Free Time

Work dried up, so I've had plenty of time to try to get something done the past week. The only show I managed to work was U2 the other day. The crew shirts they gave us were pretty cool...nobody said being a stagehand was glamourous.

I would love to have the opportunity to interview some of the people that I work with, some of them have been in the business for 50 years. As one could imagine, some of them have the most stories -famous Hollywood actors who refuse to enter their dressing rooms unless they're painted orange and stuff like that. Hell, my childhood hero Hulk Hogan dumped my dinner on the floor when I worked a wrestling show about seven or eight years ago.

I've been working on a few new mixes with some tools that I have acquired recently. This one I call "ride" because it ended up having a western thing going. I'm including a bit of the improvised jam that I decided to create the mix from. I suppose I should use a click track for this type of thing, but what are you gonna do?

jam 11-22


ride

noise

With a bit more free time on my hands the last couple of weeks I've had some time to do some experimentation with sounds. Playing with new pedals and new software, I'm finding the recording process to be much more fun this time around.

-I think I've rediscovered my love for noise.

Before, the goal had always been to eliminate the noise, to the extent that on more than one occasion I spent hours covering the doors and windows of my living room with blankets and mattresses in order to muffle the sounds of traffic. Of course the results were never worth the effort.

The other night I was talking to Joe Mac at the Doug Fir before he played his set (which rocked). We both agreed that music exists in a space. It doesn't come out of a vacuum. -I ride my bike past a warehouse with sounds of industrial machines and when I get home I pick up my guitar and possibly I'm still in that space, and its mood and rhythm comes through in what I create. Why not take a microphone and capture the sound of that space? That was the thought behind the audio of my experimental short "i." But, now, with a few more tools, I am much more free to create my own spaces.

Although I studied music theory and ear training and all that, the intellectual side of music has never been that attractive to me. While I hope to have something meaningful to say in my art, music is more a physical and emotional experience to me. For example in this piece which I'm calling "noise" I came up with several chord changes to take the harmony somewhere and make it more interesting, but it just didn't work. I couldn't add to the harmonic structure without losing the original mood. When I put the headphones on I can practically melt into the furniture.


"noise"


Someday I hope to be in the position to record all of my acoustic tunes in a form that I can be satisfied with, which will require an actual studio.

Kris's tune

The tune on this post was recorded in an hour or so when my friend Kris James from Phoenix visited last year. He had the lyrics and had a melody for them and I came up with guitar and harmonica parts to accompany him and his drum. Here's the mix I came up with.
"Alone and Desperate"

He's been playing in a band down there for going on 10 years (Danville Trains), which is very cool, but I've been trying to convince him to move and start a band with me all that time.

I'll sleep when I'm dead

Does this man look homeless? How about someone who has worked ten to twelve hours a day without a day off for going on three weeks? Yesterday I was looking for the club I was going to be working at, and I turned toward this hipster guy who was crossing the street to ask if he knew.
“Hey…” I said, as I walked up to him.
“I don’t have any change man.”
“No, can you tell me how to find the Barracuda.” (Obviously I don’t get out much there were over 2,000 people there that night.)
“Uh, yeah I’m working there myself.”

So after the Coors “titties and beer” gig yesterday I have a little time off. The 1st of the month was the Rolling Stones but most of the month I worked for Acme Scenic out at the Nike headquarters for their fall sales meetings. I have mixed feelings about working for big heartless corporations but they’re paying union scale and I’ve gotta pay the bills, so what am I gonna do? Plus the people are really great to work with.

The rest of the crew and I brought our instruments and had a great jam session while we were on fire-watch. The six of us Pete, Andrew, Joe, Brandon, Steve and myself are all musicians of one sort or another (along with 99 percent of stagehands in general). Half of us being headbangers the other half of us more on the hippie side, we called it Heavy Metal Bongo Sacrifice. Even Hunter and Tony from Acme were in on the jam.

