Wednesday, June 03, 2009 This weekend, I'll be doing sound design / live treatments for Jaamil Kosoko's new piece VIRUS at the Drake Theater in Philadelphia for the nEW Festival. The shows are

Friday June 5 @ 7PM
Saturday June 6 @ 9PM

The Drake Theater
1512 Spruce St.
Philadelphia, PA

Here's a description of the piece from Jaamil

VIRUS

We live in a media infested world where we depend heavily on technology to survive. Electrical wires entangle themselves around the bodies of the dancers to represent the restrictive power of technology, while also making visible the invisible web of the past. The wires are both beneficial and detrimental; they provide inspiration for the future by acting as lifelines to past experiences, but also drain the psyche by not allowing the individual to become free of these experiences. The forces of technology and the past are not working separately but in tandem because technology provides a way for past experiences to be recorded. The performers are constantly negotiating these aspects of their personalities moving between the human and the robotic, the empathetic and estranged, the plugged in and the cut off.

Should be a cool performance, the theater looks and sounds great.

I spent the day yesterday recording The West Philadelphia Orchestra six piece band version. This is the lineup that toured Mexico with last month with sax, trumpet, trombone, tuba, keys and drums. They did some Balkan inspired standards by Monk and Sun Ra as well as a couple of originals. It'll be a fun project to mix / produce. It's a lot more raw and loose than their full orchestral straight-up Balkan lineup I've seen live a few times. It'll be interesting how far out we can go with the mixing. I always feel like jazz instrumentation albums are afraid to experiment too much in the studio. Most jazz albums just try and reproduce the exact sound of the instrument and mix, like your seeing the band at a club. I'm talking about blowing out some cones by putting a sub-bass filter on the tuba! Ya dig?

Gemini Wolf is also getting ready for the CD Release in mid-July. Here's the spooky cover (pictured). We've been getting great feedback from people that have heard the album. The Philly CD Release show should be bonkers with Pink Skull, the aforementioned WPO, Bilwa and Neko at Jonny Brenda's. Gemini Wolf is going to have a few special guests for the show too. You can hear some of the tracks streaming on our MySpace right now!

Tuesday, May 19, 2009 the wonderful Brothers Quay chat about their nationally touring exhibit with poet Ish Klein
during this year's Philadelphia Film Festival/CineFest

made possible through the support of
The University of the Arts - Philadelphia with some Mikronesia music

Film by Scott Johnston / Evil Olive 3000 and Woodshop Films

Friday, May 15, 2009 Just a last minute heads up for folks in Philly... I'll be playing with Gemini Wolf tomorrow night at the M-Room on Girard Ave. It's part of a night of earSnake artists including Lillie Ruth Bussey, Shawn Kilroy, Paper Masques, Gemini Wolf and special guests Mixel Pixel.

Here's the exact information:
Saturday May 16
M Room
15 W. Girard Ave. Philadelphia, PA 19123
9PM - $8
Gemini Wolf, Lillie Ruth Bussey, Paper Masques, Shawn Kilroy and Mixel Pixel. plus DJ Baby Cow Face


Then in two weeks (June 6 and 7) I'll be doing two performances at the Drake Theater with Jaamil Kosoko. The performance is his new work VIRUS for which I'll be doing sound design. Hopefully I'll remember to post more information about it as the show gets closer. More information about the show can be found at the nEW Festival's site.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009 I had a great time at the two shows two weeks ago, thanks to everyone involved. Pandar and I have been cooped up in the studio (despite the beautiful Philadelphia spring weather) finishing up the new Gemini Wolf record. This one is wildly different than our last one, Josiah. Although in some ways it's more stripped down and electronic, in other ways it's lusher and more organic with the additional of a string quartet, a horn section, vibraphone and more analog gear.

This week we're getting back into the swing of live shows as we ramp up for our CD Release Party in July at Johnny Brenda's. We're pleased to announce that our old drummer, Gary Dann, back from his India/Nepal/Thailand adventure will be playing drums with us. You can check out all the details of the shows in the performances section. Both shows will feature an all earSnake lineup (except for Mixel Pixel at the M-Room show). Here's the run down

Saturday April 25 - eckhaus @ Kutztown


Saturday May 16 - earSnake Night at M Room


Lastly, this Saturday and Sunday you can hear some Mikronesia original music for the new Ring Dance piece at Haverford College.


