He's picks me up from St. Pancras St. Station, thick accent, which I know is not POSH but at the same time it's an accent I cannot exactly place. I'm trying to figure out where I am going, and he and I get to talking. "Where are you from?" he asks. "Brooklyn" I say. "I'm from Brooklyn" I'm from Ohio originally but..
…ah yes, Brooklyn, saying Brooklyn always opens the doors, especially with the toughs, which he is one. He grew up in the streets of London in a rough area. Dad absent, it was just him and his mum. He tells me that he and his mates were young thugs smoking joints at 10 years old on their way to school. They all got nicked plenty he says, which I finally figure out means getting caught and put in jail. He tells me that he personally never went in for very long, but for his mates it was like a school vacation with all their friends present. In fact, inside it was allot easier to get "the works" than on the outside.
As an adult, there came a moment where it seemed like leaving was a very good idea (he didn't elaborate), so he did. He, his wife and his three girls now live in a very peaceful village about 50 miles outside the city. It takes him 50-60 minutes to drive in to work. "It used to be I would step outside my door and before I started my car, I'd pick up a fare and I would be working!" He misses living in London.
It drove him crazy when he first moved to the village. "It was so quiet there! There where all these people going to church on Sunday! I thought, FUCK, this is the biggest mistake of my life!"
Then his daughters started speaking like the natives. "My daughter started saying "Loik" you know "like" but with an "o" in it. I say to her..what are you doing? why are you talking like these people?!..but THEN I realize -what the hell am I doing?! I don't want them to grow up like me! "
Really, he's trying to fit in. "My mother she was a proper kind woman, she hadn't even heard curse words until my brother and I brought them home. The other day I was in a conversation and I said "flipping' and my wife was like "flipping? what the hell is flipping?" and I say I"M TRYING HERE!"
He realizes he never saw any of the tourist attractions while actually living in London. "My daughters suddenly go "hey why didn't we ever see the London Eye?" after learning about it in school, so now I'm going down to London with the kids, to show them all the places I never went to see when I lived there."
His eldest daughter complained when they left the city that she didn't want ot go, but 6 months later the super of their old building got stuck with a needle that some junky had taped under the hand railing and then there was a gruesome murder, so then he asks her. "Do you want to go back now?" "No" She says. But the kids like they are from London, he tells me, "The littlest one says "I'm from London" I say you where 2 years old you don't remember, you are not from London! You talk like your from the country!" One of the daughters was having behavior problems in school but it all cleared up one they got out of the city schools and now she's an A student.
He misses London, he misses living in the city. "Cabbies know all the best places" he's says. But then he's says about the village, "It's quiet there I don't have stress and that's good. I have a picture of Big Ben in my study. I never noticed it before, but one day I was sitting there in the cab and I was looking at it and thought. What a beautiful building! Sometimes you have to leave a place to see these things!"
He said tells me he was going to end up likely in jail, I tell him I think he's traded it in for a better jail, one with three kids that drive him crazy and a wife and a peaceful life. We laugh allot. "I've got me a proper cockney accent" he says. My kid was having trouble with another kid in school and I told him to pop him..and then I thought NO NO what the fuck, I don't want him to grow up like me!"
You know buddy, those kids are going to be ok if they grow up like you.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
Berlin Day 1
My first day in Berlin and the jet lag feels like a brick in my head. I wander to Maur park, which is at the end of the Oderberger Strasse (street) where I am staying, and make my way up a path to a long wall covered in graffitti. I watch young guys with spray paint create some truely marvelous tags. A team of three work their three pieces in a very similar wild style with a European touch -nice snakey lines that dart in and out of the tag like the trails of giant mosquitos. There is a steam punk tag that makes me grin. I stand listening to the multiple hiss of the aerosol and the clack clack clack of the ball bearing in the cans, suddenly I realize I am also hearing a Yan Tierson tune being played on an out-of-tune piano in the distance. I wander down the hill. I find a piano painted as John Lennon. There are six pianos in the park. There is a young man sitting at one playing a Radio Head tune. There is a girl sitting on a piano playing it with her feet. I find fliers on top of the pianos advertising a solo piano festival coming in August.
Exausted and hungry I find a place to stand near the above ground rail system to have a brautwerst chips and beer.
I realize that the knowledge that the heaviness of my decision to leave my apartment in Brooklyn has not hit me yet.
Elyas arrives home and we talk about the music he's working on. Mellisa makes me an incredible rasberry smoothie, we go out for beers in the evening and talk about how the U.S. has sold it's own people out to an incredible degree. How the citizen of the U.S. is the corporation and the populace are goats to be milked. How every empire was built on slavery. Someone mentions that the Chinese, the worlds 2nd largest economy has enslaved their own population for economic devleopment and how the U.S. benefits from that like second hand smoke.
The street Elyas lives on has been torn up, it's become trendy, there is a "German Garment" pop-up store. They tore out trees and they are putting in parking meeters. There is a jack hammer outside the window in the morning. The motor for the jack hammer hums a tone, when the jack hammer starts up, the pitch goes down a perfect 5th, like Beethoven's 5th.
Exausted and hungry I find a place to stand near the above ground rail system to have a brautwerst chips and beer.
I realize that the knowledge that the heaviness of my decision to leave my apartment in Brooklyn has not hit me yet.
Elyas arrives home and we talk about the music he's working on. Mellisa makes me an incredible rasberry smoothie, we go out for beers in the evening and talk about how the U.S. has sold it's own people out to an incredible degree. How the citizen of the U.S. is the corporation and the populace are goats to be milked. How every empire was built on slavery. Someone mentions that the Chinese, the worlds 2nd largest economy has enslaved their own population for economic devleopment and how the U.S. benefits from that like second hand smoke.
The street Elyas lives on has been torn up, it's become trendy, there is a "German Garment" pop-up store. They tore out trees and they are putting in parking meeters. There is a jack hammer outside the window in the morning. The motor for the jack hammer hums a tone, when the jack hammer starts up, the pitch goes down a perfect 5th, like Beethoven's 5th.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Recording session in Paris for Henry Darger exhibit with Philippe Solal from the Gotan Project
Recording session in Paris for Henry Darger exhibit with Philippe Solal from the Gotan Project
http://spillspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/darger1.jpg
Feloche's (Felix) producer at Ya Basta! records is Philippe Cohen Solal, composer for the Gotan Project which is a very big tango-electronica act here in Europe. Feloche tells me that Philippe has a session he wants me to come in on, I look on his computer screen and start to see the twisted imagery of Henry Darger. Philippe is getting different musicians together, incuding Calexico, to write music to be played during the new touring exhibit of Darger's work.
It turns out that Philippe was in NYC and saw a Darger piece at the American Folk Art Museum and was blown away. Then for some reason, he had business in Chicago a couple of days later with the very woman same woman who had been Dargers landlady and now had his life's work. She and her husband owned the building that had Darger lived in. They had let him live there for free. He was a local character in an old WW2 coat, digging in the trash. The new yuppies in the area thought he looked homeless and tried to get him kicked out of the hood. What they didn't know was that he was digging in the trash for images. He was writing and illustrating a 1500 page tome featuring little girls in a fantasy world engaging in bloody battles with adults.
Darger's tome could have been lost in the trash except the husband was a Bauhaus school designer who was amazed to find Henry's work while cleaning out the apartment. Henry had gotten to the point where he couldn't take care of himself and was in a home. The bed in the apartment was covered with years of illustrations, Henry had been sleeping sitting in a chair for 20 years.
I used almost every sound making device I had, to pull and pop texture and commentary into and onto the music Phillippe had written. It was an extremely successful recording session, recorded with my effected mic and a stereo pair ala Joe "Bass" Dejarnette that gave the whole thing a very dimensional sound in movement. I did a little wind. "That is like the wind in Chicago!" Phiippe tells me. He wants wind? I gave him wind that pulsed with the music tuning itself subtly up the scale as the phrase played. Roller chimes, canister music boxes, obnoxiophone, I kept discovering new things, the play-back was magic.
France is treating me very we
http://spillspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/darger1.jpg
Feloche's (Felix) producer at Ya Basta! records is Philippe Cohen Solal, composer for the Gotan Project which is a very big tango-electronica act here in Europe. Feloche tells me that Philippe has a session he wants me to come in on, I look on his computer screen and start to see the twisted imagery of Henry Darger. Philippe is getting different musicians together, incuding Calexico, to write music to be played during the new touring exhibit of Darger's work.
