Well, Pete Brown and Piblokto! turned out to be a near-total bust. What saved it is,

a) it’s title (Things May Come and Things May Go But the Art School Dance Goes On Forever)

b) the sentimental fact that it’s the first time I heard talking drums and

c) the vigorous reinforcement it gives to the idea that we have far better production values now, which makes excellent musicians try that much harder to sound excellent (because you can hear every little mistake).

On the third or fourth note of the first song on this album, you hear a rhythmic blunder. That told me everything I needed to know before going any further. Were they stoned when they wrote the songs? Likely. Were they stoned when they recorded the album? Had to be. I didn’t have very high expectations for this thing, but wow… it’s far worse than I remembered.

Finally got coated skins for my Slingerland kit yesterday, the snare and two small toms. Holy crap… does it ever sound good with brushes.

Been playing lots on my new Motif ES. The other day I recorded a ton of instrumental variations of the same melody and tried stringing them together in Acid. Completely whacked ambition. The thing to do is create patterns on the keyboard, tweak them with quantization and get the dang machine to play the different variations when I’ve got a metronome behind me. It wasn’t a complete failure. I’ll get a song out of it eventually. But that day has to be all written off as practice.

Was trying to remember an LP I owned when I was a teenager. Joe something-or-other and Pibloco or Pablico. I searched online umpteen times trying various spellings and finally posted a message in a ’70s music newsgroup the other day. Some guy responded within a couple of hours. It’s Pete Brown & Piblokto! as it turns out. I hopped right to Amazon and ordered it just out of sheer nostalgia. Compared to King Crimson and Genesis and Aphrodite’s Child, it’s poor man’s progressive rock. But I don’t care. I’m on a mission to recollect all my old music.

I think I’m obsessing about The Avalanches. It’s been a few months now and I can’t not play it every day. Nothing else compares to the sweeping orchestral scope of it. I know it’s old, but holy shit… so’s Tchaikovsky. So’s J.S.Bach. The last time something hit me so profoundly was Bach’s cello sonatas. And Tchaikovsky’s 5th symphony. I just figure I’ve got a lot to learn from the Avalanches CD and not stress about it.

Got an MP3 player a couple of weeks ago – before my holidays. I think I would have gone completely nuts without it on the plane. Really got into a couple of tracks from The Future Sounds of Jazz Vol.10: Playboy by Hot Chip and First Note.

Love the variety on this CD. Highly recommend it.