good morning ~

(click the link / moon to listen)

My Big Breakthe world throbbed with animism

today’s track is another one of these deconstructed piano improvisations, feels like there’s a whole wide world in there

got two shows this week I’m really happy to play

tonight at Tubby’s in Kingston I’m joining the m. geddes gengras band as one of his per diem players, realizing live his impossible-to-play-live supergroup post rock collage album that just came out last week - - the show is FREE and our playing will be LOOSE, double drums, double guitar, mod synth army and saxophone, it’s gonna rip.

then on Sunday I’m reuniting with my power trio with Nico and Léna at Avalon Lounge and we’re gonna play some guitar songs and wave our fuckin’ lighters around. Izzy joins the band, too, she also just put out a good record. The great spectral songwriter Devin Shaffer’s in town to play the show and Léna is gonna play some songs, too. Great night on Sunday hope u come

Ten minutes or so into our first field recording a ferocious animal noise came growling through the headphones, then three extra small chihuahuas - at least one of them in a hoodie - scurried up to us offleashedly, sniffing and wagging. We were in the surprisingly robust nature preserve just around the corner from the studio deploying shotgun mics and a hydrophone from a wooden bridge spanning a burbling creek, capturing sound onto digital memory, yes, but also capturing energies onto the spiritual tape reel for playback later. And I did feel a little ridiculous, standing there with our jumble of wires and headphones and technology. The lady of the dogs felt really bad, she apologized for ruining - whatever it was we were doing. Oh, we're making field recordings, we explained to her. And she got it, she was cool (she was wearing Sparks t-shirt and when I complimented it she talked about having seen them and how awesome the show was). She must have been the one other car in the parking lot we saw, but great, now we had the place to ourselves.

Making stuff though and, like, enjoying anything involves a certain amount of swimming out past the breakers of feeling ridiculous. You gotta get over it, and often if it feels a little transgressively strange or contra the prevailing trends of polite, discreet human interaction it will feel like I'm on the right path. Or at least that's how it works for me, but maybe I am not blessed with rock star level confidence. But the whole enterprise of making art of any kind or cracking any kind of joke or just getting through to other people in any kind of meaningful way necessitates sidestepping expected, polite behaviors. We gotta get kinda silly with it. We gotta step into the spotlight - a patently ridiculous thing to do if I think about it too hard, why would it shine on me instead of anyone else here? And anyone reading this who has paid for studio time or for someone to cut a lathe knows how indulgently wasteful it can feel. At our most cynical having an art practice can feel like just setting money on fire and for what. But when you're really deep in it and its talking back to you and you're getting that deep, satisfying pleasure from running after it then spending money and time and belief on your endeavor feels like the most perfect economic act in the world.

We kept at it, fighting the hungry bugs biting at us, listening as the choral arrangement of the birds at dusk kept shifting. We climbed an observation tower at civil twilight and heard a gathering of bullfrogs thumping off in the woods. From above, we watched the first fireflies start to blink on and off, and in our headphones the rumble of a nearby freight train traveled from one headphone to the other. On the walk back to the car as the dark of night started draping itself over the evening more and more fireflies appeared, filling the tunnel of the tree boughs with the stochastic rhythms of their switching on and off, felt like a blessing.

The moon rose warm and humongous between the clouds and we got to work in the studio. We drank decaf coffee while we built our complicated drone machine - three guitars with three ebows rested on three of their strings, fed into a mixer, summed into a send, and sent back out to my pedalboard, then split back into the mixer and finally fed into the extremely fancy wooden speakers in John's living room, where the sustained sound of the three guitars swirled and danced in the stereo field, outlining the shape of the room and its furniture. We tuned the three guitars to each of the piano improvisations we were working on, finding that sweet spot between harmony and discordance that made the watery chords of the tune drift piano really sing. At first we wanted the guitars to play themselves, but seeking a low note, I instead had to sit there criss cross applesauce right on the rug, hearing not the piano and only the sine wave undulations, five, ten minutes of calm fascination with the swirling. And yes, wow, it felt really good to do, the playback ethereal and both somehow of the world and deeply otherworldly. Channeling.

John with the brilliant idea - he had three big boxes of sparklers, let's get the sound of them sizzling onto the record. We lit them one at a time, then we started the next one with the previous one, chain-smoking the sparkers. Then we tried 10 at once and that was maybe not the best idea - they burned super bright and super quickly, 5 seconds of tape, an afterimage on my eyes, and a burn on my thumb. But then we did two at a time and I waved them around, moving from mic to mic. And that was the take. When we flew in the audio it sounded uncanny and beautiful. I texted Matt to brag that I was going to get a credit for playing sparklers on this one.

Later than I thought and very late for Greene County I finally got back on the road. I felt tired but buzzed, like I literally got a contact high off of the sounds (I may have also gotten a little bit of a contact high off of the bubbler, but this felt more euphoric than marijuana goofy) Outside the splendor of the moon stopped me dead in my tracks, and never have I ever experienced a moon roof more literally. Everything felt illuminated, the world throbbed with animism and gentle possibility. Felt like I was driving through the energy of everyone else's dreams. I am so blessed to get a little silly with it and be obsessed with arguably ridiculous pursuits. A Tuesday night worshipping the moon, bathing in feedback and pyrotechnics, something worth doing.

But what about you? Have you done anything silly in the service of something greater lately? Does your world feel alive? Did you see that fuckin’ moon?