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.
My first Curious Automata release, Analogues of Infinity turns 10 today. It’s free on Bandcamp (and up on all the streaming sites) so give it a listen and try to figure out why the heck this is the most popular track:
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.
What if it happens and you thought it could happen?
What if you thought it could happen and it happens and you are surprised it happened?
What if you are surprised it happened and you thought it could happen and it happens and it happened again?
What if it happened again and you are surprised it happened and you thought it could happen and it happens and you hope it won’t happen?
What if you hope it won’t happen and it happened again and you are surprised it happened and you thought it could happen and it happens and you know why it happened?
What if you know why it happens and you hope it won’t happen and it happens again and you are surprised it happened and you thought it could happen and it happens and you cannot stop it happening?
What if you cannot stop it happening and you hope it won’t happen and it happens again and you are surprised it happened and you thought it could happen and it happens?
What if you cannot stop it happening and it happens again and you are surprised it happened and you thought it could happen and you hope it won’t happen?
What if you cannot stop it happening and you thought it could happen and you are surprised it happened and you hope it won’t happen?
What if you hope it won’t happen and you thought it could happen and you are surprised it happened?
What if you hope it won’t happen because you are surprised it happened?
What if you are surprised it happened because you hope it won’t?
What if you hope it won’t because you are surprised?
What if you are surprised because you hope?
Then this is an improvisation on acoustic guitar recorded in a single improvised take on June 26th, 2021 at The Foundry in Loveland, Colorado.
Tim Carmichael and I have a new album! We decided to celebrate getting vaccinated and things starting to open up with a bit of free improvisation. We hadn’t played together since recording Graphite’s Thoughtful Departure in February of 2020 but we weren’t too rusty and the ideas still flowed. As Tim says in the liner notes “When you listen to this album imagine yourself getting together with a friend over a cup of coffee to catch up and enjoy the stories of your life’s journey. And, ideally, you will enjoy listening to this album with a great friend.”
2020 has made me nostalgic for simpler times, so I used my ample free time to record an all electric improvisation in the spirit of 2014’s Analogues of Infinity.
Really, this was an excuse to play with the Electro-Harmonix Grand Canyon delay. Each track is an improvisation through one of its different delay modes. No real looping on this, but I did record the looper in the same session. The result of that is on Phantom Canyon.
Also, please remind me to never release an album on election day again.
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.
