General Update: Vacation and Music

I spent last week in San Francisco. I had a good time. I initially choose San Francisco as my vacation spot because I have so many friends in the area. All of them (with the exception of Jenna, who I stayed with) were out of town while I was there. I spent a week alone riding trains, buses, and walking about the city. I had a great time. I mostly just wandered with my headphones on. Miles Davis and Nick Drake being the two most played artists on the iPod during the trip. I visited two museums there and saw some great art. including a few pieces by one of my favorite artists: Richard Diebenkorn. The De Young Museum also had an Andy Goldsworthy installation that was neat.

I spent a good amount of money at Amoeba Records (I got records by Bill Evans, Low/Dirty Three, Wayne Shorter, American Football, Robert Fripp and Andy Summers, Weather Report, Boards of Canada, and Peter Gabriel). Jenna took me to an awesome French-Vietnamese restaurant that was mindblowingly good. I am sad it is there and not here. I ordered a ginger lemon grass chicken with brown rice, and Jenna convinced me to get a soup that she likes...it was the best soup I've ever had, sweet spicy goodness. Vegetarian, with tamarind in it. Delicious. Jenna was a great hostess and I was happy to get to hang out with her more, as we had only hung out in person a few times previously.

Once I got back I managed to get to work on music again pretty quickly. I have 3-5 tracks in varying stages of completion. Christopher should be coming over to drum on a few of them in the near future. They range in style. I'm really starting to get excited about this album I've been working on. It feels like an album full of intros and outros but with very few full songs, lol. I like that. Just pieces of moods and sketches of ideas. Honestly, its the best I'm able to do right now, and that is just fine. Talked to Janessa today and with any luck she will be coming over sometime in the next week to finally finish up some Narrator Is Lying tracks. At this point I still expect to release that as well as the Colorfield Bridge album by the Fall/Winter this year. This has not been the best or most entertaining update ever, I'll try harder next time.

Drift Theory video

So I finally decided to take a few steps towards starting a new company, sort of. Except this one will remain in my control and b what I want it to be: a hobby. Something fun, to release art that I enjoy, either by me or by people who's work I admire. Hopefully it will not stop with music, I'd like to do DVDs and books as well. Anyways, the company is named 'Drift Theory' or 'The Drift Theory Group', either way. I made a splash video for the website. The compression is problematic (as usual) and the youtube one makes it so you can not really read what is written at the bottom, but I'm posting it here anyways. The video is shot and edited by me and the audio is Nate (under the guise of his recording project Opilis.). I think it turned out pretty color. I like the look of the imagery. One of these days maybe I'll do a substantial artsy video that isnt just one subject treated in what I consider to be an interesting way. Some day maybe I'll move on to plot. We shall see. There is more and more talk of horror films lately. With various people. I'm not an overly devoted fan of the genre but I think it would be fun to work on one. Anyways, enjoy the video. I have not worked as much on my own video projects of late, music stuff has been going so well. My own project as well as recording Romak's solo project and I may engineer/mix an EP for my friend Jack. That'll be once I get back from San Francisco (I leave on the 14th come back on the 19th). I need to start writing again (words, not just music), I hope to have time and inspiration walking the streets of San Francisco. We shall see.

Ghosts, Christopher Bright, A Break from the Sea, and Redwoods

Christopher came over last night to track some drums for Colorfield Bridge. I played with Christopher previously in Glider, August Kelly, and C is for Carlo. We hadn't gotten together in a while and definitely had not played music in a long time. It was good to get a chance to catch up, hang out, and most of all get to work on some tunes. He set up a kick, snare, hi-hat, and crash in my room and we put up three mic's. The first song we tracked was just a few guitars that to me at least were too simple and did not amount to a whole lot. I played the track and he learned it quickly and had a solid take down in just a few tries. I have since added vocals and bass and am extremely happy with the result. I think it's one of my favorite pieces in recent memory, its funny how a few little touches can really just make something awesome. His performance on the track is great. The song is now titled Ghosts and can be heard on my myspace page.

After tracking Ghosts we moved on to a song called A Break from the Sea (which is a play/joke on the album title for the Glider album that has been in limbo for what seems like years). I had recorded the song about a year prior and had just recently done some re-sequencing of the audio. When I played it I played to a click but didn't bother to set the meter so when my time signatures changed it just felt natural to me....the count was incredibly screwy and it took a few hours to get drums learned and tracked for it. The count was so difficult to get we had to try for a long time to figure out how to break it up, eventually we got it and wrote the info on his snare head for easy access (lol/see image). We eventually got it all laid down. Im happy with his performance, but upon further listening I'm not sure about the song. I am going to work with it and see if I can get it to a place where I am happy with it, but I fear it will take a lot of work to get it anywhere close.

I also recently finished a song titled Redwoods (that has also been uploaded to the myspace). It is the second song to feature Amber Ormand (of Cloudcraft and Silver Pines) on vocals, the first being Sky Travel. It had been almost finished for over a month. I finally got around to fixing up the percussion and a delay problem with the horns. It now sounds great, in my opinion at least. Parker helped out tracking the percussion a while back when the song was still brand new.

Darn, I'm now listening back to Ghosts and it's overall level is too low in comparison to the rest of the tracks, I'll have to fix that later, but for now it is bedtime. Art Walk in Santa Ana and Violaine in LA tomorrow. Goodnight. :)

Recent Video Shoot

On Monday I grabbed my tripod and drove down to Parker's house, the location of the video shoot for Romak's Lady Gaga parody song. The concept is, as described by Romak, the music video for the Lady Gaga song Just Dance meets two girls one cup. The first hour or so was spent with people putting on make-up, chain smoking, and making fake diarrhea (chocolate pudding, ginger/hibiscus juice, frozen vegetables, crumbled rice cake, milk, and a bit of olive oil). I handled the camera work all day (including a makeshift dolly shot utilizing a skateboard and a box) and sort of shared directorial duties with Romak and Nate. Nate will be editing the video over the course of the week. The general mood of the video is a house party. Highlights include people getting pelted with fake excrement.We had multiple girls (in addition to Romak) dressed up similarly to Lady Gaga. The shoot was really fun. We all had a blast with the choreographed bedroom dance scene and the various party scenes. After the shoot we spent a long time cleaning chocolate pudding off of most of the house's surfaces.After all of that we all went to the jacuzzi to relax after a long day. I look forward to seeing the result of this silly/fun day of shooting. After seeing some test shots of the fake doodie Romak and I noticed that in some of the shots it looked more like fake blood which has brought up the potential of working on a horror film together....I guess we shall see if that pans out. To hear the song please visit the Lady Caca myspace page @ http://www.myspace.com/ladycacapwns , while its not normally my aesthetic it has been a blast working on both the song and the video.

In other news, the Colorfield Bridge album is coming along well. Christopher is coming over to track drums on two or three songs. One of which is titled A Break from the Sea, another is not yet named as there are no vocals yet, I think I want Janessa to sing with me on it. I finally fixed up the track Redwoods (featuring Amber Ormand on vocals). I need to get things going with Guyton,a s I want him to do live drums on Kiss. Other than that I have one song that is in the works, I just need to track the chorus and bridge vox and guitars. I amy be releasing a split 7" in the not too distant future with Brandon's project Goodnight Mechanical Dinosaur. More on that later. Also, I have to remember to blog about it, but we are going to be starting a monthly series of concerts in my apartment. I'll explain later though, back to the day job.....