Haters Gonna Hate

Everyone knows that the internet is the rudest place on earth.  Anyone can say anything to anyone while remaining unidentified (and often spineless).  So, January's award for fighting anonymous jerkdom goes to Adam Sliwinski of So Percussion.  When one of my go-to blogs for music (ok, mostly for free metal downloads), Brooklyn Vegan, posted a somewhat misinformed but honest review of So's recent concert/collaboration with Dan Deacon at Merkin Hall as a part of the ongoing Ecstatic Music festival things got a little dumb in the comments section.  And by a little dumb, I mean Youtube level.  Adam responded in the comments thread with a well reasoned (and well written) rebuttal to the covert assailants.  At first I thought "oh no dude, don't even dignify these clowns with a response," but shortly thereafter the comments became suddenly civil and thoughtful.  Well, mostly.  
So, good on you, Adam!  I think we can all agree that if you're going to talk shit, say it to our collective faces.

winter preview...

As this particularly snowy winter drags on, here's a couple of fun things to look forward to.

The Gershwin Presents 
Gershwin Hotel: Thursday, January 20th @8pm

This show features a set of acoustic and electro-acoustic solo percussion music as part of a new and exciting concert series by the Gershwin Hotel and curated by Vicky Chow.

The program will include:

The Anvil Chorus by David Lang
Composed in 1991 for God of Percussion on Earth Steven Schick, this demanding piece invokes the sounds of many blacksmiths working at a single anvil and the resulting rhythmic (and melodic!) patterns inherent in their trade.

A Watched Pot by Steven Snowden
Scored for a tea kettle, mixing bowls, and electronics, A Watched Pot explores the sonic possibilities of some everyday objects.  Coupled with a complex electronic counterpart, these repurposed kitchenwares set the stage for a dream within the mundane.

Ritual by Daniel Wohl
Ritual, for solo vibraphone, stands as a refuge of quiet and serenity in a noisy, dense world populated with noisier, denser percussion music.

Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra by Alvin Lucier
In this work of near stasis, the oft underestimated triangle is given a chance to show off its full timbral spectrum.  Aided by amplification, the instrument's resonance and overtones are slowly manipulated over time brushing the border between music and sound art.

Temazcal by Javier Alvarez
The title is an Aztec word for "water that burns" and this piece for solo maracas and electronics takes the folkloric Joropo traditions of Venezuela on a dark and twisted ride.

Momentary Expanse by Tristan Perich
Local composer, visual artist, and gadgetrist Tristan Perich is at the height of his powers following the release of his acclaimed 1-Bit Symphony.  Where his symphony is highly active and incessant, Momentary Expanse utilizes the same technology paired with a vibraphone to create a feeling of openness and suspension of time.

The cost is $10, and $5 for students.
map here.


Tune-in Music Festival: Inuksuit 
Park Avenue Armory: Sunday, Feb. 20@ 4pm

The Tune-in Music Festival is curated by eighth blackbird.  This is reason enough for discerning music fans to take note, but more details are in order!  The festival runs from February 16th-20th and includes performances by new music luminaries eighth blackbird, red fish blue fish, Steve Schick, Newspeak, Sympho, Argento Chamber Orchestra, among others.  The festival closes with a performance of John Luther Adams' hour-plus long Inuksuit for 9 to 99 percussionists.  Last Spring, I had the opportunity to perform this piece with a full complement of 99 drummers dispersed throughout the central Texas woods of Round Top'sFestival Hill.  It was wild, there are videos.
For the New York premiere, the vault of the sky will be replaced with the soaring ceiling of the Park Avenue Armory and its 38,000 square feet will be filled with 72 musicians and their drums, gongs, horns, conch shells, toy pianos, etc.
Big thanks to Doug Perkins who organized both the TX and upcoming NY performances of this massive-scale work.

we want the airwaves

Last night's show at the Southern Theater couldn't have been more fun.  Here's a preshow writeup and radio spot from MPR News.

Listen hear.

Also, joropo maraca playing as it relates to fist pumping.

I just realized I've been in a lot of bands

I tell you what, I've had a lot of fun playing solo music lately via working on my one man band.  I'm working on booking shows, bugging people to write music for me, starting to write my own music--I even have a blog where I can be as self-bepuffed as I want to be about the whole thing. 

But,

I never really saw myself performing music onstage by...myself.  As long as I've held drum sticks it was for the purpose of playing music with other people, and I've always been in bands ever since (let me think how many*).   Since I've only been at the solo thing for a little over a year now, I still feel super awkward when I finish a song and people clap and it's just me up there.  I look around for band mates I could high five or toast with my drink-ticket-scammed beer.  But it's just me so I do the sort of half-bow that doesn't really make sense for the recital hall or the club.  Not to mention that I went from being in the back behind a bunch of drums to being right up there in the Collective Grill with nowhere to hide.  At least my music school solo recital requirements gave me some practice with that but man, it's not the same.

However, as much as I miss the camaraderie I've found that being the only member in a band streamlines a lot of the process.  No coordinating everyone's work schedules for band practice--it's just me!  No arguments over which direction the band should take--it's still just me, and what I say goes.  And since being in a band is like having 3 girlfriends (or boyfriends) no dramz or personality clashes except for my internal struggles, but we don't have to talk about that. 

But when I watch bands really nail it--like Propagandhi, TOOL, the recent Bang on a Can Allstars' concert, or So Percussion with Meehan Perkins Duo a few weeks back--and remember how mind-meldingly tight sofakingdom could be in our heyday I have to concede that's where it's at.  "For now, though, I'm having fun focusing on the Me Show," he said, sitting in an airport by himself waiting 5 hours for a delayed flight on the way to a gig. 



