Yesterday was a
bizzare day.
I got a copy of a CD I engineered with another person. It is a very strange thrill to see my name after:
Engineered and Mixed by:
in the liner notes. I'm a big shot now.
After work, I improvised for nearly five hours straight. First, I played my computer instrument with two acoustic musicians with whom I had never played before. A violist friend, a saxophonist, and I played for an hour or so trying to get to know each other musically. We're going to be working together to improvise music for a showing of a silent film by a professor of mine, and we don't have much time for rehearsals before the show at a Cleveland gallery. It will be OK, I hope.
Then I went to rehearsal with my laptop band. One of the guys couldn't make it, so we made do as a trio. We made some good music, but it was quite obvious to the three of us that something was missing.
I came home, ready for sleep, but I indulged a bit with some friends, then rode my bike, red-eyed, to the practice rooms and played a piano like a madman for an hour. The improvisation was so strange... it wandered between pulsed tonality and completely free gestural playing. I wonder what people who were walking past the rooom thought.
When I had completely exhausted myself, I found that I still had a strange manic energy, which I would have normally expected to have dissipated through playing so much. But maybe it was the fact that I had primed the pump, so to speak, and that I had gotten those creative moment-to-moment juices flowing wihtout an easy way to dam them back up. I got myself to my friend's room, and she and I spent some time breathing deeply and holding hands, and slowly, I came back down to the planet again.