Fragments

Just got the score for 'Fragments/Frames' composed by Robert Seaback and it looks incredible!  The piece was commissioned by SEAMUS and will be premiered at the 2012 conference at Lawrence Conservatory on 2/9/2012 at 8:00pm. Rob came out to San Diego to work on the piece at the beginning of December and things are starting to sound really good.  It's always fun to play a good friends music but it's even more enjoyable when the piece is as well done as this one.  Can't wait for the gig.

This is a picture of Rob and Me playing a different piece about a year ago at Mills College

Brains 3rd Album 'UNLOADED' coming soon!!

Chris and I are really pumped about this new album.  Even though it's being released 4 months after our 2nd album 'Gristle and Skins'; a year and a half passed between the two recording sessions.

In that time our playing has changed so much both personally and as an ensemble.  In our other albums each track is a kind of self-contained composition where we consciously tried to show our diversity.  However, in this new album we worked on it more as a traditional composition, meaning that we had written music (gasp!) on stands and worked out how the music would flow ahead of time.  I personally feel that this allowed the music to reach a new level due to the fact that we were free to focus on much smaller aspects of the music because the larger structures were worked out prior to the performance.

As usual, the record will be available through edgetone records and will be out the third week of October.

Brains CD release 7/6/2011

We are super pumped to release our second album, 'Gristle and Skins' with edgetone records.

Subterranean Arthouse

2179 Bancroft Way

Berkeley, CA

8:30pm $10

It's going to be awesome.  You can also buy the album on itunes or any other online store if you can't make it out.

CEMEC CalArts

Played a great show with Brian Pear (drew ceccato, evan adams and carson whitley) at CalArts over the weekend for the CEMEC computer music festival.  Things went really well and I should have a video up shortly that apparently was streamed live from the CalArts website.  It's always exciting when you show up to a gig and they have the biggest pair of Meyer subwoofers you've ever seen sitting on the ground.  Some major woof and tweet action.

This coming Friday we play again at UCSD in a 32 channel blackbox.  Obviously very excited.

Teaser from an earlier performance....

L-R-G 2.0?

After rehearsing and playing L-R-G in Philadelphia for the Ars Nova Workshop gig, Archer Space (Nick Mellivoi + Dan Blacksberg) as well as myself realized how personalized this composition is for the musicians it was originally composed for (Roscoe Mitchell, George Lewis and Wadada Leo Smith).  The piece uses the familiarity of the players and their abilities as improvisers to compose in a free flowing style that is both strict and flexible at the same time.  The difficulty comes from the hyper personalized way in which the music is composed and gets even harder when an outsider tries to decipher the code it was written in.  Because of this, Nick, Dan and I came up with the idea of commissioning Roscoe to compose a piece based on the premise of L-R-G but modeled after our sounds and playing styles.  After I got back to California I met Roscoe for our regular session and brought the idea up to him and was very excited when he got excited!  So now the name of the game is finding money to make this all happen.  So if you find yourself with some extra money...I do take personal checks....

Here is some video from the gig: