News From All Over

Electronic Musician and innovator Tim Perkis made the thoroughly enjoyable documentary Noisy People in 2007, profiling experimental Bay Area musicians Phillip Greenlief, Dan Plonsey, Damon Smith, Tom Djil, Cheryl Leonard, Gino Robair,Greg Goodman, and Geirge Cremaschi. He has continued this endeavor through a Noisy People podcast, and I am the fortunate guest in the newest installment.

(A special screening of Noisy People will happen in SF on July 27th, as part of the Outsound New Music Summit.)

The medley of short excerpts from my records, heard at 2:20 in the podcast, really took me aback. As obvious as it should be to me of all people, I was struck by the bewildering diversity of the soundscape. I’ve really been all over the map! I think, heard in this manner, it sounds somewhat manifesto-esque: I Get Around.

I think the motivation behind each record being so different from each other, not too mention different from Junk Genius and T. J. Kirk, is that I feel my time, opportunities and budgets are limited, and under these circumstances, there is little incentive to repeat myself, when there are so many things I want to do.  

However, one of those things I now want to do is repeat myself. That itself would be novel. In particular, I want to make several Actual Trio CDs, as well as a sequel to Shuffle Play.


Lots of great work lately: Baguette Quartette played our annual Bastille Day at Chez Pannise, with Alice waltzing on the patio an indelible memory… Actual Trio had a blast at back to back gigs at City Lights Books, the Actual Cafe and Luna’s in Sacramento; really feels like we’re getting to new places. The art is all done and the CD is slated to come out in late September. We’ll play at the venerable Open Gate series, curated by Alex Cline, at the Eagle Rock Center for the Arts in LA on November 1st. Other dates in Seattle, Eugene, Arcata are pending, and I’m trying to find gigs in Portland, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and other fine left coast burgs… Myles Boisen is planning an six hour tribute to Ornette Coleman at the Berkeley Arts Festival on September 26…I caught a fantastic show from Natalie Cressman and Peter Apfelbaum’s Sparkler at the Freight and Salvage. I wish I could buy stock in Natalie, I got a feeling…

This entry was posted in Live Music, Music Thoughts and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.