Carson and I are 17 days (02010, September 3) from rolling out of the Bay Area in the truck of the world’s most adorable yet frightening patron, Nightmare City’s own Mrs Carruthers!
We will be loaded down with tents, sleeping bags, tools, a 6′ x 2′ x 2′ steel sign, a bowel-squinching load of solar electricity supplies, 15′ feet of steel tubing sign post, a 6′ x 3′ diorama, and his frightening collection of sci-fi audio books.
That evening we will pick up the mind-altering goodness of Amy Sampson.
The next day we hit PLAND to visit Nancy Zastudil, and then Bledsoe, Texas!
On Sept 6 we install our dioramatic exhibition in the cutest and teeniest gallery at Texas Tech!
On Sept 7th we pick up Heidi and Ben, flying in from Copenhagen.
Alex Clausen joins us on Sept 10.
Heidi (and briefly, EbM) lectures at TTU on Sept 16.

Woohoo! Can you say exciting! Yup, I’m simply squirming in my skin with gleeful anticipation, as if I were crawling inside with psychic pleasure maggots!

Here’s the sign as of a couple days ago.

It was built by Terry Mason. We will soon install the solar powered bulbs and batteries. Then plexi behind the letters. Then red paint, just as our artist requested!
No seriously, I do need to use all these exclamation points because I am just that excited!

And here’s the diorama in different states.

Oh, heavenly sexy wood and paint and grit. Most reading this will not live to see the world terraformed to our vision, but our wealthier followers, you will get to watch across the centuries as we transform Earth and human consciousness, the grandest work of art ever attempted!

Meanwhile, 2011 and 2012 are shaping up nicely. It looks like we’ll have three to four installs each year, with one each year outside the U.S.

Yowza, since leaving Texas a couple weeks ago, EbM has been wandering the great American Northwest looking at sites and meeting folks.
But before we visit Cascadia, did I mention Jon and I got stuck in the Bledsonian desert for five hours? We were trying to offroad it to the site, but hit loose sand and spun out.

We got out just in time for me to catch my bus to Cascadia. 50 hours later, I met Carson in Tacoma, WA. We were there a few days. We met with a lawyer who is advising us on our 501(c)3 filing. He was great. I’m now working on that paperwork much more confidently. We will file for a business license in CA (or OR, if I move up here?) after the Bledsoe install in September. Then, hopefully, next year we’ll file for our 501(c)3. We also met with an architect who has installed signs much like ours before. He gave us lots of helpful info on how to properly secure our sign in the desert sands!

We also met with the Tacoma Arts Commission. The folks there are wonderful. They have great visions for Tacoma. Their SpaceWorks project, installing works in abandoned store fronts, was particularly impressive. This type of project is being executed in a number of US cities (and probably internationally, as well.) But, overall, I liked the works in Tacoma far more than I liked the works in the SF variation from this year.
Beyond SpaceWorks (and several other large-scale art projects), the TAC is converting an old rail line into an art trail. We are beginning a proposal to participate in that project.
We discussed a second possible project with TAC, one I am particularly excited about. Unfortunately, I can’t discuss it just yet. We need to put together a proposal and send it out before blathering about it all over the internets.

In a bizarre rout, and turn of events, Tacoma ended up being the first installation locale for EbM. We came across a Readymade we have claimed in the name of Earthbound Moon! My friends, I give you the 90 degree expressway curve.

As if the fact that this exists isn’t enough, Carson and I had been discussing commissioning (and until financing materializes, creating models of) just such onramps and offramps to nowhere (inspired by Seattle’s wonderful and bizarre expressways), moments before coming upon this most artistic site. I mean, talk about having no use value! Brilliant!

In Gig Harbor we visited the incredible Susan Joyce. <3

In Port Angeles we hung with Carson’s brother, Clay, a park ranger, surfer and musician. Check out The Artichoke Project.

We also visited my new favorite sculpture garden, “Art Outside” in the Webster Wood’s Art Park at the Port Angeles Fine Art Center.

This program is phenomenal. And the work is really excellent. Clay and Carson and I spent an hour or more wandering around the park, totally inspired! This is very much the model EbM is considering for the possible sculpture parks we’re discussing for the future. (Is there enough hedging in that sentence for you!) And, the sort of sculpture park we envision EbM being, once the future has arrived and folks can zip from one of our locations to another via teleportation or jetpack or quantum-slippage or space folding or however we’ll be traveling in 23 years or so.
The next morn we met with the PAFAC’s director, Jake Seniuk.

Totally inspiring. He’s an artist, curator and director. He shared his morning telling us about PAFAC and his time there. EbM will be making many more trips to the Olympic Peninsula, if only to visit with Jake.

