Dean Santomieri at Berkeley Arts Festival, August 13 2011

When I was interviewing for my present job, the conpany’s live-work balance and tendency to hire interesting and creative people were offered as plusses. I didn’t think too much about it at the time. I was just interested in the job. But it turned out to be true; there seem to be a larger than expected number of musicians and artists working there. It has helped me to reconnect with art activity that I have lost touch with after years of grad school, parenting, and full-time work. A case in point was last Friday evening when I ventured out to the Berkeley Arts Festival to see one of my co-workers perform his spoken word/sound art. The venue presents visual works on the walls along with the performances on the stage.

Dean Santomieri is well-known in the performance scene around the Bay Area. I’m sorry not to have been familiar with his work prior to getting this job, chatting at work, finding lots of common interests, and exchanging recordings. In any case, the performance last Friday was wonderful. Dean is a great writer and story teller, and he accompanies himself with a battery of electronics and guitars, creating a aural environment that nicely supports the spoken word without ever getting in its way. The writing, what I might call magical realism, drew me in right away, eliciting a curious mixture of delight and trepidation.

And it was inspirational too. I’m not giving up photography, but I’m pledging to myself to fire up the old electronics and get back to work. And speaking of photography… I wish I had sat closer and gotten a shot of Dean playing that crazy, electric resonator guitar. I will next time.

The Complete Tiffany Transcriptions

In honor of Record Store Day today, I took our guests for the day, Sarah’s sister Carrie and BF Glenn, up to Down Home Music. As many of you know, this is one of the most important records stores around for folk, Americana, jazz, and more. The result was that I picked up the 10-disk box set of Bob Wills’ complete Tiffany Transcriptions. I was absolutely overjoyed to find it there. I had it in my shopping cart on Amazon for awhile and then it sold out. But the double joy today was that not only did I find it, but I supported an independent record label/company/store that’s a major player in documenting Americana and folk music from around the world.

If you didn’t do it today, get out there tomorrow and buy something from your local indie record store. And if you are in the SF Bay Area, definitely check out Down Home Music. Really.

Audience member plays the off-center wheel of death after the final performance of Schick Machine. San Francisco, CA. march 2011.

Way back in the mid-1980′s, when we lived in Fresno, Sarah and I came to be friends with Steve Schick. At the time, Steve was percussionist and young professor in the music department there. And for awhile we shared a circle of friends, local music events, reading and listening groups, and generally hung out.

Meanwhile, Sarah and I were in the habit of coming up to San Francisco to see music and performance works at what was then Theater Artaud, a fantastic space devoted to avant performance works of all kinds. And it was there that on one occasion we saw Paul Dresher Ensemble with Rinde Eckert perform Slow Fire. I’ll save the life-changing details for another post. Let’s just say we were blown away and a lot of things were fixed in our young minds about what was what in contemporary performance.

Eventually, Steve took a job at UC San Diego, and his career and reputation grew as a solo percussionist and champion of contemporary composition. And the rest is history. We moved to Seattle where I stuck my nose in the philosophy books for the better part of a decade. We generally lost touch with Steve, but did connect once or twice after we moved to the Bay Area in 2000.

Today, we experienced an interesting and joyous alignment. We went to see Steve perform Schick Machine, a percussion/theater work written for Steve by Mr. Dresher and Mr. Eckert, at the former Theater Artaud, resurrected a year ago as Z Space. The piece was a fabulous, sprawling cacophony of rhythms, looping textures, words, and visual delights issuing from a stage full of homemade percussion instruments and self-propelled noisemakers. There was a homemade pipe organ, a hurdy-gurdy, sheets of metal, spinning disks, steel hula hoops, slit drums, bottles, cans, alarm bells, and more, all mic’d and looped. We had seen the piece performed almost two years ago at Stanford. Since then, it has changed quite a bit, getting better and more focused. And seeing it in this space somehow made it all the more compelling. Maybe that’s just me and the history it has for me.

We went with friends and all brought our kids to this, the last matinee performance. The kids loved it. As it turns out, there were a total of 19 performances, with many matinees just for school classes that came over the last two weeks. And today, just like as with the school classes that attended, everyone was invited up after the performance to play with all the crazy instruments. Kids and adults alike had a blast.

Reconnecting with an old friend, a former fave venue, and the performance world all in one day. That feels good.

