Projects! Collaborations! Wonders!
Lots of music is getting made but none of it is being posted in this blog! Let’s fix this.
The members of Avi Buffalo are among my favorite humans. They inspire me and restore my faith in the future of music. And they put my picture in the “Influences” box on their MySpace page… not even the Beach Boys were worthy of such an honor!
Avi and I have been jamming whenever the band comes to town. We record these guitar-keyboard improvisations into Pro Tools and then overdub whatever seems right – usually a track of sounds captured by microphone. Not necessarily vocals; mostly odd mouth noises or scraping of the mic against objects, which we bus through effects that are tweaked on the fly. I would never have thought to play an effect like an instrument, but it’s second nature to Avi.
We’ve got more than an album’s worth of this stuff recorded and a lot of it is surprisingly listenable. It helps that Avi has an almost supernatural connection to his guitar and complete understanding of the effects he runs it through. And I think it’s clear that we’re having fun. We’re gonna press the results to vinyl (one 35-minute jam had to be cut down by a third just to fit on one side of the record). I want to call the project Space Toilets, but I haven’t gotten a thumbs-up from Avi yet so this may be the first and last time you hear that name.
Here’s the first piece we recorded:
Last weekend I brought my laptop and Pro Tools rig to the ATP festival and we did some tracking in the hotel room. In addition to the aforementioned 35-minute improv, we added Avi’s beautiful guitaring to a tune I’ve been building for quite a while. This is a song for Failing Upwards called “Never Turn My Back”:
Meanwhile, work continues on the record I’m producing for Kole. We’ll be finishing up drums over the next couple of days and moving on to bass. Here’s one of the raw tracks Jerry will be drumming on; I wrote the first draft of this song based on stuff that was going on in Kole’s life, and then she ran with it wonderfully, tweaking the lyric and adding some really touching, very personal stuff.
I do have some disappointing news to report: the 15th anniversary of the Hanslick Rebellion is gonna come and go pretty quietly. We weren’t able to get a recording schedule together, so we have nothing to release. It’s too bad. We did have some excellent material written, which I hope we’ll be able to bring to you someday. Maybe if we start working toward the 20th anniversary now, we might make it.
Here’s my rough demo of one of the tracks we sadly won’t be recording this fall: “Dear Friends And Gentle Hearts”.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jed Davis, Kole Christensen. Kole Christensen said: RT @jeddavis: Sharing some works in progress, including collaborations with @AviBuffalo and @KoleMusic. http://t.co/zloTaRS [...]
Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts would make a great… “present.”
Ah, I see what you did there.
I agree, its “presence” would help “cover” about a dozen things.
Just from the raw track there, I can tell that an instruments-only version of Never Turn My Back would be a cool track to have around.
Which makes me think… Maybe I’m just getting old, but I can’t think of a straight instrumental Jed tune… Acapella, definitely, but not instrumental.
The Rebellion has been trying to figure out a solution to our scheduling problems… we just might find ourselves in the presence of some presents at year’s end. Which means my holiday epic “Peditum Quod Festum Nativitatis Delevit” will have to wait until 2011, but that’s okay. I can’t find a boys’ choir willing to sing about farts anyway.
Instrumentals: there’s “Craptastic!” on We’re All Going To Jail!, the digital version of which also has “When I Grow Up I Want To Be A Policeman” (mostly instrumental, with spoken word at the end – no singing). My first demo tape had two instrumentals, “Crimheads Are Ugly” and “Croatoan”.
And don’t forget “The Wizard’s Demon End” in this very post!