nEW and oLD

Wednesday, June 03, 2009 This weekend, I'll be doing sound design / live treatments for Jaamil Kosoko's new piece VIRUS at the Drake Theater in Philadelphia for the nEW Festival. The shows are

Friday June 5 @ 7PM
Saturday June 6 @ 9PM

The Drake Theater
1512 Spruce St.
Philadelphia, PA

Here's a description of the piece from Jaamil

VIRUS

We live in a media infested world where we depend heavily on technology to survive. Electrical wires entangle themselves around the bodies of the dancers to represent the restrictive power of technology, while also making visible the invisible web of the past. The wires are both beneficial and detrimental; they provide inspiration for the future by acting as lifelines to past experiences, but also drain the psyche by not allowing the individual to become free of these experiences. The forces of technology and the past are not working separately but in tandem because technology provides a way for past experiences to be recorded. The performers are constantly negotiating these aspects of their personalities moving between the human and the robotic, the empathetic and estranged, the plugged in and the cut off.

Should be a cool performance, the theater looks and sounds great.

I spent the day yesterday recording The West Philadelphia Orchestra six piece band version. This is the lineup that toured Mexico with last month with sax, trumpet, trombone, tuba, keys and drums. They did some Balkan inspired standards by Monk and Sun Ra as well as a couple of originals. It'll be a fun project to mix / produce. It's a lot more raw and loose than their full orchestral straight-up Balkan lineup I've seen live a few times. It'll be interesting how far out we can go with the mixing. I always feel like jazz instrumentation albums are afraid to experiment too much in the studio. Most jazz albums just try and reproduce the exact sound of the instrument and mix, like your seeing the band at a club. I'm talking about blowing out some cones by putting a sub-bass filter on the tuba! Ya dig?

Gemini Wolf is also getting ready for the CD Release in mid-July. Here's the spooky cover (pictured). We've been getting great feedback from people that have heard the album. The Philly CD Release show should be bonkers with Pink Skull, the aforementioned WPO, Bilwa and Neko at Jonny Brenda's. Gemini Wolf is going to have a few special guests for the show too. You can hear some of the tracks streaming on our MySpace right now!