“If he is an artist he is progressive and if he is progressive he must break with tradition.”
– Louis Horst
from “Chance And Circumstance: Twenty Years With Cage And Cunningham,” (Alfred A. Knopf: 2007), by Carolyn Brown, pg. 97.
Strange to be in Berlin writing about the final work in April, all of which took place in Chicago, but that’s the way it is…
What was supposed to be a month of research into the painting of Francis Bacon and Willem DeKooning with hopes of finding structural applications in music from their use of representation and abstraction, ended up being another period of trying to meet deadlines for compositions, performances, albums, and organization. So much for space and time to look around.
Rehearsals started for the Atomic School Days project in my basement on the 18th of April. Everyone brought in at least one piece, Jeb Bishop and I had two, so there was quite a bit of material to cover. Basically we’d work from noon until nearly 6pm each day, with concerts taking place almost every night that Paal, Fredrik, Magnus, Kjell, and Haavard were in town (Ingebrigt lives in Chicago now so he’s more or less a regular on the scene here).
After Tuesday’s rehearsal I met with Bob Weston to master the CINC (a free improvisation trio with Paul Lytton and Philipp Wachsman) album for Okka Disk. The source material came from live concerts that happened in France and Slovenia during our tour Europe in October, 2004. The cd will be a limited edition release to coincide with our first North American performances this June. Should be a remarkable trip, finalized dates to be posted on the website calendar very soon.
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