Bryn Mawr College Spring Dance Concert
Saturday April 25 and Sunday April 26, 7:30 PM
Marshall Auditorium at Haverford College
370 Lancaster Ave
Haverford, PA 19041.

Friday, March 27, 2009 I'm getting back to live performing this week after a few months of no Mikronesia shows. It's been a very productive couple of months in the studio and I can't wait to share all this new music with the masses. We've still got some work to do on the Gemini Wolf album, tentatively titled, Repetition Brings Relief. We've got some more overdubs and mixing to do, but we can see the finish line for this project. There are dozens of other Mikronesia tracks and compositions floating around my hard drive. Probably after the Gemini Wolf album, I'll finish most of those up and organize them into some kind of release.

Here's the info about the shows next week. I'm still not quite sure what I'm doing for either show, so both with be highly improvised, which is always fun! For the Monday night show, I'll be doing my best to make all my digital stuff fit a silent Buster Keaton movie from the 30s.

Monday March 30
The Monday Night Club@ National Mechanics
Host: Needles Jones
Curator: A.D. Amorosi
Monday March 30, 9PM
presents
PhillyCine Fest Indies post-party with films from local independent directors and performances from earSnake Recordings Mikronesia and1K Recordings Tim Motzer making diabolical live soundtracks to silent films by Stan Brakhage and Buster Keaton
National Mechanics (22 S. 3rd St.)

The Friday night show should be a very exciting culmination of the work I've been doing with the Perpetual Mvmt<>Snd dancers, sound artist Bilwa and collaborating with some of the best improvisers in the city, Alban Bailey, Gene Coleman and Helena Espvall. Plus we'll have videos from the brilliant John Phillips. This may be the last big multi-media / dance / artwork / music event I get do with Bilwa and Emily before they leave for Europe in the fall.

featuring musicians Helena Espvall, Alban Bailly, Gene Coleman, Bilwa, and Mikronesia, dancers Emily Sweeney, Zornitsa Stoyanova, Rebecca Patek, and Jil Stifel, and video artist John Phillips, in collaboration with Soundfield
Tyler School of Art Gallery
259 N. Third street Philadelphia, PA (Old City)

Friday, March 20, 2009 Some Mikronesia music (sections of Arms Bent from Tissue Paper Ghosts and some other unreleased sounds) will be part of Michelle Stortz's piece tomorrow night at Mascher Space.

http://mascherdance.com/in-flux/

InFlux at Mascher Space Co-op
Saturday March 21st, 8pm
155 Cecil B. Moore Avenue 2B, Philadelphia, PA 19122
$5

Artists Showing Work:
Bidisha Dasgupta
Tomas Dura
Jumatatu Poe
Michelle Stortz

and also tomorrow night, Paper Masques will be performing for their CD Release, Tell the Ghosts It's Suppertime (earSnake). Along with several other special guests, I'll be playing xylophone and melodica with them for one song.

Wednesday, March 04, 2009 Ok here I am for my monthly update. I know, it's been a while. I've mostly been in the studio working on the Gemini Wolf album with Megan, as well as some studio stuff. I've also been shedding on classical composition skills studying with James Guglielimo.

We've been working on the Gemini Wolf album since December, we've recorded strings, horns, percussion and lots of electronics from Megan and myself. So far it's sounding quite different than Josiah. Just minutes ago we confirmed the album will be released around the third week of July, with a album release party at Johnny Brenda's on July 18!

As a I prepare to come out of my winter studio hibernation, I've got a few performances coming up you can read about. They're within blocks and days of each other in March.

The next couple of weeks we'll be finishing up the Gemini Wolf album and I'm working on three or four Mikronesia recording projects that have been slowly evolving in three separate directions: a dubby beat album, grainy ambient soundscapes and an electronic deconstruction of a string quartet I wrote and the recorded version of Pangaea: Trinity Sun.

Thursday, February 05, 2009 I forgot to post this in the last post but a snippet of some Mikronesia music was featured on WHYY Morning Edition on NPR.

