I’ve given up on revising my thesis for now. I’m not going to be able to focus on it with the job for Marti so far from completed, and with so much to do before I leave LA for four months.

Today I am testing all my audio gear before hitting the road.
I’m also hoping to repack and start disassembling the garoffice.
I’m getting all the love mixtapes exported, and will get the first batch burned today, I hope. I’ll leave the first one on the bus on Sunday when I travel North to SF.

I’ll be there ten days: trying to say goodbye to a ton of people; finish the Marti job; revise my thesis; say goodbye to the GF; and record music for the Bounded by Silence project Phil and Libby and I are working on.

I’m hoping to record bits of that record with every musician I stay with. That’s a lot of people over the next four months. The heart will be me and Phil and Libby writing lyrics and laying down frames. Of course, by then, we’ll be laying down frames over pieces recorded with Nobu and Alex and a number of other folks, so…
The hope is to create the bastard child of David Thomas and Marilyn Manson, wetnursed by Comus.

I had a great convo about the editing of Disembody with my father this morning. I am thinking I’ll buy another travel drive so I can take the footage from the project. I’ll try to watch it and get a feel for what we have while on the road.
Because I really needed something else to do on this trip, LOL.

Spent a couple hours on email and FB this morning chatting with folks I hope to see on my trip.

Blah that’s enough blathering for now. I can’t wait to see my GF tomorrow!

I’m back at work this week and noticed I had Disembody soundtrack on my computer, so I listened to it while working. I think it’s one of the most professional things to come out of this project so far, and I really enjoy hearing it. Phil and Libby, you created a wonderful set.

i love talking about the installation! yesterday my friend, min came by to check it out and hang out. we go way back in chicago where we were roomates for a couple of years and part of a close group of friends, some from college and some from the art and music scene in chicago. i think she’s been in LA for a few years now. we grabbed lunch with phil and libby and caught up on things. a bunch of the crew was at the same vietnamese restaurant. i’m liking LA. but i REALLY love explaining the whole disembody concept and showing off all the cool things in progress. all kinds of exchanges and sights are being recorded, things i never noticed much doing projects in the past. just being aware of the camera makes me think about what it’s capturing. i always thought of making art as “living” but now that that part of it is the art, it’s hard to see it that way. it’s “bigger than life” even as mundane as it is. no, really, making art is mundane. but by doing something you feel like doing you end up challenging yourself both in technique and creativity. everybody here wants to talk ideas even while we solve specific problems. the confessional does the trick though as does this blog. basically we’re in a reality show of making art. i can’t wait to show angela. we talked on the phone tonight too and jonny turned the webcam on me. she’ll be here in 3 days. xoxo, angela.

Actually this whole weekend has been a little unnerving. One of the primary investors is being hit hard by the current economy, and may be pulling out of the project. Which, with three and a half weeks to go, will introduce a serious complication. LOL
Of course, that was always one of the main points of 23E Studios, to devise a project so ambitious it could only fail, and then find a way to make it succeed.
I meet with that investor today to talk.
Then I begin improvising. As deflated as I feel fearing this is coming, I must say I’m also a little excited. Up until now everything has gone so smoothly…
Too smoothly. The film was going to be boring.

Another aspect of the unnerving weekend was that our potential architectural model maker leaves town on the 22nd of June. And he can’t give me a bid, let alone start building, until I get some measurements from a crew member, who hasn’t had a chance to get the measurements from her studio. So, over the last few days I’ve been watching the narrow window of opportunity for the architectural model close. Which, given that this afternoon we could conceivably lose half of the remaining money I was expecting, is probably for the best.

Our press release and other promotional materials that were supposed to be finished this weekend, are all tardy. So, those deadlines have been on my mind a lot, too.

Having said that, we’re now in a place where the project is simply unstoppable. And this is really the part of the project that is most thrilling for me, being caught up in something that is beyond control. The next few weeks can be nothing but pure improvisation. I get to live my art the way I play my music, by the seat of my pants; constantly adjusting to my partners and peers; sometimes leading or throwing out a riff we all ride, other times having to change direction on a dime when they introduce a new line. It’s probably a poor metaphor, but that is one of the ways I think about Disembody - it is one of my compositions, but the sound is spread out over the course of a year, impossible to hear with human senses and on a human time-scale.

I used to compose works that required performing acts of sound throughout a day or a week or a year. All the while recording my life, sometimes around the clock for weeks. Those recordings were then compressed to discover the rhythms inherent, or to find the composition of the sound acts within the music of my life.
Disembody is very much like one of those compositions, except this time our final product is a film. And this time it is a piece of music improvised by an orchestra of my closest friends, as opposed to being a solo work within the orchestra of my life.

Disembody is a unique feeling. There’s a wonderfully complex and seemingly contradictory feeling I get (and I think many performers do) before playing music with people. The mix of fear and excitement, feeding each other, hopped-up nerves. It’s a great feeling, really addictive.
Normally I have that feeling in the hours leading up to a performance or a studio session.
But for the last few weeks I’ve had that sensation coursing though my days and nights. It comes in waves. But I’ve never had it so regularly, so frequently before.
Except maybe on my first oRSo tour, when I’d get it before the show each night.
Except now I get it at the most random times. It’s strange how trepidation and fear can be so addictive and thrilling.

Anyway, the past three days I’ve experienced a very heightened sense of deflation mixed with the thrill of having to overcome a challenge.

So, having talked about the things not going right, let me mention that they are greatly outweighed by things going right. Stel and I met last night and he is bringing a couple of eight port gigabit switches so we can set up a solid network in the gallery. As well, he’s bringing several wireless access points. And he came up with a simple and reliable way to pull off the ending of the film, that doesn’t require a video switcher.
Phil and Libby are both raring to go on the project now that their wedding is behind them.
All of my crew members blow me away with their dedication and skills. Erin and Jonny have worked tirelessly on the website (our main promotional tool), posters, the confessional, screen printing, the arcade and a ton of other aspects; Amy is bending over backwards trying to help find funding and food donations; Carol-Anne and Keturah are spending hundreds of hours creating the interior design and all of its elements; Carson and Ted and David are all working on the build out; marcella, elise, Alex and Skye are pooling their resources to fashion an incredibly organized and efficient shoot; Hanif, Han and Ote are all working to make the promotion and conceit of the project as broad but focused as possible. Janet and Arthur are going far beyond the call of nepotism in accommodating all my demands and desires. And Susan, of course, is simply mind-blowing in her openness to letting us do whatever we dream up.

So, all in all, despite missed deadlines and a few setbacks, I find my spirits remain high. I’ll weigh in again after I meet with the investor. Maybe I’ll even have news on how we’ll need to rejigger the project to accommodate such a substantial loss.