best laid plans

i'm back from a working spring break here in lala land. just finished booking a few shows through may and i'm back to working on the vocal piece i started in the fall (life's too short). the original version was quickly improvised using the abelton live software program. its a very powerful looping program/sequencer that passed my bullshit test by letting me easily create live realizations of modular pieces like terry riley's in c and lloyd rodgers the swing.

initially i had been using the program to help organize the spoken parts of the libretto, but on the third or fourth session i started recording my improvisations which became the form i am currently using.

i was excited by the power of the technology (i still am using it to improvise how gestures unfold). the main drawback of using this technology quickly became that my improvisation left little space (aesthetic, not rhythmic) for the vocal lines. later attempts to add them in seemed pretty silly and forced. sometimes you get lucky and there leaving certain elements to chance serendipitously work out, but this time i had to admit it was a compositional square peg in a round hole.

so version one was thrown into the trash... (it worked great as spoken word performance art though) but i must have saved up some good karma, because the new version is all that and a bag of chips. last wednesday we had our first instrumental sightreading and it almost played itself. this time the vocal parts slipped right into place without a fight.

the libretto is another pastiche text (like retrace our steps), and is a collaboration with my good friend john sinclair who helped me cobble together a conversation between nietzsche and a friend of ours. here is a first taste of a spot near the opening, enjoy.

n.
this is life as you live it
now and have lived it
you will have to live again and again
times without number
and there will be nothing new in it

f.
to those people who have made a difference in your life
you can do anything you want, because god wills it
you can do anything you want, whether god likes it or not
you can tell GOD what to do

n.
but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh
and all the unspeakable small and great in your life
must return to you and everything in the same series and sequence

f.
life’s too short
and you’re shorter than life
life’s too short to remember how to be who you are
i haven’t heard from you
have you heard from you?

(as you can see they are not really listening to each other. probably more like talking at each other)