CHECK IT OUT

Smooth Landing

I've finally settled down (for a bit anyway), maybe I'll be able to start getting some work done again. I'm still pissed off at that psycho roommate of ours for the setback, but it's good to be out of a bad situation. Speaking of work -Creature's on the Loose will be playing at the Hollywood Theater on Saturday the 22nd, the Portland International Short Short festival -I hope it looks good on the big screen after the organizers' (www.zonkerfilms.com) digital transfer. It's also going into the first issue of the Oregon Literary Review (www.oregonliteraryreview.org). Pretty exciting.

Creature's on the Loose
Watch now


Well, the web archive for my files weren't working properly, so my audio files were loading but not my video. Samantha fixed it by putting it on our site... Nothing ever seems to work right the first time.

I worked a load out at one of the local network studios the other day, some deal called Gimme the Mike (creative, I know). One of these goofy deals where they get their force fed celebrity news anchor or weatherman or whatever, try to make ten people look like half the country, and give away an SUV to make it exciting. This time Joanne won! So they had the thing driven into the studio and put in front of their blue screen wall so they can make it look like it's flying through space or whatever.
I act as if these people are a bunch of morons and they don't help the situation by putting a bunch of signs on the windshield saying "Gimme me the Mike!" and "Joanne your #1!"

Time

It's not been easy to get much playing in lately...in between homes, everything I own in boxes, working every day, interruptions, catching colds...

I finally got a chance to do some playing in the backyard of my friends house in between the load-in and load-out of Audioslave (who put on a good show).

It took a while to warm up considering I was just getting over a cold, but I believe I'm getting closer to my goal of improvised songwriting. If I don't have the time or money to develop tunes right now at least I can record what I'm doing in the moment so I can come back to it later on.

Improv 9-27-05
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With only a couple of hours to play in a couple of weeks the almost constant interruptions were obviously irritating.

Blues Interrupted
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One interruption was finding out that one of our good friends had been attacked. We haven't heard from her since getting her somewhat ambiguous email, I hope she's okay...

Somewhere in America

Here I am somewhere in America, surviving. Floating around trying to be an artist. Still without a home, but hey, more and more cafes have wireless so I can still do this blog every once in a while. Buy a coffee post a blog. Here's an experimental film I made earlier this year, it's called "i". Everything I do is a bit autobiographical and this is partly a day in the life and partly a bunch of images that created the mood I was in at the time.

I
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In Over My Head

Well, it's a great title I chose for this weblog, as that's the way life can seem. I played at People's cooperative yesterday and forgot my memory chip so, although the audio levels of my recording would have been great I had no recording to speak of.
I'm going to assume that I forgot the card because of everything else going on in my life.

The family and I moved in July to find a better place for doing business, and now we're being forced to move again. Our roomate is a complete psycho. He keeps guns in the house, including a 9mm handgun and a "tactical shotgun" as he calls it. He threatened to shoot our friend and colleague because she told him she wasn't interested in him. Now he told Samantha that he wants to slit my throat. And he can't understand why we're being so unreasonable! People ask us how we meet all these psychos (more about the other psychos later). It's just luck I guess.
So, anyway, the gig at People's was great, it's one of my favorite places to play, I get to be theme music for an egalitarian establishment whose motto is "feeding the revolution." But because I didn't have my chip I'm going to have to upload a couple of more segments from the Alberta Street Co-op.

FREE
Listen now
WHISPERING WIND
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LAST NIGHT
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Alberta Street Coop 8-27-05

Saturday was a great time playing at the Alberta Street Coop. I've decided to start recording my gigs, but this time the audio was peaking out. Next time I'll keep the levels lower than I expect. I played some improvised blues that was pretty cool (aside from the peaking).

LISTEN HERE

In Over My Head

Well, this is going to be my way of sticking an arm up out of the water and telling the world (as many as are listening) what's going on.

Mike Mudd's animated video featured in new publication

Mike Mudd's animated music video "Creature's on the Loose" will be featured in the first issue of The Oregon Literary Review. It has also been entered in several film festivals and shown at local Portland venues. Check it out