1.29.08
i want to thank everybody for being interested in what i'm up to. my goal is to not bombard your inbox with too much effluvia. however, i just wanted to let you in on a few things if you are interested.
on 12.30.07 there was show at the tractor in seattle with myself and my two good friends bill frisell and eyvind kang. i will be putting up files from the show over the next few months, so if you would like to hear pop over to dannybarnes.com and snag them as they appear. that show was a real highlight of my musical life and those two guys are my vote for some really great musicians..... doing stuff that's right NOW.
what an honor to get to rehearse and perform alongside these guys. they are like biblical figures to me.
i moved to the northwest a little over ten years ago, and was just thinking the other day that getting to play with bill and eyvind, and also wayne horvitz and robin holcomb, has been totally worth the whole thing. moving two time zones away and going to a new place and starting over and dealing with all the changes. getting to study and work with these folks has really allowed my music to blossom in ways i never expected. it's been a fantastic blessing in my life, so i am very happy to be living where i live. life is such a great deal. man, it freaks me out. how does all this stuff work? wow.
speaking of wayne, the recording of his oratorio Joe Hill was just finished, which includes bill and robin and myself. details of how to purchases will be up on my site when they are available. keep an eye out for reviews of that. what an amazing experience to be part of that.
a few years ago, i wrote a piece of music callled kitchen floor waltz, and bill and i performed it as a guitar duet on my cd dirt on the angel. my friend barbara lamb, a violinist living in nashville composed a triple violin part and added it to the track. give a listen it's very nice. it's new on the site.
string summit and pickathon are two northwest festivals where i'll be working this year, performing my own music.
there will also be a fairly extensive robert earl keen tour in the spring.
currently i'm writing:
a. a new batch of songs for a song based cd, produced by a famous friend.
b. a new folktronics cd released on my own
c. a suite of 12 tone pieces for american folk instruments.
eyvind kang and i are working on a spoken word piece based on the rosicrucian fama, which anonymously appeared in 1614 in germany.
i'm launching a new site called folktronics.com, as a place to revisit some of my writings on music life, books, and gear and stuff like that. Yonder Mountain String Band's Dave Johnston has agreed to be a contributer and i've asked some like intellects to participate. have a look there if you feel like it.
i have been studying the programming environment max/msp, and working on that, and hope to include those concepts in my new work and the work of others.
some different folks have asked me to do re-mixes of certain things. this is really fun for me to do. basically the idea is, an artist sends me some tracks of a tune and i rebuild them into another song. it's fairly common in electronic music and newer forms of music, but unheard of in acoustic music, so my hope is to do more of this and make these services available to other artists. a re-mix can be a cool way of stimulating interest in a cd, or to have a free giveaway as a promotional tool. i'll be putting up links and giving some of these away.
there is a new t-shirt design in the works celebrating folktronics, my term for my style of music, typified by the cd Barnyard Electronics. perhaps you'd like one of those. my good pal and comic book legend and jersey punk rock icon steve mannion is designing a new shirt.
so that's what's going on around here. thank you for your support and thus allowing me to work on creating new forms of music. i appreciate you. let's all try to lighten up and count our blessings. the more a person keeps away from negative things and people, the better things can get.