Spring’s first fruits from the garden…
househusbands
One of the joys of the past year has been playing music together with composer/guitarist Carlos Cotallo Solares. We’ve performed together on a few occasions - a beautiful November evening at the Maas Building, a chillier March night at Century - but most of our collaboration has unfolded at home here in South Philly, with play, shared meals, and conversation all given equal time. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that the music we improvise together reflects a kind of intimate domesticity - patient, warm, subtly and richly textured.
Over time we’ve moved from getting-to-know-each-other exploration to rehearsal and then recording - and now we’re ready to share the results with you. Please lend your ears to househusbands, released today for the latest Bandcamp Friday:
For fellow residents of the mid-Atlantic, Carlos and I will be performing on May 21 to celebrate this release, at Studio 34 in West Philly (4522 Baltimore Ave., with doors at 8 and music at 8:30 pm). Carlos is about to relocate to Seattle, and while we’re determined that househusbands will continue as a project, for now, this is your last and best chance to experience this music live, and to see what goes into its making. Bassist / improviser Will Yager - always reliable for a gripping solo performance - rounds out the bill.
(Hat-tip to Carlos for the cheeky flyer).
At the workbench
I’ve had the pleasure of working on a couple of animation and video projects this spring. I always find it rewarding to trespass in other media - because I’m fascinated by the correspondences between music and other art forms, and because I always learn something new by navigating the differences. And animation is just plain fun: movement! color! shapes!
None of these projects are quite ready to share or announce yet - stay tuned - but I can offer a few sneak peaks at a music video made for Bridges of Königsberg (my band with David Collins and Peter J. Woods). While driving through the Southwest during a 2019 tour, Peter and I hatched a scheme for BoK to collaborate on a zine, using methods related to the classic exquisite corpse technique. (The strategies we came up with for visuals also eventually led to the structured and constrained musical processes we used in the creation of our record The Celebrity Veto). We pitched David on the idea, he bought in, and the three of us went to work making, manipulating, collaging, and layering text, illustration, photography, and found imagery. It’s tough to choose a single page - they are wildly various - but here’s one example:
We haven’t printed the zine yet - we’re holding it in reserve as merch for a future BoK tour. But in the meantime, I had the thought that it could be turned into a kind of “base layer” for a BoK music video, making for a project that could incorporate visual ideas from every member of the band. Layer in some variations on the animation code I wrote for The Algorithm (and wrote about in the last newsletter)…
…and you’re starting to approach a suitably BoK level of density and activity (aka barely-controlled chaos):
I look forward to showing you the whole thing, and especially the way that the music and visuals fit together - not to mention sharing lots of other exciting BoK news that lands this summer.
Continuing projects
The LV2MKRT podcast, made with Scott Worthington, carries on. The three latest episodes - “Inverse technological,” “That’s why we use Pd for all our word processing,” and “The opposite of a chicken-and-egg problem” feature some of my earliest performances with the electronic instrument that eventually became dubbed “bartleby” (and which I wrote a bit about in previous editions of the “At the workbench” section of this newsletter). Tune in over the next few months of releases and you’ll hear that instrument - and my performance of it - grow and evolve.
If you’d rather hear the previous, unnamed instrument at its maximum level of polish, there are a few recent episodes - “The profundity of caffeination,” “Zero regrets, no repeats,” and “Darmstadt and demolition derbies” - that I thought were particularly strong.
neural goldberg has been quiet of late (though absolutely not shelved - I’m just behind on software development), but in the meantime, J. Soliday has a lovely new record from his early routines project that you might enjoy. (I certainly do).
Nonce
The no-input mixing bowl, as performed by cartoonist John Granzow. Thanks as always for reading, and hope to see you on the 21st - yours,
Christopher
Christopher Burns
http://sfsound.org/~cburns