September 26th, 2024 was the 10th anniversary of my lesson studio at Boomer Music Company in Fort Collins. To mark the occasion, I recorded this improvisation that week in my lesson room on my usual teaching gear: workhorse instruments, practice amps, and a recording app on my business phone.
The two sessions have been edited slightly for time and there’s some studio reverb added for depth, otherwise it’s an accurate documentation of my typical noodlings while waiting to teach.
Give it a listen on CD or the music service of your choice, and thanks for listening.
With the 10th anniversary of Curious Automata coming up in March of this year, I think it’s time to clear out the archives a bit. This album is a collection of misfits whose tone didn’t match the projects for which they were intended. Also, in the spirit of moving on, all the tracks on this album are released under a Creative Commons Attribution license so anyone can use them as they see fit.
“Broken Tree” was improvised after my favorite shade tree was split in a late spring storm in 2017. It was previously released as a rough cut for my Bandcamp subscribers but it’s much prettier and has been edited for time here. I think it still captures my mood as I waited to see if the tree survived, though.
Tracks 2-12 were all recorded during the two sessions for 2018’s “We Were”. Those were during the end of my marriage, so they were a bit of an art therapy project as I went through a divorce. I wrote a list of things to remember, then improvised around each idea. For the original album, I decided to lean toward the positive tracks, so the remaining ones here have a bit darker tilt.
I hope you enjoy these moody leftovers, and thanks for listening.
Here’s another single, this time an improvisation with looping. I was programming presets in my Electro-Harmonix Grand Canyon delay pedal and took a few minutes to just play.
Tim Carmichael and I recently recorded some music for Dry Land Distillers, a new distillery opening spring of 2018. You can hear the track in Shaleigh Thomas’ excellent launch video and be sure to check out Longmont’s newest craft distillery at DryLandDistillers.com.