We visited Port Townsend for a day. There a good friend of Carson’s schooled us on self-sufficiency and solar power. He also coached us on yurt building.

In 2011 and 2012, EbM has a couple/few yurts to build. And now we are so ready! We got more excellent solar advice from Kurt at Solar Motive.

We also looked at potential sites for a 2011 install. Definitely not here, because, you know, how could you improve this:

In Olympia, we visited Winsor Fireform. This is where, if there are gods above (and they are not the ones I adore), we will get our information signs for EbM’s sites made. Holy mackerel, people, this place brought tears of joy (and jealousy) to our eyes.

Then we rolled into Portland. From where I bring this exercise in how not to write a blog (infrequent updates with 1000s of words and too many pictures). More on EbM’s adventures in PDX in a couple days!

Well thank goodness for Jon and Danielle Whitfill.
They are my hosts here in Lubbock, Texas. They and their three kids are putting me up, feeding me, and ferrying me all over West Texas. Jon has introduced Earthbound Moon to a slew of amazing people in Lubbock, and scared up a ludicrous amount of in-kind goods to make our install possible this September. They are freaking art heroes!
I got into Lubbock Monday night, and Jon and I were on the road at 8am sharp the next morning to visit an artist and farmer in Plainview, Texas. He is using only a small portion of his farmland to grow these days (producing just for farmer’s markets), and has been considering ways to set the remainder up as a sculpture garden with attached residency program. He has several old farm buildings that could be converted to studios and residences.

I am incredibly pleased to say that EbM is now planning a September 2011 install for the property. And will soon begin writing five and ten year plans to help set-up and manage a residency program and sculpture garden there. This is very similar to SG-23E, the proposal we made for Parsons Hall in Holyoke, MA. SG-23E gave birth to EbM less than a year ago. For its own part, SG-23E is moving along at a relaxed New England pace. The sculpture garden/residency combo is also similar to what we hope to do in Lebanon, NH.
Some of you may have thought I was joking when I said I see only the Louvre, the Getty, and the Guggenheim as 23E’s competition in the art world. I was not.

After Plainview we headed to Bledsoe, Texas where we are installing our first work this September. Jon and I took his truck off-roading in an effort to find our property. But without a GPS, and with a week of rain transforming the desert since our last visit, we couldn’t actually find it in the sea of green. D’oh!

We did establish, however, that there is absolutely no way we are going to be able to create a path from the road to our site that is safe enough for Carol-Anne’s truck to transit. (Have I mentioned that the amazing Carol-Anne McChrystal is one of 23E’s primary patrons and heroes? I should have by now.) Fortunately, our new plan is vastly superior to building our own road (we’ll do that in 2011/2012) - we are borrowing an ATV (or two)! That’s right, picture it my friends: me, Alex Clausen, Amy Sampson, Heidi Hove, Libby Reed, Jon Whitfiill, Carson Murdach, and Benoit Coeuret in the Texas desert for two weeks with ATVs, a shotgun, rattlesnakes, wild boar, mosquitos, a giant solar powered “Welcome” sign, an augur, and scaffolding.

Did I not mention the scaffolding before? Oh, sorry. After visiting slaughter ranch (where our property is located) we spent a little time chatting with Priscilla, the co-owner of the only business in Bledsoe. Then we visited HD where we confirmed that we can rent a 15′ scaffold very affordably. Let’s face it, the very best part of Disembody was the scaffolding. It was pure unadulterated excitement trapped in vibrating yellow tubing.
And now, yes, now we are going to set up 15′ scaffolding in the freaking desert. I could explode just whispering it to you here and now. I have butterflies in my stomach, and my heart rate is dangerously elevated thinking about it.
We’re going to wrap it in tarps (an homage to Jean-Claude and Christo?) to create shade for working. We will keep our supplies elevated on it. We will sleep in its metal and plastic womb. This may be the sexiest thing ever achieved in America.

Yes, yesterday was exceptional, and the thrill of it will keep me adrenalized for weeks to come!

