Mushrooms, still, and other non fungal topics...

There are still mushrooms in my cousin's ceiling and the work outside on the bricks has stopped because of the threat of rain.  This is not good.  I've been stressing mildly about it all week even though I'm not the one sleeping not in my bed.  My poor cousin has had to endure sleeping in the living room and getting woken up by me coming in late every night this week.  The next course of action for us is to withhold rent until the repairs are done and to only pay what we feel we owe for the month of essentially living in a one bedroom apartment.  But good luck getting in touch with my landlord.  This is the guy for whom I only have one phone number and no email address.  I'm going to start putting all my correspondences in snail mail if I have to...registered snail mail.

I met with Tania last night after work and ended up chatting about our upcoming endeavors at a little place called The Tea Set just off Greenwich Avenue until just about midnight when they kicked us out.  It's getting exciting now that she's back from Europe, talking about what's coming up next.  We're going to be doing Rhythmic Movement, the concert she did back in July, again sometime in November and she already has a spot booked on a program of new music at the Harlem National Black Theater in February 2012, at which she's going to premier my new piece for piano and electronics.  As it stands now, I'm taking a sketch that never got premiered but deserves to see some daylight in my opinion, fleshing it out and adding an electronic element.  Back when I was in grad school I saw a classmate of mine put a saxophone through a computer, sample it, and, using a program called Max/MSP, do all kinds of random shit with the sound.  I intend to do this same thing with this piano piece but the shit is not going to be random.  Like I did with Moon, Tides, Cycles, I plan on running the piano through Mainstage but instead of just adding effects to it and fading it in and out, I plan on sampling it, twisting the recording around a little and running it through some effects and mapping the sample chunks to my keyboard so I can play them during the second half of the piece.  We're going to get together again in November when she's less busy so I can record her playing what I've written of the piece and do some test runs with the sampling.  Meanwhile, I flesh out!

That sounded funny.  Idioms used in weird contexts. Heh.

In other exciting news, if I haven't mentioned, the premier screening of Sides of the Track is happening on October 7th and here's the trailer on Facebook.  Yes, that's my music!

This weekend, I have a friend coming into town for some art related conference and we plan on going to the DUMBO Arts Festival on Sunday.   I'll post about that and hopefully, I'll at least have the sense to bring my good camera.  More to come!