Treebeard

Sorry to have skipped a Music Monday; there will be some good stuff coming up but I've been swamped for the time being. For now I'll leave you with a picture from 2009's Guatemala expedition:

Druids rule!                                                              Photo credit: Steve Bylsma

Veggie corks

Last year I spent a week up at UALR's research cabin on the Buffalo River with my lab mate and good friend Dr. Robin Verble. She often commented on the row of glass bottles with vegetable-themed corks that stood perched upon the fridge; it usually entailed a desire to steal them. Thus, when she got married several months later I decided to give her the next best thing: home made reproductions.

They were a ton of fun to make although I don't think I got all of the vegetables right. There was an eggplant instead of the asparagus, and some other thing in place of the corncob. One particular thing I loved was how the best way to make most of these was to combine small sculpted components rather than molding the whole vegetable from a solid piece of clay; I felt it really spoke to the composite nature of plants.

Each of these goes with a square glass bottle about 2 inches tall.

Pelican beach (the one in my head)

This is an image salvaged from the chaff of fading dreams; that point when you're about to wake up and the oneiric weirdness comes flying thick and fast. I was standing on a beach watching this pelican serve bill-pouch-soup to a line of chameleons who changed their levels of transparency rather than their hue:

I have yet to be able to capture the method of transportation by which I arrived at this scene: inside the 6-seater rib cage of a 12-foot skeletal horse. It's a lot harder to draw.

Music Monday - Take IX

Saloon Music:


The first section is just riffing on a G-minor 12 bar blues. In the later half I was going for more of a ragtime feel, using some chord progressions from "Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear." The first time I played these in front of anybody my uncle said that I belonged in a saloon, so that kinda stuck. Play this track whenever you feel the urge to smash a sugar-glass bottle or a balsa wood chair over someone's head.

Research themed tats FTW!

This is a draft of a sleeve design commissioned by one of the faculty from my M.S. program, Dr. Matt Gifford. He had seen a tattoo design I drew for my roommate Jonathan and asked for a drawing that he could comment on, direct, and then bring to a tattoo artist. The (obviously not-to-scale) salamander is one of his study organisms, Plethodon jordani, and the tree is a hemlock with his daughter's name carved into it.

He really liked the design, but I have yet to hear if he's followed through and gotten it. My favorite part was seeing how excited his wife was with the idea of him getting a bicep half-sleeve: actually 100% super-stoked.

Siege weapons

A functional Lego trebuchet from Highschool:

It's outfitted with an adjustable pin that allows for fine tuning of the trajectory. What's really cool is that it will actually fire farther on wheels than if it's laid flush on the ground. It's got something to do with energy being lost in the backlash. Due to scaled proportions, and the low density of Legos, I supplemented the counterweight with downward pulling rubberbands. Cheating? Maybe, but I can still hit your turd of a castle from across the entire living room.

Music Monday - Take VIII

Piano Fragments: TPS-006

The dynamics in this particular recording aren't how I usually want them to be, but I'm finding that I often tense up while recording and I'm pleased to get takes without too many mistakes. I know I should try to be more patient, and I can record as many takes as necessary to get the perfect one, but as soon as I hit the record button I make ten times more errors than when I'm playing normally. I wish someone would come and record me in secret; despite how creepy that would actually be, it might yield great takes.

On the subject of recording, I'm using a really quick setup using nothing but keyboard --> 1/4in cable --> 1/8in adapter --> computer, and though the scope of what I can tweak is more limited this way, it means I'm much more likely to record on a daily basis so my output will be higher. Unfortunately, it does produce a lot of pops at random times, but they go away temporarily when I restart the software, so I don't think it's a cable problem.

For those of you who don't care a lick about the recording process, just listen to the piece. It's got a nice sweeping intensity to it. I hope that makes sense.