and mines, a castle, and a palace. Walking through it, especially near Puente Nuevo, feels like walking into Middle Earth. ^ Top | 11:25 AM | | |
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