Tonight Owen Cartwright and I will be playing with Charlie Hendrick and Jason Dean's new band Tit City at New Years by the Bay in Belfast, Maine. Before getting into, here's a little background on Tit City:
I first heard Tit City this spring in its early stage as a duo (Jason Dean on drums/Korg synthesizer and Charlie Hendrick on computers/vocals) as they were developing their set for some gigs in New York. The blend of computer generated drums with the live drummer was something that Charlie, Jason, and I had played around with in the past at the Gilbert's Open Mic before that establishment closed. This combination sounded really great when it evolved from an open mic improvisational atmosphere to an arranged set. Fast forward to summer of 2010: after the set had evolved and much of the lyrics been more clearly defined, I began helping Charlie and Jason record an album version of their set and developing some new ideas possible only on a studio version.
After learning the songs through the recording process, I was invited to join Tit City to play at a Halloween dance party put on by Hot Pink Flannel at The Underground Lounge in Rockland, ME. I thought about playing vibes with Tit City (or perhaps digital mallets like in The Limited Time Only Band days--but I decided keyboards and my standard live electronics setup was enough gear to bring around). The gig went great (the obscene amount of technical setup time Charlie and I had probably had something to do with it), there were some great costumes (my favorites being the giant skull and the magic mushroom), I had become one of the mayors of Tit City (as a "citizen"/audience member called me at a later gig), and we got a decent sounding live recording. Hot Pink Flannel liked us enough to immediately schedule us to play at their holiday dance party (The Bad Sweater Dance Party). We then called up Owen Cartwright and asked him to join the band on guitar--don't worry, he brings a computer too.
We are missing Clint Hartzel, but Tit City while making a different kind of music, in some ways feels like a reunion of The Limited Time Only Band. The two gigs we have played since Owen joined the band have been a lot of fun. We have even added a few The Limited Time Only Band songs with new twists to our set (Bleeding on Venus, Untitled, and Logjam). Last night at rehearsal I had an interesting realization about a structural development in the music of The Limited Time Only Band to Tit City: The Limited Time Only Band played theme and variations improvisations with some pop/dance tunes and extended free improvisations while Tit City plays a primarily dance oriented set with highly focused avant garde transitions. With our cross-genre influences, electronic sounds, and improvisational structures, I would classify Tit City as a new type of fusion but when asked, the simple answer I give is that it is a pop/rock electronic band with live drums and guitar playing tunes from a wide variety of genres.
Charlie posted some samples of the album recordings (before Owen and I joined the band).
Tonight we will be playing at Beflast, ME's New Year's by the Bay at the First Church UCC Hall (on Spring St. between Church St. and Court St.). Our first set will be 6:00-6:45pm and 7:00-7:45pm.
I began a new website back in March, but until now, other projects have kept me from being able to launch it (and in the meantime I stopped posting to the old blog).
As you can see, the new website is now up. I had to launch the site a little earlier than I had planned since the old site broke and because of this the teaching content and RSS feed are still missing but coming soon. Also, once I settle on a media player interface, there will be some audio and video going up on the site as well. In the coming weeks, I will post some links to some old material that never made it up on the blog and some random pictures as I experiment with image uploading systems for the new site.
In other news, check out the new website launched for Punkte, my electroacoustic improv duo with pianist John Aylward.
Bios coming to this site and punktemusic.com after my gig tonight.
When teaching Music 9 last term, I wast telling students about my first assignment in the Intro to Electroacoustic Music class I took during my undergrad at Brandeis. Our assignment (while learning tape-style editing techniques) was to transform provided recording of a some speech into another phrase. Since some of the students seemed surprised by this assignment I thought I would post my version (I will admit, I could probably do a lot better job at this now, but I posted my original version of the assignment). I was asked to transform the following sentence: "One thing you can always be sure of is the stupefying anger of field mice." into: "Bee stings are no fun. You can always ice them. Sugar."
For the past month, fellow first year Digital Musics grad students Josh Hudelson, Alex Wroten, and myself having been working on Ken Ueno's Yellow 632 (a trio for Tickle-Me-Big-Birds) in preparation for the Dartmouth Contemporary Music Lab tour we have planned for April. We will be debuting our first performance of the pice at Spheris Gallery (Hanover, NH - map) tonight. Also on the gig, Emily Schecter '12 and Doug Perkins will be performing Tristan Perich's Observations (duo for crotales and one-bit music) and Julia Floberg '11 will be performing J. S. Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major. 6pm - Free and open to the public!
So I realized it has been a while since my last update and there is a video from last term that never got posted. On December 3rd, we had Seth Cluett come to Hanover as the guest artist for the final concert of 2009 in our Spheris Art Gallery series. In addition to a solo live electronics set performed by Seth and Thierry de Mey's Table Music (performed by Heewon Kim '10, Emily Schecter '12, and Doug Perkins), my fellow Dartmouth Digital Musics students performed Seth Cluett's Focus. In our realization, we performed a simultaneous performance of Focus, for two performers and Focus, for four performers (and yes, I brought the whole vibraphone—minus the "black notes"—to play a single pitch). Check out the video below:
- Patrick Barter - live electronics
- Josh Hudelson - melodica
- Roth Michaels - vibraphone
- Chris Peck - flute, piccolo
- Paul Osetinsky - live electronics
- Alex Wroten - stylophone