*OK, here's what a brief dredging of my brain found: 
sofakingdom 
Written Off
Elisa Ferarri 
The Tea Merchants 
Cobretti 
Sargeant Parkinson's Platoon 
G8 
Erik Espe
The Vinyl Collection
Ah, Venice! 
The Pan-Metropolita Trio 
Rattletree Marimba 
The Aries Project 
Needs No Chill 
Racketball 
Undertow 
5 Mile Chase
Hips Don't Lie
probably more that I'm spacing right now...

If you don't talk to your kids about Steven Snowden, who will?

Me, that's who. 

Steve is an unbelievably creative and hard working artist.  He's a wizard when it comes to music technology and uses his fluency in several software programs to make sounds I've never even thought about before, and use them in musically meaningful ways.  He also rides a Harley everywhere.  Which is way kickass.  He's the kind of guy that would write you a Max MSP patch in the morning, change your oil in the afternoon, and then cook up a dynamite chorizo stew for 20 of his friends like it was no big deal (he even made a special vegetarian bowl of it for me).    

I mean, check out this piece for trombone and live electronics which uses field recordings of cattle auctioneers (Steve Parker, trombone).
Or this breathtaking piano quintet performed by Austin's Aeolus Quartet and Kevin Garnica, piano.

Steve and I had been friends for a year and a half, batting around ideas for a percussion piece before we began working on the project below.  I had worked with dancer/choreographer Rosalyn Nasky twice before, once in a truly epic staging of George Crumb's Music for a Summer Evening and again in an eerie setting of Temazcal by Javier Alvarez.  Naturally, I was really excited when I was able to get all three of us together to talk about a possible collaboration.

The premiere was in June, 2010 at Big Range Austin, an annual dance festival organized by the tireless Ellen Bartel.  This was a particularly fun project in that it was a three headed collaborative process between Steve, Roz, and myself.  Based on our schedules we had collectively about one month to put this together and for the first couple weeks Steve worked at an astonishing rate.  

After deciding the instrumentation (tea kettle and mixing bowls) he and I came into the studio and recorded every single sound we could get out of those things.  Steve then took all the sampled sounds and wove them together into a midi mockup mosaic of what the piece would become, meanwhile composing/building the complex electronic component.  As he worked he uploaded his progress onto a blog he created specifically for our project so Rosalyn and I could witness the creative process unfold, offer feedback, and in her case find Inspirado.

Then we had couple weeks for me to try and learn the piece  and for Rosalyn to work out her (and my) steps. 

Steve had the presence of mind to record the live instruments through the soundboard, later syncing it with his electronic audio, AND getting multiple HD camera angles in on the action (oh, and he edited the video, too). 

So, what you can watch here is our super hot off the presses performance from last summer's Big Range Austin.

A Watched Pot from Steven Snowden on Vimeo.

Aggravated Assault

Here's my take on Oscar Bettison's Breaking & Entering (With Aggravated Assault).

I grew up playing really loud, really fast music with my most excellent friends in Sofakingdom, a band started in high school that graduated to playing about a gazillion sparsely attended shows in Minneapolis and mounting a handful of unbelievably fun (if not lucrative) smelly-dudes-in-a-van tours.  So when I first peeked at my Breaking & Entering drum part with it's expertly-notated blast beats I laughed out loud at the fact that I'd get a chance to use those skills I developed in beer-soaked basements and scummy dive bars for the higher call of "contemporary music".  However, it resulted in a personal highlight when I took the stage with my colleauges at the 2010 Bang on a Can Summer Institute marathon concert (with Brad Lubman conducting!) and proceeded to play this piece.  Loud.  Really loud.  I was told the janitors had to use extra mops that night clean up all the melted faces.  OK, not really, but you can imagine.

Give a listen from that night.


Yeah, I know, it's all about the "genre busting" these days, but I never expected a collision between my two worlds of "classical music" and full-on thrash attacks.  My friends from one never really understood the other.  So thanks, Oscar.  But hey, who's supposed to play that part anyway?  There just aren't many people schooled both in Darmstadt and Cannibal Corpse.  I mean, David T. Little of Newspeak just happens to be a composer extraodinaire/rock drummer with good taste in metal and he had to learn double kick pedals just for this piece.  And admirably; the Newspeak recording rocks [B&E was written for them, and they play it like it was].
Either way, I guess I missed playing with my sofakingdom dude-lifemates so much I just relished the opportunity to make an unholy racket and channel my inner Dave Lombardo once again.

Videotime: The Anvil Chorus

I guess since this thing has my name all over it and even a photo of me trying to look cool I should go ahead a put a video up of myself playing.  Makes sense, right?

One of my very favorite pieces in the solo percussion repertoire is David Lang's The Anvil Chorus.  It's also one of the most popular ones out there and according to the composer possibly the most oft performed piece he as ever written.  It also involves the most ninja-like balance and control in the rep. because of its intricate foot work from pedal to pedal [editor's unsolicited opinion: playing it seated totally eliminates the Ninja Factor©, and where's the fun in that?]

When David stopped in last spring to hear the UT Percussion Group play the so-called laws of nature he commented that even after all these years he doesn't get bored listening to performances of The Anvil Chorus largely because it always sounds radically different from one performer to the next.  Obviously there's lots of reasons for this, but musical execution aside he was referring to it's largely open instrumentation.  Wherever you go a piano sounds pretty much like a piano, and a violin like a violin, but a piece of "non-resonant metal" could be anything from a wok to the hood of a car. 

Hearing him say that about this piece at least made me less squeamish about trying my hands and feet at it after someone like Steve Schick put a pretty indelible, Sony-recorded stamp on it years ago.
Makes me glad I don't play the piano or violin.

It was still pretty fresh when I recorded this almost a year ago, but nonetheless, enjoy!