Windy & Carl

So, last night I drove up to LA with two friends (Brandon and Melissa) to see Windy & Carl at a venue I had never been to. The venue was called Synchronicity. It was a gallery space. Very small. I liked it. When I arrived I ran into Ned Ragget (who's photos I jacked for this posting cause my phone takes horrid photographs) and Windy Webber. We chatted through the first band and had a lovely time out front. Then Brandon, Melissa, and I went in to watch a band called Nudge, who I had never heard of. Their set was fantastic. Mostly instrumental drone stuff with synth, electronic drums (used pretty minimally) and guitar. A lot of the patterns that emerged really reminded me of the earlier works of Philip Glass and/or Steve Reich (in different ways). What I most loved about them was how they had all this sound going and manipulated the whole wall of it in varying ways, deconstructing it with stutters, slow downs, stops and starts. It was great. Next up was White Rainbow, who unknown to me has a ton of associations with other acts that I was familiar with. His set was really great as well. It sounded like he was using one of those Boss slicer pedals or perhaps one of the Linn guitar boxes that do rhythmic stuff, he was very good at what he did. After his set I bought a limited edition tour 12" Windy and Carl were selling, as well as a tour EP by Nudge. Windy and Carl's set started with a few shorter, for them, pieces with vocals. They were nice and set the mood perfectly for the epic bliss out drones that came in waves at us over the next....what had to have been over an hour. At varying points I almost fell asleep, or closed my eyes and just felt the music, or watched enthralled by the pulsating wall of sound and the beautiful photographs being projected with the set (courtesy of Christy Romanick, who if you have not seen her photos....you really have to). It was a fantastic time and I highly recommend seeing them live to anyone, it is great. I only wish I could have gone tot he show in Big Sur (outdoors in the redwoods, people brought sleeping bags and just lay down on the grass to their set). Black moth Super Rainbow is playing tonight and I'll likely post a brief play by play of that as well. Till next time.....

Photoblog: Recording Space

Colorfield Bridge + Thoughts on music listening environments

So, I said I would post more once I had a name to the project. Well, the new band/recording project is called Colorfield Bridge. I have also solidified the idea behind the project a little bit. It is meant to be raw short songs. I don't want to record more than a take or two for everything. I want there to be flaws in the music. I want it to be human and a real performance. I don't want to edit everything into perfection. I want it to be spontaneous (start and finish a song in the same day as much as is possible). I want it to sound like it was made in my bedroom (which, for the most part has been and will be the case). Lastly, I want to collaborate with as many friends as are willing. I have two tracks with Amber on vocals (only one currently posted, I think I'm going to try to get Carlo to play drums on the other). Anyways, I hope to release a 15 - 20 song album in the winter of 09/10 sometime. I have the album name picked out already (Without the Horses). It will likely be the first release on the new label I am starting (now that I am pretty much fully removed from my former record label The Gaia Project). Anyways, enough about the new projects. TO hear tracks please go to myspace.com/colorfieldbridge. On to other thoughts.....

Maybe it's just me but have you ever noticed how certain albums are great for listening to with a bunch of friends, some are great for putting on at work with co-workers, but some are really just for you.....songs or albums that you only listen to when you are alone? I have a lot of albums/music like that, they just aren't things that are good to listen to around even one or two other people usually. I think these are my favorite albums, they always end up being so personal, so much a part of my day. I listen to them driving my car, or on an iPod while I shop for groceries, or on my record player while I do the dishes. They comfort me in ways that the music I play when around other people can't/doesn't. What are your favorite albums to put on when you are alone, but never play around many other people? My least favorite listening environment for music is at work. While there is some crossover between my co-workers and I (we can always agree on Jazz or anything by The Weepies/Deb Talan) most of what I listen to (even beyond the aforementioned alone music) is not stuff that I can play around them. Even if some of them liked would like it I can't manage to put on a Sunny Day Real Estate album or Daft Punk or even Nick Drake. I put on Nick Drake one time and just felt wrong listening to it with them there. It's funny how music can be like that, demanding a certain environment, a certain level of comfort with your surroundings. I had just been thinking about this and thought I'd type it up.

New musical avenues.....+ art purchases.

So I spent yesterday helping Romak (of Romak & the Space Pirates) record a parody/cover version of Lady GaGa's Just Dance. I think it came out really well. We tracked to a really cheesy midi version of the song, and layered on 4 vocal tracks. I will be helping him film a video for the song this coming Sunday evening. We got to talking, as we had not hung out much in quite some time, and it seems like we work pretty well in the studio together, so I am going to be helping him with a solo album. I'm pretty sure in addition to engineering the solo disc I will also be performing on it and helping with some writing, which should be a blast. Romak's music has a certain sense of humor that I never have in my own music, I just don't know how to include humor in my music, so it should be a fun project to be working on, and will hopefully help me grow as a musician. After he left I dug out the first Space Pirates album.
Years ago Rory, Daniel, and I helped produce/engineer the record. I had not heard it since it's release. I played on one track, Daniel played on one, and I did some edit or other on another. I really enjoyed listening to that album after all that time, it really was a good album. Of all the music I've recorded, albums I've worked on, etc. recording that album was the most memorable experience of recording. It took weeks, working every day at the peak of summer in a boiling hot room. There were always tons of extra people just hanging around the studio or out front, we all ate together, chain smoked cigarettes together, played monopoly while others were tracking, it was a blast and I hope to never forget how fun it was.



