Thing-a-day.com

more delicious ambiguity

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Today I learned a bit about playing the accordion, and made some music.  It was pretty simple to pick up, since I can already play the piano, guitar, clarinet, and know music theory.  The only downside is that it’s kind of heavy.  I practiced the basic oom-pa-pa bass today and got that down, tomorrow I’ll learn some other things.  But I could probably do the oom-pa-pa bass all day, haha.

Made this flyer in Fireworks in 5 minutes.

February 20th
Because this road is all you’ll ever have…

I burned cds for my car!

That right thur is my playlist. It shows my wonderfully eccentric music taste, huzzah. Yes, you do see all sorts of bad pop in there. Mmmm bad pop.

And on a random sidenote, if you have the song “Edge of Seventeen” by Stevie Nicks, play the beginning before she starts to sing. Just listen to it. Listen to it. KEEP LISTENING. …. DOESN’T IT SOUND EXACTLY LIKE DESTINY’S CHILD “BOOTYLICIOUS”?! You have no idea how much this threw me. Sitting in my car. All of a sudden this comes on and I’m sitting there wtf’ing all over the place, and then I’m like oh, good it’s just stevie nicks…. I was a little worried…

ALSO I would like to take this time to promote my friend, Tara Mackey, who is on that playlist there. She’s currently working on her first demo to send off to record companies, and she has an amazing voice. She’s also highly talented - actively pursuing photography, drawing, modeling, and writing, you know, as hobbies. Because she’s crazy. Crazy, loveable Tara. Anyway, you should check out her webpage for further information about her artistic endeavors and to hear her songs (it’s worth it I promise) that she wrote herself. Go here, please. She can also be found at: her livejournal.

Some musician friends of ours are scheduled to play a gig in a suburban Philadelphia pub tomorrow evening, and we are planning on being there. HOWEVER, the forecast is calling for snow, beginning in the wee hours and continuing throughout the day, turning to what is euphemistically called a “wintry mix” [read:  ice]. If we are unable to make the gig, it will probably be some time until we see them again, as they are flying back to LA on Saturday. So, with apologies to the children’s skipping rhyme, here’s today’s haiku:

Snow, snow, stay away,

Come again some other day.

Marna wants to play!!!

I’ve been fearing my studio for far too long - with no good reason. It’s a nice studio. And I like making music.

So here it is - unpolished so I could finish within the time allotment for a “thing-a-day”: Urban Myths (4:16). It’s indirectly inspired by The Wire, an HBO series I’ve been watching on and off the past few weeks.

 Be gentle.

Saw Keith Urban in concert on Feb. 14 and he sooooo ROCKED!!! It was my first ever KU concert and it was a great way to spend Valentine’s Day!! here is a pic ~

Saturday I went to the opera to see Handel’s Rodelinda.

Yesterday I edited a bunch of photos and here are a couple of them:

I made this flyer for our show on Feb.29. Got inspired by an online chat about ewoks. Whats not to love? I mean really.

Check out the music at http://www.ponchosfromperu.com 

Was away for the weekend, again without computer access, attending the MidWinter Scottish and Irish Festival in Valley Forge, PA. Fantastic gathering of Celtic bands, both traditional and rock, Celtic vendors, and friends from near and far. Thought I would have time to at least write an entry each day and post them today–I didn’t. Too much partying, too little sleep. Exhaustion has now set in, but happy exhaustion nonetheless.

Friends from near and far,

Music brings us together.

Fondness keeps us close.

Another indulging weekend started with going dancing with my girlfriends (guilty pleasure for late nite quesadilla afterwards).

Going to a reading by a Japanese author, which was quite inspiring.

Exploring a wine bar in my neighbourhood on my own.

Going to a friend’s b-day party. 

Brunch with a good friend of mine.

Listening to a Russian symphony (Rachmaninov was a goose-bumping experience).

Nice Italian at-home dinner with close friends.

A sunny day today.

What could I ask more?

And yet, tomorrow, I’ve got plans to have a quality time with myself.

I am like an efficient biofuel machine that knows how to recharge itself with something it has within. Not from outside source.

Yes, it is within me: Happiness.

Play Here

Sadly today I’ve been forced to cheat. I made this thing a while ago, but it’s the end of the day and I don’t have time to make anything new, so it will have to do. Enjoy making songs with my song maker.

I’m coming to this whole thing terribly late, but I feel that’s a terrible reason for just giving up on the whole project, so! Here I am.

I’m a terrific fan of super-short vignettes, and read a lot of them, so I feel like that’s a good place to start to get the old machinery cranking.

Something from today:

He loved watching her up on that pedestal, and he knew she loved being watched. Far from being completely carried away by her momentum of her magic wand, she was the embodiment of an ideal conductor: omniscient, all-seeing and all-knowing both within her orchestra and without it. She saw and heard her first chair violinist tremble a little from too much caffeine before going on and her third chair bassoon’s frequent breaths because of his asthma and the entire percussion section completely high, they said they played better that way, and the audience’s breath behind her rising and falling like the tide with each sweep of her arms and the magic she drew forth from the chorus of voices before her. She detested these metaphors; tucked into her couch afterward, feet neatly curled up beneath her, she laughed at the notion of an audience who might try to sum up her performance with a few measly adjectives. It was nothing, she would tell him, and everything; it was like trying to sum up the complexity of a master performance of Hamlet by blanketing it with a word like “magical”. There was no describing her genius, she yawned; only adulation would indicate that a spectator had come anywhere close to understanding what she did.

