This episode comes from the Youtube livestream on September 23, 2025. It’s been a while since I’ve posted a new episode, and I appreciate your patience for that. Things have been busy as I’ve adjusted to parenthood, and as I’ve accumulated a backlog of livestreams I’ve become intimidated by trying to parse through them and go through each jam to give my thoughts. I thought I’d just skip to the chase and post this episode as soon as I finished in order to just give my rambling thoughts as they’re fresh, or as fresh as they can be after jamming them out a bit.
The first piece is an experiment in playing in 5/4 live, which I never do. I’m working on a new quartet based on the Japanese tale of Kaguya hime, which tells the story of a moon princess born in a shining bamboo grove, pursued by 5 royal suitors who she gives 5 impossible tasks, and then returns to the moon to forget the old couple who loved and raised her. It’s a deliberate departure from Momotaro, which I recently turned into a quartet. There is a lot of declarative action in Momotaro, and in the Moon Princess I’m trying to stay more vague and ethereal, driven more by emotion than action.
Staying vague is its own challenge, and a bit of an exhausting one, so this stream was fun being able to get out some more rhythmically declarative sounds, which I think is how the rest of the session goes.
The third piece is a bit darker, and I really like the minor chords I arrive at here, and really tends to embody some of my angrier feelings about the sheer stupidity of some of the news recently. After this piece was done I joked that it was called “Tylenol Blues.” There’s a real satisfaction in being able to say something musically that feels a bit much to spell out in words, suffice to say that the sense of foreboding and anger that this piece evokes is no accident.
The final piece is much lighter, and was a fun catharsis and release after exploring my darker feelings about things. I’m really happy about some of the layered arco and love the scattered driving and washy movement it creates.