Audience members play the hurdy-gurdy after the final performance of Schick Machine. San Francisco, CA. march 2011.

Organ Wheel

Building with Lights, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco CA.

This evening I managed to attend The San Francisco Tape Music Festival 2011. I enjoyed it immensely. There were some really wonderful pieces and an appreciative audience. Of course, many in the audience were probably participants waiting their turn on this or one of the next two nights–I recognize that this is not a hugely popular genre. Nonetheless, it was good to see a decent audience out for this kind of art. I myself would go fairly regularly to see and hear experimental music if I could, but life is different now than it was when I was in college with few real obligations and responsibilities.

In any case, the first half consisted of works by Adrian Moore, Mauricio Kagel, Paul Dresher, and bran(…)pos. It was a solid set that really showcased the power of electronic music  experienced in a good venue with a terrific multi-channel sound system. The second half was more mixed with a piece by Christian Marclay being the standout. To be fair, by the time the second half began, my ears and brain were tired and I was surely not as receptive as I was earlier in the evening. The relative accessibility of the Marclay piece, with its turntablism aesthetic, gave it a leg up at this point in the evening.

The concert was at the Southside Theater at Fort Mason Center. I have never been to this particular space before, and had not been out to Fort Mason in a couple years, so wandering the foggy cold grounds for a bit after the show was a treat in itself. The Exploratorium has some installations along the water that focus on the nature of SF Bay, and they were interesting to see.

Beyond being a consumer, I was really inspired to again be a producer. Following on yesterday’s confessional post regarding picking up the guitar again, I’m now entertaining a commitment to using the gear that has been set up and dutifully standing by for years. It has sat here day after day as if any second I would just jump in and start working again at composing electronic.

I used to compose a lot, and even naively thought of it as a career track. I wish I had pursued it more rigorously and with determination. I’d love to have a job making experimental electronic music. And making fine art photographs. And perhaps putting the two together. Can’t I just have a patron?

Manny and the Gretsch

Recently, Sarah and I went back to Fresno to attend a loosely organized get-together of people from the arts and music scene of the late 80′s and early 90′s. At least that’s how I think of it, because we left town in 1993. In fact, many people live elsewhere now, but come back to town over Christmas break to visit the family.

This year also included a bonus: a reunion gig of The Miss Alans, a popular Fresno band that really nearly broke through, but not quite. The reunion gig really turned out to be the centerpiece of the weekend. I was not really part of the TMA scene back then, but was really looking forward to seeing the couple members of the band that are friends and to seeing them play. One of the great things about the show was having an opportunity to really work on taking concerts photos in the low-light and high-contrast conditions. I had never had much luck with this before. But with my D300s, I was able to get some shots I was really happy with.

Then an awkward thing happened. During the last song of the show, guitarist friend Manny hopped off the stage to get a beer or something, and suddenly one minute I was slugging beer and taking photos, and the next I had a live guitar in my hand with the band vamping, waiting for someone to do something with it. Unfortunately, long ago were the days when I played guitar almost at all, much less in front of lots of people, and my brain was no longer wired for serendipitous improvising. So, deer-in-headlights syndrome was the result.

Yes, I was a little embarrassed by the whole thing. Even writing about it now is cringey. And it made me wonder why I even still have instruments taking up space in the closet and next to the computer. I had the realization that it was really time to get rid of this clutter in the house and in my psyche, this part of my ancient past.

Then a funny thing happened. My climate scientist friend Bill is taking guitar lessons and insisted we get together to try to work on some kind of modal soloing ideas he was introduced to at his guitar lesson. I didn’t really want to do this, think about this, face this. But I did. So, tonight we did that. We traded twos and fours over some progressions, and it was hard, but we both really got into it and had a great time. We came away exhilarated. So now we are planning on jamming every week, figuring it out, and getting it down.

Yeah. Face the fears.

I decided I really still want to compose, so I also finally tackled getting my audio software up and running on the brand new iMac. The good news is that the recording software, MOTU’s Digital Performer, all works on OS 10.6, despite being two major releases old. The bad news is that the patch librarian/editor software for all my old synths doesn’t. It won’t run at all, and it doesn’t look like MOTU is really supporting any more. That’ll be a headache to solve.

In the meantime I came across some ambient pieces I had been working on a couple years ago. For some reason they all have working titles derived from works by Paracelsus. Here is a rough mix of the first one.