In addition to working with Romak, I have begun work on a solo album of my own. I have two tracks demoed out. One is in a shoegaze style and the other is somewhat reminiscent of late 90s indie rock such as Owls or American Football. I don't know exactly what I want to do musically with this solo release and it will likely be a hodgepodge, chock full of friends helping out. That is my hope anyways. I'll post the two demos just as soon as I think of a name for the project (I don't want to use my name).


Lastly, in this long update: I attended the opening of Inside the White Cube at The Box Gallery in Costa Mesa. The show featured white on white works by Joseph Hawa, curated by my friend Johnny Sampson. It was a pretty good show. I hadn't expected to, but I ended up buying one of the pieces. My small collection of art is growing! I got one of a series of four titled 'Geometrics'. I'll recieve it after the show is over (I'll post a picture then). Here are a few pictures from the show:

Books and Movies.....

A high ranking contender, in my opinion, for best film of all time is Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky. It is slow and cerebral. Taking its time with every step. Painting us a picture more than telling us a story (after all, they say a picture is worth a thousand words). I wont go into detail about my love for the way Tarkovsky makes movies, I could ramble about his ridiculous talents, instead I want to get to talking about what I set out to talk about:I love this movie, yet I had never read the book that it was based on. The book is called Roadside Picnic and is by Boris and Arkady Stugatsky. It has been slow at work lately so I read the book online (available through the Wikipedia entry for the book, as no english edition is currently in print). Having seen the movie and read the Wiki for the boak I figured I knew what to expect. It turns out that the movie really only encompases a microcosm of what exists in the book. I have been in the middle of 5 or 6 books for a while now, seemingly unable to finish any of them, then this came along and I read it in 1 and a half work shifts (all the while still getting my work done), I just couldn't stop reading. It is a rare breed of science fiction, much like Stanislaw Lem's Solyaris (also turned into a film by Andrei Tarkovsky and later by Steven Sodderberg). These are both books/films about humanity on human terms, not about the alien worlds they hint at. What it is to be human in the universe. They ponder reality, but not in very romantic ways. They both present us with a setting containing evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Both pose the question: would humanity even be able to comprehend this intelligence? In Roadside Picnic it is likened tot he idea of a roadside picnic: you pull the car off the road, eat, drink, be merry. After you leave frightened animals slowly start to come out of the woods and find a candy wrapper, some empty bottles or cans, oil that leaked from the car, a hair clip, etc. While some animals might even be able to make use of some of these objects in some way, none of them would have the foggiest idea of their actual intent or use, they can't comprehend it. I love that idea, that we just simply would not understand an alien intelligence at all, that we would be like those animals. Anyways, I thoroughly enjoyed the book.

I think I will read Lem's Solyaris next, as I have not read the novel for that either. I highly recommend either of the films to anyone, both are fantastic, but you need to be patient. They are long and slow and moving and beautiful. They give you time, as a viewer to think and process, they do not hold your hand, they give you room to space out and formulate your own thoughts. I would also highly recommend the book, even if you are not a fan of science fiction as a genre. Both would fall, in my opinion, more into the realm of speculative fiction anyways (much like Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth or Carl Segan's Contact).

Sun Spots: Entry #37

A character dialogue segment of Sun Spots done in stop motion with spoken vocal, keyboard music, and stop motion imagery. This was my first attempt at using batch/action processing in photoshop to process the large amount of images used in this style of moving imagery. I'm not 100% happy with the result but it was good practice and makes sense in the context of the loose story at that point. I'll try more later.

The Narrator Is Lying

I recently spoke with my friend Janessa about finishing up some of her/our songs. We hope to release an album soon. If you are interested in hearing some of the demos the tunes can be heard here:

The Narrator is Lying

Dialogue With Giants

Dialogue With Giants (Originally titled T R E E) is another stop motion style video piece. I played around with dropping and reordering shots a lot more in this one. It makes the stop motion a bit more apparent and gives it a more manic sense of motion. The soundtrack was recorded shortly after the video and consists of various vocalizations (ie. there are no instruments, beyond the human voice, used).

This piece will likely be a part of Sun Spots, the long format work that I am planning. I have been writing a book for a while, the majority of it will be turned into a film called Sun Spots. The film will consist of a great many linked shorts in various styles telling a loose story based off of fictional journal entries. This segment (Dialogue With Giants) is meant to be a communication between the main character and a group of trees. The segment name comes from mythology and literature, in a way. I found out that the word Ent, from Tolkien's Middle Earth stories, was based on an anglo-saxon word for giant. I liked the idea of trees being giants in the classical/mythological sense.

W I N D O W

W I N D O W is a stop motion short film meant to give the experience of my bedroom window in the morning/early afternoon from both my and the windows perspective. The soundtrack consists of two layers: 1) A piano improvisation I recorded, the sort of thing that tends to play through in my head in the morning as the light shines through the blinds. 2) The sounds that could be heard from my window during the recording process (birds, cars, neighbors shouting, doors opening and closing, etc.).

I am really happy with how this came out. It totally captures the mood I was wanting. I feel like the show Seinfeld when I create stuff a lot of the time. Everyone's doing something and I do nothing. It feels that way a lot of the time anyways. I don't really feel the need to say something or have a stance or a message. I am not overly interested in filming people/characters. I just want to show things I see in an interesting way. The only thing I was not happy with in regards to this video is the compression. Especially the web version. The compression takes away a lot of the definition and color tone. I'm working on getting a decent compression setting for a full display version.

My name is Brian Michael Evans. I am an artist/musician living and working in Southern California. I create things in most mediums and will be talking about my own creations here as well as thoughts on art and other peoples works.