Guilty Pleasures

December 21, 2011
It's always frustrating to check in the the blog and see that I have completely ignored it for over a month. In this case, I am almost surely breaking my own record of days between posts. Not cool. And not that it's any real excuse but my laptop stopped working a few weeks ago and took me back to pre-digital age for a second. It was frightening. My music and video production was crippled and even though I still had the Internet in my pocket, I realized just how much I use that machine. So when I was told that…

Open Your Eyes

October 26, 2011
Godot is an artist who creates some amazing stop-action videos with all sorts of different media. He is an innovator and an activist who craves social justice, using art to promote Supergoodness in all aspects of life. He is also my brother-in-law and I have been lucky to work with him, producing soundtracks for a number of his videos. Here is one that I recently collaborated on, with video shot in the art jungle of Berlin. Enjoy! Open Your Eyes

DJ

October 26, 2011
One of my favorite activities is playing DJ for a group of people interested in listening and maybe even dancing to the music I play. I love finding songs appropriate for any situation and sharing them with friends or strangers, who in turn provide feedback and requests, creating a playlist I could never have made on my own. It is as much about discovering music as it is about listening. Tonight I was asked to curate the sounds for Ars Nova, an amazing little theatre that always throws great parties. They are committed to stimulating new work and recognize the…

Music Alive

October 26, 2011
It has been a couple weeks of great musical entertainment for me. Wilco at Central Park Summerstage, Jon Brion at Le Poisson Rouge, and Deadmau5 at Roseland; all of them wonderfully different and uniquely fun. Wilco rocks as hard as any band with a rare restraint that pulls you forward as a listener. Jon Brion is the best musician I have ever seen, playing solo and recording drum, piano, glockenspiel, guitar and bass loops, building his songs with sweet harmony and jaw-dropping skill into some absolutely beautiful sonic collages. Deadmau5 is one of the biggest DJs in the world now…

Backtowork

September 20, 2011
The last two weeks have been a gentle ease-in to a precisely scheduled life as classes at various workplaces are starting on a rolling timetable. I expect my teaching capacities to be fully engaged and operational within the next week and look forward to a "rigorous" fall semester... But in the meantime I've had some free time which is almost completely monopolized by creative music production. Since spending a month without my studio, I have had a stream of rhythms and melodies pouring into my laptop and have condensed them into few songs which I offer here. Supergood music is…

India: Soundtrack

August 31, 2011
I brought my laptop to India. I debated it for months, and decided to lug it for a few reasons: the most practical was as a storage device for all my videos. I had two 4 GB cards that were obviously insufficient video time, so I needed to fill and dump them. While unnecessary, the ability to record music and blog is a treasured joy and the weight and space sacrifice in my tiny backpack seemed inconsequential. Travel tends to throw some tricks at you and after 6 days, the power adapter was fried by a generator on our houseboat…

India: Endia

August 31, 2011
Back in Brooklyn now after an unplanned two-day drive from Chicago following an Irene-inspired flight diversion from Delhi, I have had almost 24 hours to catch my breath and reflect on the crazy month that I just experienced. It was fantastic, intense, challenging, beautiful, terrifying, inspiring, depressing, insane, hilarious, exhausting and amazing trip. The few words that I write here can barely do justice to the feelings touching me throughout the adventure. India is maximum sensory overload at all times and it goes straight to the brain. We ended in Delhi, with two days at the uber-luxurious Imperial Hotel as…

India: Tibet

August 29, 2011
The Himalayas have an aura untouched by any other range, partly because they contain the highest peaks on Earth and partly because they contain such a diversity of cultures. I would love to someday travel across these mountains, from the India to China, and witness the gradual cultural evolution. On this trip we made it only into the foothills, to Dharamsala, but the shift was evident. Tibet sounds like one of the most beautiful and fascinating places on the planet, but unfortunately suffers under one of the most brutally repressive governments in existence. China invaded Tibet over 50 years ago…

India: Chandigarh

August 29, 2011
Chaos abounds! In every way, Indian cities are collages of clashing elements. It seems that everyone is a merchant, whether they sell from a storefront or a nomadic basket and lawlessness engulfs all aspects of life. Traffic lacks order and food is entirely unregulated, leading to questionable choices in nearly every moment of day-to-day existence. This is, of course, much of what I love about this country; it is raw and real, daring you to test the limits and taxing your comfort constantly. And then there is Chandigarh. The capital of both Punjab and Haryana states, it is the only…

India: Rishikesh

August 29, 2011
We are traveling in a vast and varied cultural and physical landscape. Planning this trip was frustrating because there were too many places we wanted to visit in too little time, so we decided that we would divide it into two weeks in the South and two in the North with specific locations to be determined. We arranged a flight from Goa to Delhi at the midpoint and then, knowing we would end our trip in Delhi, hopped on a train headed towards the legendary Rishikesh; a small town straddling the Ganges River as it flows out of the mountains.…