Nico
Muhly,

I’ve been totally delinquent these last few weeks with updating this space, but I have an excuse! For the first time in forever, I’ve been in my new apartment in New York for longer than two weeks, and I’ve taken the time to properly set up my workspace, organize my technology, buy air conditioners, etc., and mainly, finish writing this opera that has been on my desk since 2008. It’s all wickedly exciting.

As a result of my maniacal cleaning, I have uncovered some problems in my iTunes library; namely: sometimes my cover art does not match the song/artist. This is one among many complicated issues…these are some recent things, though, that have come up on my iPhone shuffling through:

Buxtehude:

Múm into dude I don’t know:

A very special padded blazer edition of Piano Phase, by Steve Reich:

And my favorite, because I adore both albums equally:

I love Remy Ma. I also love, more than anything, this video, which I will not embed here, but offer as a link to those interested. I recall, when it came out, my girl Nick doing an unspeakably brilliant IPA of how she pronounces the word “Remy” and “fuck” but I can’t render it here for technological reasons. It’s a girl who claims that she used to “fux” Remy, but you really have to watch it to get the full breadth/depth of the Situation.

Media organization is really intense though. If you listen to a lot of classical music, you know what I’m talking about: whole CD’s, with each track assigned to a different artist. It’s like, Lorraine Hunt with the orchestra of the age of whatever. Lorraine Hunt + Random Tenor + That orchestra + That Lutenist whose name I forgot. Lorraine Hunt + That Lutenist + That Oboe d’Amore-ist whose name I forgot. And you have to go through it the entire way and make exxxtra sure that everything is organized as you, your own self, would search for it, which is to say, That Beautiful Lorraine Hunt album. Or whatever it is that you would say to your friends is what you need to be able to type into the search field.

Does anybody else suffer/celebrate (from) this problem, with the wrong cover art? Ur girl has refresht, rebuilt, reorganized and still the Books come up as Ngwemy.

The other amazing thing about doing a deep media organization is that you come across totally random things you never knew you had. I found an album by a Finnish singer-songwriter I didn’t even know:

[audio:SammiKukkaExample.mp3]
Sami Kukka, Sisältäni varjon löysin
If the audio doesn’t turn up for you, check out this YouTube.

And it’s like, where has this gorgeous thing been all my life? I didn’t buy it from iTunes. A search in my email reveals no mention of this name, “Sami Kukka“. The iTunes store has it, but not enough people have rated it to display an average, and, mine are untagged mp3’s. So where did it come from? I emailed all my Finns and nobody is taking responsibility. It’s totally weird and delightful. I’m happy to have found it, and have listened to it all day.

In other news, some of my upcoming projects have been announced. I’m very excited about everything, but in the short term, I’m particularly excited about the Los Angeles Master Chorale releasing a disc of my choral music on Decca. Choral music has been a focal point of my emotional landscape for years and years, and it’s great to see it collected all in one place. The disc sounds amazing, and it’s the first commercially available disc of works that I haven’t written for the studio, and I’m thrilled about the whole situation.

I am doing a few shows in Europe in August, with Bedroom Community, and we are all super psyched, so check the sidebar on this site for more information and tickets and all that.

PS Many of you have kindly written to me about my website possibly being hacked by some kind of Erectile Dysfunction Drug. This is something like True; my lovely webmistress and I are working on fixing this, but for now, be nice; your girl has been very busy as has her webmistress, and now it seems as if the audio is not working, but everybody is going to get through this, and remember that the web is a Process. You should see the batshit spam comments I get on this site:

I mean, really, what did I do 2 deserve this!?