A day out in the woods

I spent a wonderful day out in our woods and fields yesterday. It’s extremely cold right now, but heartening. The sun is out almost every morning, and I feel very much at home in the vast expanse of the American mid-west.

It feels like a lifetime has gone by since I recorded this little idea:

[display_podcast]

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Lowell, Indiana: A note from home

It’s true, I never thought the time would come, but I am now of an age where I belong to “those of a certain generation”. I guess I always thought that life would just make an exception for me, moving just a bit more slowly maybe, a bit more gently, protecting me, rather lovingly, a bit more kindly. Life, instead, has moved too quickly for my taste - and with more indifference, I might add. The many years have congealed into a single web, thin, and barely wide enough to cover my tracks.

I am so grateful to be home. I am so grateful to be home. So grateful…

MP3 Download: Theme and Variation 1 (192kb @ 2.5mb)
A tender interlude based on the song “We Might As Well Have Stayed Young”.

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Southern Amp sneak preview

Drove down to the AMI stadium today to pick up artist and vehicle passes for Southern Amp. It’s actually a rather interesting vibe there. The stadium was absolutely flooded with sunlight, whilst the corridors and suites overlooking the grounds were calm, empty and air-conditioned to perfection. On my way out, I ducked into one of the vacant suites to snap a few shots of ground zero:

I couldn’t help but notice the fact that I only saw two stages, not three. Turns out I was on a fools errand, as the third stage was actually located right behind the stadium, and not inside it, as I had assumed:

This actually strikes me as an excellent solution, as it means that our more intimate set won’t be drowned out by the massive P.A. of the main stage. Furthermore, I am so relieved that they decided to place the CHART stage inside a tent, rather than just setting up a small stage in the middle of nowhere. The advantage, aside from being weather-proof, is that a tent helps create a much more intimate environment, which should be of great asset considering our sound and performance style.

I’m looking forward to this now! We’re on from 11.45 to 12.20 am, and although most ticket holders probably won’t be arriving until far later in the afternoon, we’ll be playing our heart and soul out for those 35 minutes. As the Germans say: “Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund” (”Morninghour has Gold in it’s mouth”).

The moral of the story? We’re excited about Southern Amp and German proverbs are the stuff of lunacy.

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Stillness, poetry and music

Mary is generally very good at living. She is highly intelligent, well-educated, and enviably successful at making sound and moral decisions in her life. She also happens to be a poet with a marvelous knack for transforming the familiar and forgotten into something odd, gentle and worth remembering:

Somewhere Between Here and There

At dusk, when tide is low, the silver water turns dull
unpolished and scratched by wind that growls
across the tips of waves, choppy as a see-saw.
The fish are lined up on the shore like soldiers,
washed up after bobbing along the froth.
Rattling, red-brown leaves shake on branches
and, shaking off inhibitions, fly away with a dry rustle,
scratching together airborn–like insect wings.
The smell of the salt off the sea is dry;
it sticks in the throat before the wind
changes directions, but leaves a scaly aftertaste.
The fish on the sand are the biggest I’ve ever seen,
swollen and half-buried beneath drifts of salt and sand.
I reached over and traced the edges of the scales,
dry instead of wet, glinting like well-worn pennies.
Their mouths were open tunnels, big enough to hold
a matchbox racecar, but lined with white teeth,
tiny as maggots, nothing inside but ink.
The eye sockets were deep and dark,
the gelatinous membranes eaten away,
empty as a playroom outgrown and abandoned
somewhere between here and there.

Songs of ours where Mary’s poetry can be heard:

An old piece of mine called One Of Many Dinner Conversations [mp3 6.3MB], and two songs off of the new album, A Maze and Amazement, called Solitaire [video on cliptip] and Remember The Stillness.

Remember The Stillness
Solitaire

I can’t rememember the precise moment when I started paying more attention to the combination of spoken word and music, but suffice it to say it’s been a few years now, and my interest in it continues to intensify. Here are three marvelous examples from the classical world:

Exerpt from Knee 5 by Philip Glass (from his opera “Einstein On The Beach”):

Philip Glass – Knee 5

Exerpt from Steve Reich’s The Cave:

Exerpt from Delta Run by Annea Lockwood:

Annea Lockwood – Delta Run

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Dayvan Cowboy

Just for a moment my world is brightly lit. Boards of Canada is droning major chords through my sun-flooded living room, thick with glittering dust. Today is spring cleaning day; tomorrow might yet be beautiful; next month I will let myself fall into the great America; and next year everything is possible again.

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