Brains 'Gristle and Skins' review

Brains' second album Gristle and Skins' just got a great review in germany at http://www.tokafi.com/news/brains-gristle-and-skins/

Thanks to the guys over at tokafi for taking a listen and taking the time to write some nice words about the album.

Duo album with James Fei on Contrabass Clarinet album out soon

James Fei and I have been hard at work on recording a piece of his for two contrabass clarinets.  The piece is comprised of two parts, the first slow, continuous held notes in the upper which we allow harmonics to come in and out of the texture creating the illusion of there being more than two players at times.  The second part is at the very bottom of the contra range is aggressive attack after aggressive attack.  The piece builds until the attacks overwhelm everything and take over completely.

The album will be out soon and for the time being will only be available on reel-to-reel tape.....I'm trying to talk james into a digital version but i don't think he's going to concede that one.

Brains second album 'Gristle and Skins' out now on Edgetone Records

Brains second album 'Gristle and Skins' is out now on Edgetone Records!

It's available from the following link edgetone records

This album is much different that our first record which was much more episodic.  Gristle and Skins has a much more developmental approach to each piece where the music flows and changes in a number of different ways.  The pieces range from intense overblown sax and slamming drums to eerie whistles and bowed cymbals.

I hope you check it out.

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:

First

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