Yet another drum machine composition, inspired by the motorik beats of 1970s German bands like Kraftwerk, Neu!, Can, and Faust. Motorik means “motor skill” and refers to the driving, propulsive quality of this kind of beat, which was originally inspired by high-speed driving on the German Autobahn highway system.

This one has a kind of futuristic, upbeat quality that makes me think of driving the Pacific Coast Highway in the morning sun.

The MP3 is here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?0y3tijcd035

I’ve been looking at these music Things as sketches, which will provide ideas for future projects that I can map out and develop over time. As such, they are rough and full of glitches, but contain kernels of usable ideas. I hope you dig them.

I’m behind, but I’m still bound and determined to catch up.  I’ve been spending at least four hours per day in the library for the past 2 weeks doing homework and research.

My running joke right now is that I study for a couple of hours and then I take a break by doing some research.  *headdesk*

Technically this was for an assignment, but the version I posted is the part that I continued to tweak after I achieved the objectives for the assignment.  :) 

Instead of my usual computery experiments that I’ve produced for thing-a-day, I’ve decided to share something a little different. A very short guitar instrumental that I recored today:

Untitled.mp3 (Right click + “Save as…” to download).

Enjoy!

The Lincolnshire Poacher + Black Flag, interviewed + John Bonham + Um Jammer Lammy’s sweet heavy gtr = PURE AUDIO MAYHEM.

A collage/remix piece. Short, full of grace, pulling pillows over yr face. Not for the ill-at-ease. I call it 39715.

For reasons which will become clear as you listen.

The MP3 is here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?esfhtjdlbtg

Update: On Feb. 14, a MetaFilter contributor posted a link to the very John Bonham outtakes (from the In Through The Out Door sessions, 1979) that I exploited to make this tune. They’ve been floating around the Interweb for at least a couple of years now, and they’ve been sitting on my laptop’s hard drive in a RAR file for well over a year, just waiting to be used for something cool. I’d previously played with snippets of one of the outtakes in Sept. 2006, layering them over a tune (Huge) from the Amplifier Worship album by Japanese noise-rockers Boris. But I never finished that tune and it was a casualty of a hard drive crash last year. Oh well.

So anyway, this Thing is completely unrelated to that MeFi post, but the synchronicity is interesting.

No pictures today!  Instead,  I had a really fun evening jamming with some great musicians.  A friend of mine got involved putting on some U2charists - the Anglican Eucharist with the music of U2 - and apparently they’re being done all over southern Vancouver Island, 10 in all, to bring awareness to the 10 mandates set out by the UN to reduce poverty, fight AIDS, etc.  Ok, that sounds very idealistic, but I’m mostly doing it to help my friend out.  It’s fun to actually pick up my bass again and play some music with some great musicians, and if doing that helps bring awareness of very real issues to people, well, I’m happy to do that.

Tonight I made a Valentine’s Mix CD:

• Just What I Needed - The Cars
• Mushaboom - Feist
• This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) - Talking Heads
• Here Comes My Baby - Cat Stevens
• I’m The Man Who Loves You - Wilco
• You’re The Ocean - Teitur
• Strange And Beautiful (I’ll Put a Spell On You)  -  Aqualung
• Lover’s Spit - Broken Social Scene
• Love And Some Verses
• Somethig In The Way She Moves - James Taylor
• You On My Mind In My Sleep - Richard Ashcroft
• High - The Cure
• Brand New Colony - The Postal Service

Tonight I started out doodling with no direction whatsoever….

Then I got to thinking about my Thing-A-Day partner Joonbugg (who IS participating and participating well, she just doesn’t post as often as me) and did this for her…

“Never was a cornflake girl, I hung out with the raisin girls…”
It’s a reference to the Tori Amos song “Cornflake Girl”. I may not have got the last part of the lyric right (she pronounces things funny) but you get my drift.

I decided illustrating song lyrics might be fun, so I went to the next one that popped in mind…

This next one is posted in thumbnail format because it has a tiny amount of female nudity, and I am a little unsure of the TAD terms & rules. I don’t wanna get kicked off the blog.

“She liked to keep her body clean, clean… She thought the world to be quite obscene”
From “Oedipus” by Regina Spektor.

And the last one, also in thumbnail format because it features a little male anatomy lesson that everyone who’s ever watched Shin Chan on Adult Swim knows… Please be forewarned before you click, lest you be offended by Mister Happy…

“To be a man you must have honor, honor and a penis.”

Well you can pretty much see every object in the drawing’s thumbnail anyway. Oops! Oh well, if you’re offended by the tiny THUMBNAIL weewee, you may just need to lighten up some.  SRSLY.

(You can tell I was a little shy about drawing the penis, I didn’t bear down with the Ebony pencil near as much as the rest of the sketch. I’m such a shy little girl sometimes. Nevermind that I’m almost 25 and married. LOL.)