On September 7, 2011, 23 Entryways Into My Mind, Portal 7: A Mild Informality entered its second year (P7Y2). Year One (P7Y1) consisted of composing - with the collaboration of Daniel Miller, Moe Bowstern and a handful of others - approximately 365 scores for field recording. P7Y2 is a 365 day field recording extravaganza, wherein I am wearing an audio recorder on me 24/7 for an entire year. Yup, I am recording every sound in my environment for 8,760 consecutive hours. Obvs the project owes as much to Tehching Hsieh as John Cage. These are two artists who informed and inspired me as a teen more than just about any others. Well, The Residents, John Zorn and Current 93 were pretty damn important, too.
Those 8,760 hours of field recordings will make up the material for realizing the 365 compositions. I’ve scheduled five years to actually work on the realization. I did a smaller variation on this idea back in 2000, Une Fleuve Maudit (UFM). UFM took five years to complete. I’m hoping the lessons learned then will allow P7 to move at a headier pace.
You may be reading way too much about P7 on here in the coming year. Or given my lack of regularity at posting here, maybe not…

In November, 23E Studios will be creating an etching in an edition of 23 with Caladium Editions, in Champaign, IL.
Caladium Editions found us through the website. They asked us to create a print, curious as to what an installation-driven art collaborative would create when given a blank page. Currently, Honyo is working on two illustrations for the print. He is integrating images from Erin, Phil, Libby and Jack. The owners of Caladium, Walter and Molly, will also be contributing to the image as members of 23E. The images are proper Penrose tiles (P3), following the rules of tenfold symmetry.

23E just sent off an initial proposal to an arts center in New England. The proposal is for us to design, install and co-manage a sculpture garden.
Um, yeah, audacious and ludicrous we are.
That proposal has absorbed the last several months of my life. It was deeply research intensive as it is a site-specific, community work. I now know more about the turn of the century and industrialization in America in the 19th century than I ever could have imagined was possible.

In August My Daddy Ate My Eyes had a great tour. Documentation of the 6 installations should be complete by month’s end.
On September 25th SleepWalks will launch the first of our monthly research performances.
My Special Porpoise expects to perform in Chicago in mid-November.
And I’m nearly finished mixing the Stowe-Pembleton Project’s third and fourth records.

Transferred a couple hundred trip pictures from my phone to my computer. Maybe by the end of June or July I’ll have the data from the past six months organized and uploaded, finally. Maybe not, there’s thousands of photos and hundreds of hours of sound.

Rehearsed for the upcoming Copy Lake/MD*ME tour of Cascadia in July.
And recorded some new cymbal sounds for the CL cassette. Have about an hour of new cymbal experiments to cull through and edit.

But that will have to wait, for my friends Chuck and Barbara called and I’m heading out to Venice now for a bike ride and a BBQ!

OMFG, my life is good!

So, another day another mix of SPP4. We’re getting really close, basically tweaking the finer points of the doublebass and piano. For this recording we used a great studio, with awesome separation (by our standards), but we do have bleed from the piano and rhodes in the doublebass mic. That’s requiring a good deal of finessing. In the past we had no separation on mics, and that made mixing easier, as we had far fewer options. With these really clean tracks I can do a lot more in the mix, and the final record will sound a lot better. But having bleed in just one mic (out of 19), and unfortunately one of the most important mics, introduces a world of conflicts. Very time consuming. OTOH, I’m learning a ton about mixing and EQing and balance and the like.

I updated my photos and resume at IMDB today. I think I will be able to get work as an extra in scenes in biker bars and insane asylums now.

Tonight, more updates on vime. And recording my backing tracks for Copy Lake.

And now I’m trying to pick and sequence the tracks for the md*me cassettes and CDs we’ll be taking on tour. Last night I knocked out this rough image for the tee shirts:

It makes Alex uncomfortable. You know, the cliched use of a battered anime sexpot, so tired and sexist. Whatevs.
Also made this one for tee shirts and badges:

No one could have trouble with that. Except Fox’s and Groening’s lawyer’s, of course…

Did some reading on zombies for Vile Dead today, as well. I also updated the 23E Studios site to reflect that we’re in pre-production on VD and post on Disembody.

I started organizing my notes for an article on contemporary art, in particular the work I call Gutteralism.

Finally, I updated vime, and fixed up my laptop to maximize its processing power when playing live.

I’m pleased to say that we’re closing in on the final mixes of the fourth Stowe-Pembleton Project record. A few more good days, like I’ve had this past week, will get it in the can. And then it’s off to Soul Note. We’re pretty confident they’ll pick it up for release as our third release on their label.
But the third SPP record, embarrassingly, is still not mixed. D’oh! Heaven only knows if the label it was originally recorded for will still be interested. Rest assured getting SPP3 mixed is high on my spreadsheet of things to do. Well, item 13 of ~59, anyway. But since some activities exist in overlapping states, it’s higher than 13 might seem to suggest.

Research for Vile Dead continues. Which is to say I’m watching zombie related tv and film, as well as horror and supernatural flicks. I’ve been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes. This weekend I watched The Hunger (the first 2/3 is awesome. Then it’s downhill into complete, “quick, wrap it up, we’ve used our allotted 70 minutes! Screw linearity, comprehensibility, plot, characters and everything that’s happened in the film thus far, we need a quick ending. Oh hey, could you throw in a twist! Don’t worry about it making sense, this a vampire movie with David Bowie and lesbians, we can’t lose!”) and Hellboy II (Lots of fun to watch with absolutely no promise or pretension to being anything else.) I must admit, I always love the research phase of projects, but VD is particularly enjoyable.

