News 6/17/03
Summer is here and I am looking forward to a plethora of musical endeavors. I have several irons in the proverbial fire.
My main musical focus these days is Oyster Lucy, a band consisting of David Reihs, Vic Sabula, Eric Mosbarger, and myself. . We are going to begin work on our second full-length CD this week (tomorrow night in fact). Although we are justifiably proud of our first CD, This Is The Left Side, released in 2001, we are confident that our sophomore effort will be vastly superior in every way.
First, we have added a real human drummer, Eric Mosbarger. Eric is an enormously talented musician and his input into our creative process has already been invaluable. And of course having a thinking feeling human being handling the percussion chores gives us exponentially more flexibility than we had with drum sequences.
Second, we have been coming up with new music that represents an evolutionary leap forward for the band. The songs on Left Side were all things that I wrote and brought in to the band. While this is still the case for some of the material that will appear on the next CD, we have also been coming up with new songs in a much more collaborative manner. In short, the band will assert a much more collective identity on the upcoming CD.
Hopefully the CD will see the light of day sometime in the late summer/early fall.
Click here to visit the Oyster Lucy website.
Click here to visit the Oyster Lucy MP3.COM site , featuring tracks from Left Side as well as rare live recordings.
I have also been busy with solo projects. I have been working sporadically over the past several months on a CD of vocal music. For this project I have gone back to some of my older material (as far back as 1984). I recorded the original versions of the songs in question entirely alone. I decided that I wanted to see what would happen if I recorded new versions of the songs in collaboration with other musicians (since moving to Portland, Oregon in April of 2002 I have had the good fortune to meet a number of very talented musicians who have agreed to participate in the project).
I have also enlisted the services of three different producers--Daniel Crommie, of Saturnalia Trio (also my roommate), David Reihs, and Vic Sabula (see Oyster Lucy entry above). Most of my work with Daniel is finished as of this writing, and I expect to start working on material with Dave and Vic in the very near future.
Click here to visit my MP3.COM vocal music site. However, don't expect too much--the site is still in its infancy and there isn't much there yet. I promise there will be new material soon!
Meanwhile, I'm still active in my bedroom studio. I have turned out a number of new instrumental pieces in recent months. All of these new pieces have involved my exploration of MIDI guitar (controlling a synthesizer with a guitar--in other words, the guitar supplants the keyboard). This new music is mostly in an abstract/ambient/minimal vein and consists of both unaccompanied solo bits as well as more comlex multi-tracked songs.
I have been posting this new material at my MP3.COM instrumental music site.