• Liber Prologi in Vitam Beatam

Click the link above to show the player, then click the pointer for playback.

Fire-breathing Snail at Maker Faire

I attended Maker Faire 2009 this last weekend with Sarah and Theo. I was not quite sure what all to really expect other than “burners”, art cars, and other alt-artists. It is definitely a scene for Bay Area hipsters.The fire-breathing snail truck, motorized one-person cupcakes, tesla coils, fire-arts displays from The Crucible, body art, etc. set that vibe for sure.

If it were just this, it would have been fine, but it was so much more than this. We went as a family, and the number of activities and other things geared toward kids and families was really great. Theo was totally into it. Of course, for a six-year-old boy, the main buzz was word of a large Legoland display and activity area. Theo wouldn’t settle down until we found it, and then wouldn’t leave it once we did. (We could hardly escape to do the things WE wanted to do.) There were many other building, science and educational activities and presentations going on from groups like NASA and Exploratorium. Sarah and I both came to the conclusion that the Weekend Pass is a good idea; the Faire really demands a two-day visit, and next year we thought we’d spend one day largely devoted to kid stuff, and one day to explore all the stuff we really want to see. I was disappointed to entirely miss Survival Research Labs among other things.

Among the things I checked out was the experimental and computer music section, which was definitely cool. There were individuals there with their own creations, like computer controlled prepared piano, home-built electronic zither things, guitars with sound-sensitive color displays built into the body, and more. I also discovered organizations like Sound Arts, which work to support the sound arts community in a variety of ways. I was actually inspired to try to participate next year. I’m eager to start composing electronic music again, and perhaps put it together with photographic imagery. There were several multi-media tools on exhibit, and the possibilities for interactive mash-ups appear to be very extensive. So, we’ll see..

Beyond the fun of electronic noise-toys, it seems to me that the notion of making your own fill-in-the-blank, instead of relying only on mass-produced consumables for furnishing one’s life, is more important than ever. A quick review of the story of stuff should convince you of that. In fact, among the most interesting and yet slightly disturbing activities we did at Maker Faire involved making things out of discarded stuff, mostly computer stuff. There were gigantic piles of computer gear that were available for dismantling and use as raw material. (I’m not really sure which Theo enjoyed more, destroying a computer keyboard, or assembling its pieces into a robot ship.) The fun aside, the sheer volume of discarded material present here gives one pause as to what must be going into the world’s landfills. Thank goodness for groups like the Alameda County Computer Resource Center, which was a participating organization and probably the source of the “art supplies”, for what they do to stem the tide of electronics discards.

Not that everyone is going to build their own computers. But there were exhibits and activities on everything from sewing, to gardening, to “slow food”, to green energy technology, to bicycling, and how to make your own robot. I’m already looking forward to next year.

Extracting the Root

It was a collaboration between myself and Mike Mogan in the late 80′s. I am not sure of the year. It actually made it onto a cassette release of a compilation of Fresno indie music. I’m not sure what kind of music to call it, but it was influenced by early, so-called world music, Peter Gabriel, and ECM jazz stuff. I can’t remember what the title is a reference to. It was actually quite a challenge to record as it was done on a Tascam “Portastudio 244″ 4-track cassette recorder. There were quite a few parts and stereo imaging of things, so there was a lot of careful bouncing tracks down. It is hard to believe we managed to do it with somewhat decent mix levels and minimal tape noise.

Mike played rhythm guitar, the cool double-tracked guitar solo, and synthesizer. I played rhythm guitar (the part with the dubious timing), acoustic 12-string guitar, and did the drum machine programming. It was my first drum machine, the E-mu Drumulator. This thing came with a stock set of sounds that was a basic drum kit. Eventually, you could add, I should say change, sounds by swapping out the computer chips onto which he sounds were recorded. Here I have the ethnic percussion chip set going. It sounds a bit dry and forward in this mix. I think we actually recorded a sync track for the drumulator on the tape and printed the stereo percussion part straight to the mixdown.

In my typical fashion, my prowess for commercialism and self-promotion has lead me to begin by uploading whacked out experimental sound pieces that will probably drive most people away. But fear not. If anyone comes back for more, I’ll eventually get some old song stuff up here, too. I have hours of tapes going back to some of the earliest garage and experimental days. It will be a treat to be able to share with people, particularly you far-flung players on these recordings, where ever you now live.