Just a fresh reminder that Tom Lehrer stands among the great artists of all time for, among other things, relinquishing copyright to his life’s work as he nears the end of his time here rather than having his clutching, wealth-hoarding estate or some atrocious corporate creeps hold his “intellectual property” behind a locked door to generate never-ending revenue as long as possible rather than to give his work to the culture that helped him create it. So McCartney, Springsteen, Dylan and all the other money-grubbing famemonsters sell their catalogs to monstrous LLCs to make the pile of obscene wealth they sleep on each night a few feet taller, while better humans give back. The guy’s a mensch, and his music is fun.
Visit his site to download his wonderful work, and share some the generosity:
One of the things I truly lament about the social-mediafication of the internet is how I’m stuck looking at an endless thread of posts about political creeps, bible-waving hysterics, celebrities I’ve never heard of and care even less about, and other things that have no direct impact on my life that I can do anything about, and that all that AI horsepower producing billowing clouds of atmospheric carbon in competition with digital mining for moronic fake money can’t seem to recognize the things I *do* care about (probably because few of them result in online purchases), and it’s because of this that I only just found out this week that one of my all-time favorite composers, Stephen Scott, died a year ago.
I’ll share this video to illustrate his amazing, lush, and satisfying work (as well as the craftsmanship and astonishing precision of the people in his ensemble), but will it get the same traction as me bewailing or ironically demeaning some random crime of taste? I post videos and links to amazing things I love all the time and they get zero traction, because the AI sees they don’t get the endless arguments that descend into the mudpits of prog and kitchen appliances and pulls them out of everyone’s feeds.
Stephen Scott was amazing and I wish more people knew his work, and even further, I wish there was more work to come, but his catalog is closed now, and that’s terribly sad. I’d have liked to meet the guy, if for no other reason than to say “thanks for the inspiration and all the time I’ve escaped from the world into your musical realm.”
Was inspired by the beautiful weather yesterday and sat on the porch to edit some recent material into a little collection under my musical pseudonym on Bandcamp, appropriately titled I Skugga, which is Swedish for “in the shade,” since I’ve been revisiting my college Swedish lessons during the pandemic. It’s an abstract mixtape of recent ambient experiments and field recordings.
It’s priced from 0 to pay-what-you-will, but I’m content with zero.
I was delighted to be invited to perform once more at the North-East Electro-Music Festival held at the Center for the Arts in Homer, NY. It’s a three-day festival of electronic and electro-acoustic music that brings together some of my favorite artists in the field for a diverse selection of genres and instrumentation. This was my sixth performance at one of these events, created by the Electro-Music community, now celebrating fifteen years of bringing artists and audiences together, often in a diffuse way in which players play, coalesce, and recombine into both planned and spontaneous ensembles that challenge and engage.
The event includes performances, unstructured time to just gather with other performers and composers and talk shop, and a variety of workshops ranging from the technical to the historical and instructional. We were lucky this year to have Bill Vencil, known on Youtube as Chords of Orion, with us to perform, share his technique, and conduct a great session on how to get established as a performer on Youtube.
There’s a openness and forgiving quality to audiences at EM Fests that really push a person to open up more, and experiment more, and to try new ideas and modes on an audience that is both one of the smartest and most forgiving in the field, and I’ve been gradually drifting from doing tightly scripted, fully orchestrated combinations of stories and live, improvised soundtracks that are my best approximation of what you’d get if stand-up comedy and digital jazz got together and made a noisy, chatty baby on stage. This year, I took on unresolved plotlines, half-told tales, and ruminations uncertainty and endings.
For my set, I performed under my Kantoendrato monicker, live-scoring a brief story about my youthful experience of things electrical, “Touch the wire.”
I’ll be playing a gig in my ambient mode, as Kantoendrato, on Saturday, March 23, in Pittsburgh, PA. The details are as follows:
WHAT
A meet-up & performance event for electronic music and modular synthesizer enthusiasts, featuring manufacturer demos, live performances, hands-on wiggling, and more! Admission is free, however donations to the The Western Pennsylvania Center for the Performing Arts Academy (a non-profit organization) will be gladly accepted. We understand that starving artists and students are especially strapped for cash.
Played a nice little ambient set last night at the Electric Maid, under my Kantoendrato monicker as a part of the ongoing performance series curated by Logan Mitchell of the Baltimore Synth DIY group. It’s minimal and atmospheric.
I’ll be performing as a part of the wonderful Electro-Music Northeast Festival in Homer, NY, on 9 September 2017 (I’m in the 4:20 PM slot on the second stage). The festival is a two-day coming-together of fantastic players, composers, video artists, experimentalists, and other electro-acoustic explorers, and I’m honored to be participating for my fifth year with the group. It’s an absolute bargain for the diversity and density of work on tap, and there are seminars and a synthesizer petting zoo to get your hands on the greatest and latest gear in the field.
For years, the Electro-Music festival was held in the Catskill region of Upstate, NY.
For the first ever Northeastern Electro-Music Festival, a new location has been discovered at the Center for the Arts in Homer, NY. This year’s gathering features two full days of innovative electronic music concerts, seminars, workshops, demonstrations, jam sessions, video artists, and a mini swap-meet.
There will be a hands-on “Synthesizer Petting Zoo,” with various rare and odd synthesizers, drum machines, and other pieces of electronic music gear you hadn’t known existed.
Please bring your own headphones for the Petting Zoo, otherwise a community set of headphones will be made available; iPhone/iPod headsets work well, too.
I’ll be performing a piece for spoken word and electronics on Sunday, 6 August 2017 at 2:30 PM as part of the 13th Annual Electro-Music Festival at the Irving Theater in Indianapolis, Indiana [directions]. The entire weekend is a long-form celebration of electronic, electro-acoustic, and experimental music that runs the alphabetic gamut from the abrasively new to the zestfully soothing, with a three-day bill jam-packed with amazing musicians I’ve had the pleasure to work with and otherwise revel in for several years now. I’m bringing my combination of left-field storytelling and digital atmospherics to the party, and I get to spend the rest of the time enjoying and educating myself in how it’s done.
All ages show – tickets at the door Weekend pass $25, or by day: Friday $10, Saturday $15, Sunday $12