It turns out that Philippe was in NYC and saw a Darger piece at the American Folk Art Museum and was blown away. Then for some reason, he had business in Chicago a couple of days later with the very woman same woman who had been Dargers landlady and now had his life's work. She and her husband owned the building that had Darger lived in. They had let him live there for free. He was a local character in an old WW2 coat, digging in the trash. The new yuppies in the area thought he looked homeless and tried to get him kicked out of the hood. What they didn't know was that he was digging in the trash for images. He was writing and illustrating a 1500 page tome featuring little girls in a fantasy world engaging in bloody battles with adults.
Darger's tome could have been lost in the trash except the husband was a Bauhaus school designer who was amazed to find Henry's work while cleaning out the apartment. Henry had gotten to the point where he couldn't take care of himself and was in a home. The bed in the apartment was covered with years of illustrations, Henry had been sleeping sitting in a chair for 20 years.
I used almost every sound making device I had, to pull and pop texture and commentary into and onto the music Phillippe had written. It was an extremely successful recording session, recorded with my effected mic and a stereo pair ala Joe "Bass" Dejarnette that gave the whole thing a very dimensional sound in movement. I did a little wind. "That is like the wind in Chicago!" Phiippe tells me. He wants wind? I gave him wind that pulsed with the music tuning itself subtly up the scale as the phrase played. Roller chimes, canister music boxes, obnoxiophone, I kept discovering new things, the play-back was magic.
France is treating me very we
Sunday, February 28, 2010
I fuck and fight WITH nyc. -my new album, the people involved, NYC and love.
"new york is impossibly handsome
impossibly bright
but his hands are too busy
his shirts are too shiny and tight
on fridays he dances to metronomes
so he can keep counting
all night all night all night" -Dayna Kurtz
My album is almost done. After 2.5 years, 15 thousand dollars (seriously, I know!), one important relationship, recording certain compositions then rejecting them and then recording them again, working with Joe Bass on exactly HOW to capture the sounds over a 3 year period, I am of course now exhausted yet energized, broke and in debt, heart broken but elated, but.....
Jeff Lipton of Peerless Mastering is mastering "Sonic New York". He's the guy who mastered 69 Love Songs for Magnetic Fields and has worked with them allot. He is seriously brilliant. I thought the mastering was done but there is a touch to much high end in the sound for my taste so he is going to have another go at it at the end of next week. This process is slow and painful but good. Mastering is still a bit of mystic art to me but I am being obsessive that this whole thing be a masterpiece. Seriously. You will hear this album and you will think-this is one of the most intense and beautiful things I have ever heard.
Evan Rosen, who is a really really talented young designer, and I are going back and forth on the cover art and the design. His work for the cover is really spot on and absolutely captures the feeling of seeing the mythic city from Brooklyn. Everyone I've been showing it to loves it. He went ahead and made another deeper concept version which I didn't like for this project as much but had great ideas in it. I am finding that allot of peoples initial instincts are right. The way the engineers first hear the mix before they overly tweak is right.
This of course being said by a guy is tweaking allot himself but...I have been right so far. I kow what makes my work read, even if I am discovering some of that as I go.
The design is a work of art, it featuring Evan's work and photos by my father. You will see. I am even considering NOT putting a bar code on it because really, what is the point these days? When will I be selling this retail? If it gets picked up by a label after the first 1000 copies then they can deal with it. I am requesting they not shrink wrap it, I will sign every copy.
I don't want this to be a throw away object. I want the document that is this work to seem like a small piece of wonder in your hands and incredible to your ears.
This album was created because sound engineer Joe Bass Dejarnette and I lived in a house together for 3 years and he was the first person to figure out how to capture my sound by putting a dry stereo pair of mice acoustically near my mouth while recording and putting maybe 5 percent into the recorded sound against the mics. He got this trick from something they used to do with Jimmy Hendrix's guitar.
Brilliant, it somehow made all my crazy sounds present and real. We had to learn to record human beat box (Adam Matta!) and work with tuba (Oren Marshall and Don Godwin), we worked with my two favorite singers in the U.S. Aimee Curl and Rhiannon Giddens from the Carolina Chocolate Drops. I also worked with Don Godwin on some of the recording and on mixing. On "Dreamland" (which will be my bonified summertime regional NYC hit) Sammy Rubin from Project Jenny Project Jan did the production, he was VERY VERY generous with his time and gave me the gift of his amazing artistic sense of arrangement.