Yesterday 23E Studios hosted a little tea party in the front courtyard of the garoffice. Our overlords, the Nightmare City City Council, were in town and wanted to check up on us. I think we passed the spot inspection. They declared the garoffice very nice, and expressed a strong faith in our ability to be productive in the 23E complex. While here they picked up their tribute for the year, the Nightmare City arcade from the Disembody installation/set. And their outfits from that film for use in future NC ventures.

(This is the courtyard. In the pic it is setup for mixing SPP4. It looked much nicer for the NC3: no computer paraphernalia, just my blue teapot and white cups and saucers.)

You’ll note from this post that the rebuilt desktop is performing fine thus far. I yanked out two internal drives, and hope to replace them soon with much larger drives for the logging and editing of Disembody. That’s one of the first things that came up in my logging strategy session with my father. The other big thing at this stage is establishing the best possible naming system for the clips. And defining parameters based on future uses of the footage. To that end I’ve begun a catalogue and timeline for the footage.

In other Disembody news, the NC3 think they spotted the dumpster from Disembody still residing in an alley in Chinatown where we filled it. The dumpster company has still not carried it away. Why not?
In sad Disembody news, 20th Century Props, where 23E rented theater seats for the Morgellon, is selling off its props and closing its doors. Oh, if only we could buy those seats for future projects! They’re being auctioned off, but A) I’ll be on tour and B) I have no money. So…

Above is some of the messy Copy Lake/My Daddy Ate My Eyes setup for our coming shows (and hopefully tour) in July. I’m mixing a MD8ME demo today. And rehearsing for the shows every day for the next many weeks. Also working on new material for Forever What?. We hope to rehearse in August in preparation for shows in Fall. With luck we’ll start gigging out semi-reguarly here in LA starting in September.

The garoffice came together today. It is more or less complete. Hoorah!

It features two music spaces. The first is for my Arp Odyssey and X-Station. The X-Station will run Live, as it has for the past couple years. The laptop will fit on the upper shelf between the mixer and Kaoss pad. So awesome. This will probably be my primary composition and rehearsal space. This is where I will work on the SPP and oRSo and My Special Porpoise and SleepWalks and FW? and Kenton Camerata stuff.

The second music station is more focused on My Daddy Ate My Eyes and Copy Lake, bands wherein I don’t use the computer. That station is super old school, with equipment that goes back to my early 90s music days in Carnival De Carnitas and Meow (and Suplex and Pale Ghost and DragKing and oRSo.) It’s all motors and toys and contact mics and bent tape players etc. I really look forward to playing with all that awesome goodness again. And working it into my other rig.

While on the topic ogf music, I worked on SPP4 a bit more today. Remixing Wich-i-tai-to twice. The way Nobu and I mix the SPP records (living on opposite coasts as we do) is a little bizarre. I mix and upload. He listens and calls. We debate, discuss and argue. I make a new mix based on our conversation. And upload it. And then he calls…

About the only other newsworthy 23E/MVM news is that the primary video editing computer, my desktop, was booted up today. It is imperfect. It was a great machine for many years. But ever since I was evicted in November 2007 from the Green Door Studio, it has been unreliable. It won’t run two monitors. It drops external drives. One of the RAID sets has disappeared now (but not one with any valuable data, fortunately.) This makes me sad as I obvs can’t replace this machine and have to log and edit Disembody on it.
Tomorrow, troubleshooting the dual monitors and RAID issues!

But now it’s time for more Vile Dead research. Buffy season 3, a zombie episode entitled, the Zeppo.

In other arcade news, Nightmare City will be in LA this weekend and they are taking their arcade back home to the sweaty city council offices.

In SPP news, this evening I made a new mix of Wichi-tai-to. It is now off in the ether for my compatriots on the fourth record to sound check.

Other music news, plans for Copy Lake and My Daddy Ate My Eyes to tour this July are moving along. Though I haven’t done any of the FW? recording I need to do for the Copy Lake demo. FW? are guesting on the cassette being released by Nightmare City records.
On the tour I’ll being playing bass and cymbal and home-made tchaudiotchkes (pronounced cha-dee-oh-ch-kees). It will be a return to my pre-Ableton days. Weird. And super-exciting. The new garoffice will feature a rehearsal space with my Arp and tchaudiotchekes and X-Station to hang out in. The porch will function as the work space for building tchaudiotchkes.

And now to wind out the evening, I’m watching some Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Vile Dead research.