the river flows slow
Brazos / NM-TX-OK / LA / Greensboro
Some time early this morning I woke myself up when, in my dreaming state, I looked at my phone at two incoming texts. Reassuring to know that my dreaming body knows that The Phone doesn’t belong in my leisure time. Last week I returned home and to the studio from a week of field work and my time has been dominated by screens filled with e-mail, zoom calls, and various DAWs, catching up on everything I’d missed during my time away.
For nearly a decade I’ve been thinking about mapping the Brazos River in the same way that Annea Lockwood mapped the Hudson, the Danube. When I still lived in Texas, I made recordings at the former headwaters at Blackwater Draw and the strange storm grate just outside the loop highway around Lubbock that feeds the Lubbock Lakes and subsequently the Double Mountain Fork, which eventually meets the Salt Creek Fork to form the Brazos. For a minute I thought I lost those recordings, I made them years ago, but I found them this week. We live with many homes, and Texas is an important one of mine; there is a comfort in the coexistence of arid flats and suffocating humidity. My friend Jordan gracious helped me travel from Lubbock to Waco to record the first half of the Brazos for this piece. The idea is fairly simple, but challenging to execute: 5 minutes of sound in every county that the river passes through. The variety of activity and non-activity along this river is astounding. I have never sweat so much in my life, standing in this slow-moving river under highway overpasses. The whole process brought up a lot of questions of private property and access that I feel compelled and confused by. We’ll talk about it at some point. There’s not an end goal or projected presentation for this work, but I’ve needed to do it for some time. While I was flying to Lubbock to start this trip, I managed to get a screenshot of my flight directly over the marker that notes the collision of Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, which I’d visited a few months ago. Of course this spurred an idea and I made a small edition of a print with these images, which you can find on my Bandcamp page.
Tomorrow in the early morning I’ll head to LA for a couple of performances. As a part of Dogstar, I’ll join the Dogstar Community Choir for a performance of a piece of mine called Grey/Blue. It uses descriptions of sound pulled from the books Greyhound and Blue Highways, which the choir will sonify and I’ll transduce through road detritus with Ryan Seward. That performance will be at the West Side Music Conservatory in Santa Monica at 7:30pm. At 6pm tomorrow, I’ll join Ryan and the choir at the Ohio and Bundy Triangle Park to perform a piece that Ryan wrote specifically for this park that abuts Rt. 66. Everything is kind of the same thing, you know what I mean? Then on Wednesday at 7pm, I’ll play in a quartet with Ryan, Adam Lion, and Cassia Streb at Solarc Brewing in Glassell Park, Haydeé Jiménez opens solo. Kind of a dream band there, I’m grateful that Adam wanted to put this together. On my return to Colorado, I’ll play a solo set at the DMV in Denver on the 24th, opening for Ryan Seward & Jack Wright.
Yesterday I posted a new release from my digital label Bastard Countryside, an on-air recording from cenOte. They an improvised music duo from Greensboro, North Carolina and recorded this one on WUAG, the station that I had a show on during most of my years of college. Gwen & Gregory pull in influence from southern rural outsider art sites, which has been a really wonderful connection to draw in the process of getting this record together. The cover image is a detail shot of Junior Banks’ Fortress of Faith in Greenback, TN. Again, everything is kind of the same thing.
Today several records I’ve mastered or engineered otherwise in the last few months have been released or announced. I’m grateful to get to touch so much different music. I have a fairly open schedule when I get back from California and I’d love to work on your music. Just shoot me an email, my rates are affordable and I do good work. I never know how to sell my services, I just pray that the work speaks for itself.
Last newsletter I mentioned giving lessons/consults/perspective on zoom and I’ve had a couple of people take me up on that. I’m still mulling over how to formalize it in some way but it’s been gratifying to find a new way to work with people.
That’s all I’ve got for now. Thanks for reading this far, I appreciate the feedback and connection I get from these newsletters. I’ve been writing brief weekly studio journals for paid subscribers, which is affordable if you have interest in that perspective. See you out there.