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

Cookies, at left, baked fresh today for this evening’s concert at Roulette. Featur­ing music by Robby Elfman, Noam Faingold, Brian Mark, Angélica Negrón, Alex Temple, and yours truly. 20 Greene St. at 8 pm. See you there.

This is an infor­ma­tive feature on my favorite hot sauce, Sriracha (which is appar­ently everyone else’s favorite hot sauce, too). Earlier today I put together a pretty basic sausage/peppers/onions grinder and garnished it with some quick Japanese-style pickles and a squirt of Sriracha. I pronounced it “good”.

Lens is a new photo blog from the New York Times. I wasted a good half hour on here this morning when I should have been writing for this, design­ing this, or reducing that.

PS. New audio excerpts are up for Bathtub Shrine and Senior; take a listen.

Just got back from Los Angeles and Balti­more, where I expe­ri­enced life as a touring musician for the past week. The Big Gig with the LA Phil­har­monic went splen­didly; I wish I could post a record­ing of Nightjar up here because John and the Green Umbrella crew made it sound so good, but alas, the unions (or at least their lawyers) would demand my head. Not only were the musi­cians consum­mate profes­sion­als, as I had expected, but they really cared about making Payton’s and my music sound like real music. When I asked percus­sion­ist James Babor if he could try a differ­ent ratchet sound for the opening, there was imme­di­ately a multi­plic­ity of differ­ent ratchets seem­ingly conjured from midair, every­thing from Toy to Industrial.

John, Payton and I did a little Q&A with Helane Anderson, an artistic admin­is­tra­tor at the LA Phil, which you can listen to here: LA Phil Q&A with Helane Anderson There was also a bunch of press about the event: a preview article in the LA Times, and a review from Mark Swed (“strangely Darwin­ian” as my friend Andrew points out).

LA is truly the city of great hole-in-the-wall Asian food. Each day we feasted on Bánh Mì, fatty pork ramen, Shanghai-style soup dumplings… all things sadly unavail­able in New Haven, and even a bit obscure in New York. Inspired, I am right now letting a fresh batch of Nước Mắm infuse on the kitchen counter (which is in turn infusing the whole apartment). 

The morning of the show I made our friend Annie’s family drive us out to Santa Monica, to make a pilgrim­age to the Eames House. It’s more modest in scale and construc­tion than photos in glossy art books convey, and is exactly how Charles and Ray left it, complete with the charm­ingly grody old appli­ances and corrod­ing steel paneling. I was surprised at how close to the Pacific Coast Highway the whole thing is (a thor­ough­fare which, at that point, kind of repre­sents the worst of Southern Cali­for­nia). Nonethe­less, the Eames estate is one of the pleas­an­test places I have ever been. Even though it is unequiv­o­cally one big piece of “high art” (there’s a jarringly monu­men­tal “national historic landmark” plaque in the studio) there is not a trace of snobbery or preten­sion— it feels more like the nest of two divinely-inspired magpies.

To cap the week, I was supposed to share a concert with fellow composer-pianist Tudor Dominik at Strath­more down in Bethesda, MD. Only, about two weeks before the show, Dom injured his hand (skate­board­ing? that was the rumor) and couldn’t play, doctor’s orders. So I filled out my program with a little Rzewski and Ives, in addition to the Marshall, Andres, and Steve Gorbos (who was in atten­dance with his entourage!). The venue was a nice contrast from the huge, sleek Disney Hall— a large 19^th-century living room of a converted mansion, which couldn’t have held more than 100 seats. I actually prefer playing in such intimate spaces; strangely, I’m able to concen­trate better, even though the front row is nearly sitting in my lap. The lovely producer of the series, Georgina, greeted me how, hence­forth, everyone should greet me post-concert— with a bottle of water in one hand, and a glass of booze in the other.

Hannah Collins, one of my frequentest and most loyal of collab­o­ra­tors, asked me to wright her a piano-less cello piece about a month ago. So I went and wrote her a piece with Hammond organ. Ha! Sure showed her. Thanks to prodi­gious acquirer of outdated musical equip­ment Jack Vees, I got to play a real live Hammond B3 last week rather than a MIDI imita­tion. The piece is called Fast Flows the River and here is what it sounds like (You can hear the noise of the motor making the enormous speakers slowly rotate):

Timo Andres: Fast Flows the River

Hannah Collins, ‘cello; Timo Andres, Hammond B3