Sarah Alden and Kerthy Fix were the albums constant critics and could hear the mixes with fresh ears. Meeta Gawande invested the initial amount that got the project started, Larisa Fuchs lent me money when I had to get my teeth fixed and all my money was going into the record, my Kickstarter friends and fans were very very important, and Jim and Sandy Shirey pitched in when I absolutely needed it and of course my composition gigs and touring gigs paid for it. My former partner for much of the creation of this album Lizzie Wort was a constant inspiration and encouraging force. She is in the music.
The album will be done just in time for tour with Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley (Jason told me "YOU HAVE TO HAVE THIS DONE BY TOUR!" and offered to put up the money and put it on his label to get it printed. He really supports me in a lovely way) and Amanda of course is the only artist at her level of success to go. "I know what to do with this guy! I'll put him onstage to rock the shit out of the audience." I am very thankful for Amanda. I am also thankful for programmer Bill Bragen, party maven Larisa Fuchs and listings czar Jeff Stark who have supported me during my time here in NYC. Shit I gotta stop thanking people or I'll never get to the end of this note.
This album will have cost 15K to 16K to make after the first printing and with the website, maybe more. Fucking what the fuck. How did that happen? Well I flew in a tuba player from London and then the airline charged him $700 to get his tuba back to the UK for starters, I'm not kidding. This is ALLOT of money for a fairly unknown artist who chose the lucrative profession of avant-garde circus composer.
...What have I made? Well in the end you have to please yourself. I have made an album that if I discovered, not being me, that would make me fall in love, fall in love with the music and with the city the album is about and the people performing on it. I have made an album that would make me jealous of it's raw innovation. SONIC NEW YORK is surprising and beautiful and very very dirty and real.
So there you go. I am at a new point of life and this album, this work, this group of 17 compositions about and inspired by New Rock City is the baby I'm birthing at the end of it.
In the end, this whole thing, living in New York City, struggling to make a living doing something that has a limited commercial appeal. Kissing a lover on tope of a building, eating at Punjabi's amid turbaned Taxi cab drivers while listening to Banghra for first time, having long conversations with incredibly vibrant complex friends, walking into the sea with The Hungry March Band at the end of the Mermaid Parade. eating in the covered mall on Arthur Avenue, the honor of knowing so many honest and ferociously talented people...this whole New York thing has been about love. It's a fucking act of love.
I don't "fuck and fight in New York City" I fuck and fight WITH New York City!
I know am lucky in this life. I know that. I know I am a bit of an uncompromising crazy fucker about what I chose to do in life and how I chose to do it. I think it has made my life harder in some ways and easier in others. I don't give a shit about certain things that if I gave a shit about would help my career (seriously to a fault). I just do what I want and by some fucking miracle keep landing on my feet.
So, right now at 5.55 in the morning on an insomniatic Sunday morning I love you all. I really do, I mean everybody. I love this city, as much as I hate the bitch, and as likely as I am likely to leave it soon-I love New York.
Cheers,
Skip
impossibly bright
but his hands are too busy
his shirts are too shiny and tight
on fridays he dances to metronomes
so he can keep counting
all night all night all night" -Dayna Kurtz
My album is almost done. After 2.5 years, 15 thousand dollars (seriously, I know!), one important relationship, recording certain compositions then rejecting them and then recording them again, working with Joe Bass on exactly HOW to capture the sounds over a 3 year period, I am of course now exhausted yet energized, broke and in debt, heart broken but elated, but.....
Jeff Lipton of Peerless Mastering is mastering "Sonic New York". He's the guy who mastered 69 Love Songs for Magnetic Fields and has worked with them allot. He is seriously brilliant. I thought the mastering was done but there is a touch to much high end in the sound for my taste so he is going to have another go at it at the end of next week. This process is slow and painful but good. Mastering is still a bit of mystic art to me but I am being obsessive that this whole thing be a masterpiece. Seriously. You will hear this album and you will think-this is one of the most intense and beautiful things I have ever heard.
Evan Rosen, who is a really really talented young designer, and I are going back and forth on the cover art and the design. His work for the cover is really spot on and absolutely captures the feeling of seeing the mythic city from Brooklyn. Everyone I've been showing it to loves it. He went ahead and made another deeper concept version which I didn't like for this project as much but had great ideas in it. I am finding that allot of peoples initial instincts are right. The way the engineers first hear the mix before they overly tweak is right.
