Releases
from Thursday, March13th of the year2008.
People in Holland are so-o-o nice unless you accidentally walk in the bike lane. Then, they give you this special look usually reserved for people at the whole foods when you reach for the last kohlrabi or something. NPR Death Gaze. 
Yesterday, Teitur and I took a cab to the venue, and the cabbie dropped us off in basically an industrial wasteland near, but not that close to, the venue. See picture. We ended up climbing this hill up onto the highway where we found ourselves in the bike lane on the highway and were subjected to many NPR Death Gazes.
Rehearsals for this project are going really well. The Holland Baroque Society are, basically, a bunch of people roughly our age, which is great; I was telling them that I half expected a lot of leather pants, full bodice, crushed-velvet and woolen socks, as is sometimes the costume of choice for period instrument ensembles. 
The way this concert is working is that the Holland Baroque Society are playing four pieces from their repertoire and Teitur and I wrote four songs for him to sing with them. I play harpsichord in two of them and conduct the rest. It’s kind of a strange program and I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything like it; I’m excited to see what happens to it in performance. Anytime you do these collaborative things, the performance is always the butter whisked in at the end of the sauce-making; it’s very difficult to gauge whether or not things are going to gel during rehearsals alone.
I like being able to do a project like this immediately on the heels of the chaos of a live performance in NY (at the Kitchen) and also a period of very intense writing. So, I left the country for two seconds and suddenly this soundtrack I wrote was released! Pretty cool. It’s for a film called Joshua and while you can get the soundtrack in a variety of ways, iTunes is, I think, the easiest. I will say, I am really happy with how this turned out. Listening to film music is an especial perversion of this century and I’m not 100% sure how I feel about it, but I guess it should be said that a lot of excellent, excellent things were written for film and I’m happy to have participated! Download and enjoy.
Also, an excerpt from my upcoming album Mothertongue is available through the excellent magazine The Wire‘s issue this month, which comes with their fun Wiretapper CD No. 19.
1 Comment
March 13th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
I take your point about listening to film music, but I wonder if it is that much different than listening to an opera if one doesn’t know the plot or understand the language. Of course, it is better to know the plot and have studied the libretto, and I’m sure it is better to have seen the film to know how the music fits into it. But I doubt that I shall ever see Joshua and I am very glad to be listening to your music. Since I am beginning to learn your aesthetic gestures I can recognize the music as yours and enjoy it as foreground rather than background. The disconcerting thing about iTunes is that each segment is given a name and that name seems to have more to do with the film than with the music. Are the names yours?