Here it is - Cheers!


Download Audio (mp3)

Well two months have gone by very fast at NEXUSradio (well for me as a listener and part-time contributor, but probably not for Bilwa and Nick and all the people that have been working hard everyday to keep it on air). Tomorrow is the closing party for NEXUSradio and it's going to be off the handle.

Just to recap, NEXUSradio was a two month art gallery "installation" where they turned the gallery into a functioning low powered AM radiostation. They had a super wide range of on air and in gallery events, from chamber music, to DJs to live theater to comedy to talk radio. It was an honor to be a part of NEXUSradio and it's sad to see it go. Maybe it will be back again someday.

The first thing I did at NEXUSradio, was one of the first events there; a string quartet recording for upcoming Gemini Wolf album and future Mikronesia project. You can hear the "string only" version of the Gemini Wolf song, The Music You Make - here. The other string quartet we recorded was a full version of "Daemon En Gauze". That will be released after some production and processing for a full length album down the road.

Gemini Wolf did a small acoustic-y set for the Winter Solstice celebration. That a fun weird day with a fake fire place, live painting, and video. Megan and I were zonked, since it was the day after Festivus, but we did our thing.

Then a few weeks later we had earSnake day, with performace by Ben Fleury-Steiner, Baby Cowface and Carl Franke. It was also the long awaited premiere of the prequel to the opera, Pangaea. Solomon Slowburn and I did a performance of the Orson Wells type radio drama with narration by Solomon and music by myself of the creation myth of Pangaea. We have a recording of that, but I'm putting the finishing touches on a studio version of that piece which will be released on earSnake soon.

So thanks to Nick, Bilwa and everyone who was involved with NEXUSradio, it was a great event that expanded the minds and ears of people within the radio span of 1650 AM.

Monday, January 05, 2009 Happy New Year. I'd like to take moment to thank all the musicians and artists I was able to work with in 2008. Last year was a tremendous year of growth for me as as a composer, a producer and an artist.

2009 is here and is looking to be an even more exciting and action packed year than 2008!

People close to me have been hearing me talk (and joke) about my "rock opera" Pangaea for years. It's been something I've been kicking around for almost 15 years now! Last year I sat down and wrote out the story and I've sketched out about 3/4 of he music on piano. Last year, I was planning on performing it late this year and maybe early 2010. However, with the amount currently slated for Gemini Wolf, earSnake and other solo work, I would be rushing to get it done in a year. I've waited 15 year, so what's another year or two?

I want to take time, get some funding, meticulously craft the score and recording, and make it the best production I've ever done. Therefore, I've decided to make the opera premiere and recording release Pangaea: When the Continents Were One on November 11, 2011. I've always been a fan of patterns with number, an an opera about one unified super continent seems like it should happen on 11/11/11 (plus it's a Friday).

This will also give me some time to premiere some supplementary narrative and artistic work to help contextualize and tell the mythological tale of Pangaea, which bring us to this Saturday.

This Saturday, Solomon Slowburn (earSnake MC/Poet/Musican) and I will be premiering Pangaea: Trinity Sun on air for NEXUSradio. Trinity Sun, is an epic poem of the creation myth of Pangaea in the vein of Judaeo-Christian story, Genesis, or the hundreds of other Creation Myths out there. The idea came from Christian (Solomon Slowburn) to make the first chapter in the Pangaea story the myth that the tribes on Pangaea belive, which gives them a moral and spiritual guidance in their lives.

This will be the first in a series of smaller scale Pangaea performances leading up to the opera in 2011.

The performance will be Christian reading the text with orignial ambient music I wrote and will perform on air at NEXUSradio. In December 2008 and January 2009, Nexus Gallery has been turned into a low powered AM station for the comminity in North Philadelphia. If you're in Philadelphia you can tune in to 1650 AM or drop by the gallery. The performance will be around 5 PM on Saturday January 10. From noon until 6 PM that day is earSnake day with performances by some intrumental / experimental earSnake artists. Check earSnake.com for details.

After the performance, we'll record the piece and post here and on the forthcoming Pangaea website.

[Image credit (croped image) NASA/JPL-Caltech]