Rocked the Sett yesterday with Glacier, opening for A Hawk and a Hacksaw:

The two most recent episodes of Mad Toast Live  are performances by Shtetlblasters and Thistle and the Thorns. Go to their website and download the podcasts now! I had a great time playing the show with both groups.

Summer is a good time to start new projects, and I'm excited to be starting a new trio with guitarist Luke Polipnick and percussionist Geoff Brady. They're both stellar musicians, who have been involved in things that I've admired for a long time, so this'll be a great opportunity for me to learn a thing or three.

Our first show is Thursday, May 26th at Audio For the Arts. We're opening for the killer NYC band Father Figures, in a show presented by Surrounded by Reality. 7pm

Father Figures:

I just realized that these pieces we recorded for Sleepwalks last August are online!

Sleepwalks is produced by a collective of improvising musicians and video artists. We've been on hiatus for a while, due to the sad state of WYOU, the community TV station we used as a space to record/means to broadcast, but hopefully more will happen in the future.

Please enjoy these performances from August 19th, 2010---

Eric Sheffield, electronics, guitar, percussion
Jeff Herriott, electronics
Matt Sintchak, saxophone
me, bass
Heidi Johnson, live video mixing
Eric Allin & Anna Weisling, cameras

You can see more Sleepwalks I've been involved with here.

Whirlwind week. Got back from the Thistle tour and immediately jumped into a bunch of performances. Played L'histoire du Soldat on Tuesday, followed that evening by a Lovely Socialite Mrs. Thomas W. Phipps performance for Honky Tonk Tuesday at Mickey's Tavern.

Here's an excerpt of us playing my tune, 'to float before sinking,' at that show:

The recording is a super low quality reference recording, but hopefully you get the sense from it that we had fun, because we did.

Next, I went on a mini tour this week with conspirators Anna Weisling, Jeff Herriott, and Eric Sheffield, as a project we're calling Sympathy Swimmers. We reworked Anna's, Eric's and my piece, exit crafting, to include Jeff, and the three of them had a piece called a scrape in the liquid, which we reworked to include me. We also conceived a new improvisation as the four of us to flesh out the set.

I feel super lucky to have these three  as friends/collaborators. A good deal of my most artistically satisfying adventures of the last year and a half have been with/through them. (Fyi, their band, bell monks, has just release a great song.)

We played in Minneapolis on Thursday at Bryant Lake Bowl, supporting We Can and We Must. BLB is a bowling alley, bar, and theater. When I first heard of the place, I admit I thought it sounded dubious, (I generally have an aversion to bowling alleys) but it's actually a really cool space to perform. It would have been nice to have had more of an audience, but we had fun. We took the show back to Madison on Friday with a show at the Project Lodge.

We Can and We Must is a really awesome improvising electronics duo from Chicago/Beijing. Composers/performers/improvisors Ryan Ingebritsen and Jason Wampler brought an impressive energy to the stage, using a variety of live electronics, samples, live samples, programmed beats, and live drums and keyboards. Anna Weisling jumped on board with great aplomb to do visuals for them both nights, which was very impressive.

And then tonight! Local innovators New Muse coordinated another splendid event, a Vaudevillesque variety show at local gay bar Plan B. They asked Weather Duo to open the night, and we obliged.

We play again on Sunday, with a May Day performance at Crossroads Coffeeshop in Cross Plains.

And amidst all this running about, I've been rehearsing this week with singer/songwriter Page Foster, because I'm playing with her on June 4th at the Just Coffee warehouse. I'll also be playing a set with Thistle and the Thorns. Page had to teach me her tunes this week, because she's all cool and going to play some shows in New York throughout May.

Here she is playing on Mars or somewhere:

Drove into Madison early this morning through the rainy Wisconsin sunrise, returning home from the week-long Thistle and Thorns Earth Week tour. What a great week! It's really rewarding to be performing on the road. Through meeting some really great people, we explored farms and mansions around the midwest.

It was also great to spend a solid week performing Thistle's songs--I definitely gained a deeper appreciation for them by getting to explore them every night. She's one of those artists who does really important work.

Speaking of awesome music from Seattle, (see previous post) I had the great pleasure of performing on Wednesday with the stellar Seattle band Slow Skate. They have an impeccable sense of the sound world they create, which is filled with warm analog sounds and gorgeous vocals.

Through a measure of great luck, I get to perform in the same show as them again tonight, in LaCrosse, where I'm on tour with Thistle and the Thorns. I'm looking forward to hearing them again! You can follow our Earth Day tour here.

Performing with us this tour is vocalist Page Foster, who is a really great singer/songwriter in her own right. I recommend checking her tunes out here.

Getting excited to perform Stravinsky's L'histoire du Soldat later this month! Tuesday, April 26th, 11am, in Mills Hall at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

I've gotten so excited I drew a poster for the recital:

Any excuse to draw a grinning devil is a valid one.

We're also playing Bach's Brandenburg No. 2 (as you can see), which will be rather fun as well.

The new Shtetlblasters single is available for stream/download now! This is the first project I've recorded with them.

We kick off our tour this Saturday in Madison, at the Project lodge. Detailed dates in performances.

It's March already? What!

Last month, I had the opportunity to play Tom Johnson's piece "Failing: a Very Difficult piece for Solo Bass" at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. It was for the MMoCA Nights event, and the program was put together by New Muse. The rest of the program was pretty fantastic, as you can see here. The event was very well attended and was a lot of fun. Performers were stationed around the gallery like works on display, and we played in succession, so the attendees could roam from performance to performance. Pretty cool! I even had a fancy placard on my stand.

This week, I'm playing in the University Theater's production of Rocky Horror--a revival of the stage production. This is so much fun. It's every musician's dream to be a rockstar, and it's hard not to feel like one playing this music. We have four performances this weekend at the Wisconsin Union Theater, including two midnight shows Friday and Saturday. Trusting that everyone lasts through this week's cold and flu pandemics, this will be a pretty awesome show.

Speaking of failure and horror, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker continues his attack on the working class of Wisconsin by trying to push through his "budget repair" bill that strips union workers of collective bargaining rights, guts Badger Care (Wisconsin's state Medicaid program) and includes many other reprehensible and asinine provisions. 

Protestors continue to rally in solidarity against this bill, in a period of debate that is allowed by the action of 14 Wisconsin state senators who left the state in order to deprive the Republicans of the quorum required to vote on the bill.

Walker delivered from the state capitol this afternoon, where protestors were not allowed in through unconstitutional restrictions enforced by state police. He spoke to an audience of fawning approval, which apparently he smuggled in for his benefit--indeed, I waited in line to get inside the capitol building for 2 hours, and no one was let in.

This ordeal is disgusting.

I just watched a movie called From Beyond, a Stuart Gordon film from 1986. It's based on a short story by H.P. Lovecraft, and follows the plight of a physicist and psychiatrist who try to control a machine that unleashes unspeakable horrors by triggering the pineal gland, which is the gateway to a sixth sense--apparently the sense of detecting slimy, mutating creatures that turn you into writhing, toothy monstrosities. The film includes a crazy scientist who takes kinky S&M videos of himself, a man being eaten to the bone by a swarm of pineal creatures, heads being devoured, vindictive doctors, faces bursting out of creatures' mouths, and x-ray vision that allows people to eat the brains out of other peoples' heads. 

Scott Walker is more disgusting than that.