notes from the kelp

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…about the music

Strong winter fire star.

This morning was pretty great for February: almost 50 degrees. Yes, Fahrenheit. I had to spell check that last word because I can never remember the first “h.”
So as the sun blazed into my windows and the birds chirped with glee as they pecked at bowls of seed I’d put out, I prepared the materials for my upcoming residency at Capital University in frigid Columbus, Ohio, where it is in the mid-20’s.

Mid-20’s. Just like most of the other cities I’ve been trotting around to for my work this winter: Chicago, New York, Minneapolis. What is wrong with me?? Why am I not smart enough to figure out a schedule that would have me in the south of the U.S. between November and March? If I were really clever, I could refuse commissions and conferences in any clime above Latitude 32 during winter. But I won’t, because I love this music life way too much. It’s worth freezing my backside off for, any day.

They are very, very lovely people in Columbus, truly. But they are a cold people. And I am about to be a cold person. If you, too, would like to join me and The Lovely and Talented Cold People, click here and read about the NOW New Music Festival and how you can shiver right along side of some really great musicians and one very appreciative, if frosty, composer.

…click to listen:

…about the music

Occasionally explosive.

The last of the three articles I wrote this month for NewMusicBox posted this week. So many words have been erupting from me lately, in addition to all the usual musical notes, that I’m starting to wonder what’s in the water I’m drinking. Oh, wait, that was vodka… now I get it… Anyway, feel free to have a gander at
The Economy of Exposure. Disappointingly, no trench coats are involved.

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…about the music

Up, down, and all around.

More travel. More landings. All directions, literally and figuratively. Mostly quite good, and that which is not quite good is still quite compelling. Interpret as you will. I am looking in all directions. Inward is always the best, even if not always the most reliable.

My outward self, meanwhile, has not only been writing music like a good little composer, but also writing words about outward things regarding artists’ experiences in the world, now that the new digital paradigm is reality. For all that I have failed to blog on this page this month, I have made up for in two recent essays for the wonderful online magazine NewMusicBox. Whether you are a musician or not, you may enjoy the reads: As Important as the Printing Press: Net Neutrality and Artists’ Freedom, and What I Learned About My Tiny Business From Paramount Pictures. NewMusicBox will be publishing another, possibly more significant, and hopefully even more controversial piece (ooh!) this coming week. Stay tuned: I’ll post the link here.

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…about the music

Interpettzo.

Ok, snapped with my iPhone in low light, but still, Smudge and Moses, butt to butt, seem to appropriately represent “out with the old and in with the new.” Like a gravity-defying circus act atop my heated kitchen floor, they remind me that cuteness can still survive in a topsy-turvy world.

Here’s to a new decade, filled with soft fur and the ability to blissfully ignore any rind shavings and vegetable trimmings that may unexpectedly fall on your head from life’s countertop!

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…about the music

Finding out. And in.

Everyone has their own reaction to the end of the year. Inescapable holidays. Unstoppable chronology. Opportunities gained, and others lost. Family, friends, loneliness, or just peaceful solitude taken at home, while the rest of society swirls in a mad dash of annual tradition. I start and stop with Thanksgiving; beyond that, no other holiday captures my time or heart. I count myself among many who view Christmas with a cynic’s raised eyebrow (I’d say jaundiced eye, but mine remain brown and my besotted liver still functions remarkably well, thank you very… hic!… much). Some people truly adore their families and anticipate the yearly holiday gatherings with delight. For others, the odd discomfort of being artificially thrown into a food-infused petri dish with people simply due to a shared a strand or two of DNA, speaks only to the absurdity of social expectations.

While I have little emotion for what December represents, I do love January. I love the new year. I have a birthday soon after. I love getting older, racking up more experience, filling my life with more emotions and people and musical discoveries and mistakes and joys. It’s all real and it’s all vibrant and passionate. Each New Year’s is my time to hope and envision and dream and plan. And and and. There is always more that tugs and invites.

I hate tax time because I resent having to look backward. Even in a year that’s gone reasonably well, my gaze turns to flaws and errors and misjudgments and disappointments. You’d think the start of another year would create the same uneasiness in me, but instead, it’s always been filled with light and happy anticipation. I guess I’m blessed with either good brain chemistry, or the daftness of being the local village idiot. Either way, it’s rather pleasant.

I see this time of year as a series of paths and windows. Directional choices made and yet to be determined, and views to external and interior landscapes defined by my heart and its frailties. This is what has meaning to me. To the rest of the commercialized, media-driven fakery, the President and CEO of Notes From the Kelp, Inc. says: Bah! Humblog!

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Jam. No peanut butter.

I admit that I have a tougher time making time for certain things when my time is being spent in places other than the place I spend most of my time when I’m home: my studio. For as much as I get done in several realms at once, there is always much more that I want to do that just follows me around from city to city, waiting patiently for my attention like a deranged stalker, while my internal taskmistress takes care of nagging me mercilessly. In general, we all agree, there is never enough time. Even though we are the ones supposedly in charge of making time for what we need and want to do.

So from time to time there forms a logjam of many diverse things needing to be done, and of course one triages activity choices and responses based on urgency and abject fear that were one not to accomplish Said Seemingly Important Task within an imaginary, self-deluded time period, well then, the Earth would cease to spin on its axis and, most importantly… we would not be loved. Perish the thought.

So here I sit in Manhattan, on an island merely half the size of the one on which my studio sits, and having taken momentary refuge from the cold and wind, I am attempting to pry apart an impressively expanding logjam of work-and-life-related things. And one of those things is right here in Kelpville, where my heart is, despite my body being elsewhere. I offer this friendly note to tell you that my hands are itching to hold a camera in front of a scene containing no buildings, cars, traffic lights or cement. And when they do later this month, you’ll be the first to know. All in due time. Minneapolis, and then Chicago, await!

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…about the music

Rain croak.

The embossed lettering atop my trash can instructs, “para que no entren los animales… lock the darn lid.” (my translation). Sure, the clever handles prevent raccoons and deer from enjoying the leftovers, but there is no stopping the renegade Pacific Tree frogs, who don’t read Spanish.

My studio window is wide open on this quiet, mild, grey Sunday, and I’m surrounded by the delightful and insistent commentary of many little frogs as I type this. They love this weather. Or maybe they despise it, and are whining. I can’t tell because I haven’t signed up for the Berlitz course in Amphibianese. Against a hazy, shifting ceiling, the grass and the trees are green, and remain so throughout the winter. Even in winter, it rarely looks bleak here because of two things: the perpetual verdant landscape, and the fact that ninety percent of the time, even our grey weather offers fluffy, three-dimensional clouds in varying hues, giving visual depth and movement to the sky. It really is quite poetic. The frogs provide the text. I keep my window open, to steal the music.

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…about the music

Moving. Always.

Yes, home again. After 17 days on the road. In the air, in hotels, in meetings, in rehearsals, in concert halls, in lecture halls, in receptions, in universities, in homes and apartments, in museums, in trains and cars and ferries and buses and taxicabs, in restaurants and bars and coffee houses and clubs, in elevators and up and down stairs and escalators and sidewalks and sometimes wondering where the heck I was going but all-times having a great time getting there and back.

Next week I begin another trip. Five cities. Six planes. Eighteen days.
I will be looking up at trees for partridges.