Trans­former di Roboter covers Michael Jack­son’s Stranger in Moscow. Make sure to turn your speakers all the way up:

Trans­former di Roboter: Stranger in Moscow

Synes­the­sia via Kitsune Noir. Beau­ti­ful and strange.

Moving, again, in about a week. I wonder when this will stop becoming a yearly ritual (slash feat of strength) for me. First to Wash­ing­ton, CT, to dump the contents of my apart­ment on my parents for a month (thanks, parents!) and then moving all that to NYC in August.

Moving involves lots of inter­est­ing chores. For instance, finding creative ways to use up the varied contents of the pantry and refrigerator:

Couscous, sun-dried tomato, a vidalia onion, green olives. And a cucumber. And some eggs! It only gets more improb­a­ble from here. Actually this was surpris­ingly good. I love this pan in the photo; it’s from the 70’s (I think) made by some Danes, and it weighs about 15 pounds. Found it at Salva­tion Army for $4!

Also, inner ear self- irri­ga­tion using a MUJI dishsoap pump! Highly recom­mended. Now I can hear high frequen­cies again. I’ve been seeing neti pots all over the place recently, but I really think ear cleaning is more neces­sary. People say I have tiny ears so maybe stuff just gets trapped up in there more easily.

For the past 13 years or so I’ve had these reels of 1/2‑inch tape sitting in the top of my closet. They were made by the legendary engineer David Hancock, the last record­ings he made before his death (of Parkin­son’s disease). I must have been about 11 when these tapes were made, and had been studying piano with his wife, Eleanor, for a couple of years.

Gene and Jason at the Fred Plaut studio rolled out their reel-to-reel machine the other day and helped me transfer them to digital files:

Motion blur. That tape is going by at 30 inches per second!

Here is 11-year-old me playing Prokofiev’s third piano sonata (approx­i­mately six and a half years before I learned what the marking p stood for):

Prokofiev: Piano Sonata no. 3

Here is a little about the micro­phones David appar­ently used to record this.

Here are the Fred Plaut’s micro­phones, all in a pile:

$40,000 worth of micro­phone. And a razor blade!

The epony­mous cartoon.

The original cartoon that pred­i­cated this piece got lost a couple years ago, so I decided to re-draw it from my memory. I think this one is better because there is an added dog/sheep.

I’ve been doing head­shots for a bunch of musician friends over the past few months. It’s a pretty enjoy­able way to spend time, and mutually bene­fi­cial as well. My subjects always start out kind of awkwardly smiling into the camera for a few seconds, then turning away, self-conscious, and I like the process of getting them to grad­u­ally forget about the camera and act as though we’re just hanging out. Here are some of my favorites so far:

Andrew Norman, composer

Chris Cerrone, composer

Jessica Chang, violist

Ted Hearne, composer, singer, bandleader

Jay Wadley, composer

Anne Lanzilotti, violist, and Juan-Carlos Fernan­dez Nieto, pianist