This of course being said by a guy is tweaking allot himself but...I have been right so far. I kow what makes my work read, even if I am discovering some of that as I go.
The design is a work of art, it featuring Evan's work and photos by my father. You will see. I am even considering NOT putting a bar code on it because really, what is the point these days? When will I be selling this retail? If it gets picked up by a label after the first 1000 copies then they can deal with it. I am requesting they not shrink wrap it, I will sign every copy.
I don't want this to be a throw away object. I want the document that is this work to seem like a small piece of wonder in your hands and incredible to your ears.
This album was created because sound engineer Joe Bass Dejarnette and I lived in a house together for 3 years and he was the first person to figure out how to capture my sound by putting a dry stereo pair of mice acoustically near my mouth while recording and putting maybe 5 percent into the recorded sound against the mics. He got this trick from something they used to do with Jimmy Hendrix's guitar.
Brilliant, it somehow made all my crazy sounds present and real. We had to learn to record human beat box (Adam Matta!) and work with tuba (Oren Marshall and Don Godwin), we worked with my two favorite singers in the U.S. Aimee Curl and Rhiannon Giddens from the Carolina Chocolate Drops. I also worked with Don Godwin on some of the recording and on mixing. On "Dreamland" (which will be my bonified summertime regional NYC hit) Sammy Rubin from Project Jenny Project Jan did the production, he was VERY VERY generous with his time and gave me the gift of his amazing artistic sense of arrangement.
Sarah Alden and Kerthy Fix were the albums constant critics and could hear the mixes with fresh ears. Meeta Gawande invested the initial amount that got the project started, Larisa Fuchs lent me money when I had to get my teeth fixed and all my money was going into the record, my Kickstarter friends and fans were very very important, and Jim and Sandy Shirey pitched in when I absolutely needed it and of course my composition gigs and touring gigs paid for it. My former partner for much of the creation of this album Lizzie Wort was a constant inspiration and encouraging force. She is in the music.
The album will be done just in time for tour with Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley (Jason told me "YOU HAVE TO HAVE THIS DONE BY TOUR!" and offered to put up the money and put it on his label to get it printed. He really supports me in a lovely way) and Amanda of course is the only artist at her level of success to go. "I know what to do with this guy! I'll put him onstage to rock the shit out of the audience." I am very thankful for Amanda. I am also thankful for programmer Bill Bragen, party maven Larisa Fuchs and listings czar Jeff Stark who have supported me during my time here in NYC. Shit I gotta stop thanking people or I'll never get to the end of this note.
This album will have cost 15K to 16K to make after the first printing and with the website, maybe more. Fucking what the fuck. How did that happen? Well I flew in a tuba player from London and then the airline charged him $700 to get his tuba back to the UK for starters, I'm not kidding. This is ALLOT of money for a fairly unknown artist who chose the lucrative profession of avant-garde circus composer.
...What have I made? Well in the end you have to please yourself. I have made an album that if I discovered, not being me, that would make me fall in love, fall in love with the music and with the city the album is about and the people performing on it. I have made an album that would make me jealous of it's raw innovation. SONIC NEW YORK is surprising and beautiful and very very dirty and real.
So there you go. I am at a new point of life and this album, this work, this group of 17 compositions about and inspired by New Rock City is the baby I'm birthing at the end of it.
In the end, this whole thing, living in New York City, struggling to make a living doing something that has a limited commercial appeal. Kissing a lover on tope of a building, eating at Punjabi's amid turbaned Taxi cab drivers while listening to Banghra for first time, having long conversations with incredibly vibrant complex friends, walking into the sea with The Hungry March Band at the end of the Mermaid Parade. eating in the covered mall on Arthur Avenue, the honor of knowing so many honest and ferociously talented people...this whole New York thing has been about love. It's a fucking act of love.
I don't "fuck and fight in New York City" I fuck and fight WITH New York City!
I know am lucky in this life. I know that. I know I am a bit of an uncompromising crazy fucker about what I chose to do in life and how I chose to do it. I think it has made my life harder in some ways and easier in others. I don't give a shit about certain things that if I gave a shit about would help my career (seriously to a fault). I just do what I want and by some fucking miracle keep landing on my feet.
So, right now at 5.55 in the morning on an insomniatic Sunday morning I love you all. I really do, I mean everybody. I love this city, as much as I hate the bitch, and as likely as I am likely to leave it soon-I love New York.
Cheers,
Skip
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