25 April 2014

4/15/14: I finished another MTB piece, then did two interviews for the tour. In the afternoon I rehearsed with Christof, Tim Daisy, and Nick Macri (who wasn’t able to do the tour but who will be the permanent bassist with Made To Break afterward), then I picked up t-shirts for tour and id more logistical work for the trip, details coming together but I definitely overbooked myself between mixing the new Side A album, recording the Margots album, preparing the first two Audiographic Records releases, composing for MTB and preparing for our tour, all at basically the same time. As a break from this organizational madness, Ellen and I went out to dinner with Tim, his wife Emma, and Christof in the neighborhood; I’m trying to learn to let go and calm down to enjoy the social aspects of what I’m doing with music since it creates added energy reserves and brings more focus and clarity to my thinking- continued work and running around is just going to burn me out.

4/16/14: I picked up the van with Steve Marquette, who is going to be the driver and merch guy on the Made To Break tour, then we got the backline equipment from the rental company, which ended up completely tapping me out financially because the company billed my card as opposed to keeping it on file and then allowing me to pay when I returned the equipment. Somehow I had to make it through to the Detroit gig so I coud get some cash coming in, and I was still faced with getting the train tickets from Philadelphia to Newark for the trip to our Watertown, MA gig on the 22nd… I put together a “game piece” based on time brackets in the van as I drove to Detroit with Steve, Christof and Tim; also started reading “John Cage & David Tudor: Correspondence on Interpretation and Performance” by Martin Iddon, and the Godard biography by Colin MacCabe, my books for the tour. We arrived at the motel reserved by the Detroit airport and by some miracle my bank card worked to to cover the incidentals until I could pay for the rooms with cash at check out on the morning of the 18th.

4/17/14: After all the discussions of pulling down as much online evidence of Jasper’s arrival, I woke up and checked my Facebook account and saw that Christof had just posted something about him and Jasper playing at Trinosophes in Detroit! I asked him to delete the post immediately then I got dropped off at the Detroit airport to pick up Jasper Stadhouders, fingers crossed that he would get through immigration. Amazingly, he arrived in he waiting area quickly and with no hassle. Part of the reason may have been that he had checked his bass under the plane so he didn’t have anything “unusual” with him that could flag him as a musician. After letting Jasper rest the band went to the van (not before he walked directly into some freshly paved concrete in front of the hotel with both feet- we got out of there as fast as we could before the ruined concrete was discovered by the crew finishing up the job; when we got back that night the entire area was thoroughly roped off). We got to the venue at 2pm to set up equipment and some of guys went to look at the city while Steve and I stayed behind and worked on tour details. Soundcheck/rehearsal took place with Jasper around 5:30- the first time he had ever played the music with us, and he did a brilliant job. He’s playing nearly everything on his Rickenbacker with a pick, so the sound is much more punchy, but it works extremely well. We ran through parts and then started playing on them a bit, explaining in more detail the approach to working with the material in Made To Break, how components can intersect, be reconstructed or deconstructed very freely as long as the tone and character of a piece is maintained. Jasper got the basic premise immediately. Everyone had some dinner at a good Thai restaurant and then we played two sets to a small but extremely enthusiastic audience- a nice way to start a two week tour with a group that’s just added a different member to the ensemble. The first set functioned on a basic level, and went well despite the boomy acoustics of the room. At the break I told Tim not to use his radio as part of the improvising because it diminished the clarity of Christof’s role in the band. On the second set things opened up much more and there was greater transparency and use of dynamics, people laying out more to give more room for things to spontaneously expand in various combinations of players. I was completely impressed with Jasper’s contributions from the start, especially considering he had just arrived from Europe! Steve, Jasper, Christof and I celebrated with some drinks and a heavy political discussion which thoroughly depressed me until I called it a night at 3am.