Saturday April 5: Instant Opera Company : Karen Young, Tom Buckner, Tim Brady, Jason Hwang, Philip Hornsey, Lori Freedman

Sunday April 6: ­ Saxophones : le quatuor QUASAR

In the 2 Interview segments below you’ll hear questions from Risa Dickens and Sarah Pearson to Thomas Buckner about improvisation, and conversation about work he’s done internationally making music at the cutting edge where avant garde meets classical, meets dance, meets sculpture, meets electronic.

In the final audio segment, you’ll hear a free improv jam with Matthew Hiscock on beats, James Finnerty on guitar, and master mad vocalist, the inspiring and sweet Thomas Buckner on all sounds oral, odd, lovely and liberating. My favorite moment is the clear harmony he makes with the distortion Matthew produces from the laptop, and then how he echoes and plays with the beats. I hope you smile, sit back, and enjoy the sounds of playful, artful freedom.

The song in the recording is a little-known English folk song called “Water of Tyne,” about a long-distance relationship…two lovers are separated by the Tyne River, and the woman sings, “I cannot get to my love if I would die.”

I’m warning y’all - the sound is kinda weird (although it makes for neat effect). I fiddled with input stuff on my ‘puter a few weeks ago, and now I can’t get the levels back right for this kind of live-off-the-floor stuff - I’m totally baffled by what I did, and have no clue how to fix it (I’ll have to ask our trusty sound-guy James Finnerty). Just turn the volume up on your speakers and forgive the the shifting levels. It’s a good taste of our lovely afternoon jam.

Deep River Decoy is:
Sarah Pearson: lead vocals, keys
Andrea Stuart: cello
Amena Ahmad: vocals
Jesika Starnino: vocals, and maybe guitar for future shows (she’s not on this recording tho :-( )

We’ll be singing a 20-minute set of familiar sing-along-able folk songs and traditionals - we’ll even be passing out lyrics for your sing-along enjoyment!!

Last week we met for a pre-mess podcast with Vancouver four peice It’s a Living Thing. We recorded the session live off the floor in my living room with just one overhead mic capturing the sound. Here’s the full version including It’s a Living Thing members Damon (guitar), Falcao (drums), Monashee (violin/keys) and Alissa (bass).

Check out their Myspace for more info:

www.myspace.com/livingthingster

Okay, so this isn’t so much a “jam session” as much as a work in progress. But I thought it was podcast worthy so I’ve decided to post it anyway.

Sometimes the need to express a musical idea surfaces and can only be communicated fully by spontaneously playing out those ideas. This session is pretty much the result of that process. The first track in the piece manifested itself through a free improvisation that eventually solidified into a cohesive musical line. The line stuck with me and it was from there that the rest of this one minute, thirty-odd second song evolved. After the first three tracks were laid down, I began looping the session to discover if there were more ideas hiding under the surface. That’s when Angela MacKenzie overheard the peice and started humming what she thought to be the “missing melody”. So I lifted her melody, tracked it, added some percussion and that was that.

I can imagine adding some vocal ideas to compliment the piece, but I figured that’s something I might come back to another day. So in the meantime, here is the first version of what I call “The Rainy Sixteen Countdown”. The title came from the merging of two ideas that were part of the creation of the song; 1. It was written on a rainy Saturday afternoon and 2. Each additional track I’ve layered enters after a four bar progression, which of course equals a sixteen beat countdown.

Rainy Sixteen Countdown

I had the pleasure of recording a quick late night session with guitarist and old friend Ryan Browne a couple weeks back at my home studio. Sometime around 2am, the night Ryan and his girlfriend arrived, I was inspired to record a piece that he was playing for us as we sat around the living room near-twilight. The recording captures the atmosphere of night-time and (what I find most interesting about this session) the vibe of three people just sitting there in silence, listening to Ryan humbly play through this beautiful instrumental piece. We did one overdub and despite a few barely noticeable slips of the guitar, decided to keep that take and call it a night. This is the final mix of that session. Engineering assisted by talented pianist and sound engineer James Newhouse.

Untitled #1