Pimpin' for my sistah

(and I promise, that's the last time I write in dialect here!). My good friend Robin Renee has a new video up by videographer Tom Curtin. I just wanted to share it with you. Emjoy!

Saturn Song (take 0)

Here is the Cassini spacecraft "recording" (brought into the audible range by NASA), turned into a 10-beat loop and mixed in with some drum samples from the Steve Tibbets loop library. Photos courtesy of NASA.

I would be interested in getting some feedback about this... see the poll on the blog page.

The Idea of Sharing Ideas

I guess I have to really decide the purpose of this blog. I want make my own creative process vis á vis music transparent. And to do that, I have to share with you my half-baked, or completely uncooked ideas, and the badly-performed or recorded works-in-progress. The unfinished work. The stuff that you know is just awful. The stuff that nobody but you is supposed to hear.

I have been reluctant to do this out of fear that someone else will "steal" my idea and do something fabulous with it and they'll get all the money and fame and whatever else. Today, I have to laugh about my hubris. Today, I realized that it's a ridiculous attitude to have at this time in my life (and I'm not sure if this attitude ever benefited me in any way in the past, either).  I need to remember that any idea that I may come up with from the various triggers in the world is highly likely to occur to a few thousand other people within a few days of me coming up with it, because they are also exposed to the same set of triggers. The odds that any of them will act on it is small, and the odds that of those who will act on it will do it in the same way as me are negligible.

So.

This is what I'm working on in the stolen moments between work and family and other commitments. I got an email from NASA about the Cassini probe detecting lightning on Saturn. They recorded it in the visual and audio spectrum. The few seconds of noise from Saturn had to be processed by NASA because the frequencies were out of the human audible range (and I suspect out of dog-hearing as well), and they replaced it with some sort of static noise. But it has rhythm to it. And I'm working on turning it into a drum track and build up from there.

Over the next few weeks, I'll treat you to the building blocks as I create them. Expect some interesting noise coming from me.

My two loves coming together in unexpected ways!

So I'm at one of my quilt guild meetings last night (Harvest Quilters), and a friend from one of the other guilds I'm in (who came to this guild's show  last weekend - where I had some pieces hanging, and won my first blue ribbon) came to the meeting last night. We haven't really discussed any of our other pursuits, and it turns out that Kristin is also an independent musician!

Go check out Kristin's band The Grip Weeds - their songs are very psychedelic, man!

Only the sound of the rain

There is no new music this week. The nor'easter knocked our power out, briefly, and we had water in the basement, so the weekend was spent rescuing stuff in the basement and cleaning up from the storm.

The Purple Dashiki

As I'm just coming off a 4-week slog of tremendous amounts of overtime and working through the weekend at my day job, I'm sorry to say I don't have any new music to share tonight. I do have a story from the road, prompted by my unpacking of a garment from storage this afternoon.

I unpacked my husband's purple dashiki today. When he bought it at the Starwood festival, he really liked it - it was cool in the summer weather, and he felt comfortable pushing the borders of his fashion sense away from the t-shirts and jeans that he basically lives in at home. I think he looks pretty good in it in this picture, at the gig we had at the festival (he's the one standing playing the djembe):

He was perfectly happy about it until he got to the stage, right before our gig, and saw our guitar player.

 

Yes, he is wearing the same shirt. No, this was not planned. Yes, it was like the prom when 2 girls show up in the same gown, and NO, my husband has not worn the purple dashiki since that one time.

OMG! SOLD OUT!!!

I have packaged up the last physical copy of Goddess Mandala that I am going to sell and it's going to the post office tomorrow.

(I actually have one more still in shrink wrap, but I'm keeping that for myself).

It's been a long haul selling those CDs, but from what I understand, most unsigned bands only sell about 200 or so copies of their physical CD (basically to family and friends). True, that statistic is at least 10 years old (as is Goddess Mandala), but it makes my selling 1000 units all the more impressive. Sales weren't steady or even - I sold most of the run in the first 5 years, and the last 50 took a while to move.

so I guess the question then becomes, What's next?

The future of Goddess Mandala is going to be all-digital. I had researched a non-iTunes micropayment music website where I can upload albums of MP3s and sell tracks individually or as entire albums. Since I was planning on marketing my new music that way, it makes sense to start up that account and service. So keep watching this space and the Music for the Goddess website for more information about how to get the new music that's on the way!