This week were are headed all the way up to Bellingham Washington for a couple of educational programs for kindergarten to 6th grade students. This will be our second time going to Western Washington University and we’re looking forward to returning to Bellingham!
When you live in Los Angeles it’s very easy to forget how foul weather can be just a few short hours away. On our way to Reno we ran into a blizzard through the Sierras. Luckily the thoughtful staff at UNR called to warn us about the storm. Still it was hard for me to conceptualize putting chains on our van while reading that email in shorts and 80 degree weather that morning. Thank goodness Maz actually took the warning to heart and packed a proper snow jacket and gloves. We had a horrible time with putting chains on our van and once we got them on they broke! Kris then channeled his inner Macgyver and repaired the show chains by linking the disconnected sections with a key chain ring. All was saved!
It’s a good thing we made it because the performance was fantastic! The audience was very enthusiastic and the staff and sound engineers at the hall were all top notch. A big thank you goes out to CJ for bringing us out to Reno and to Chris, Rich, Bob, Scott and the rest of the staff for all of their work. We worked two new pieces into the concert and reworked another piece dramatically. I was very pleased with the flow of the second half with the new pieces and feel like our program keeps getting better and better. We have some recordings that I’ll post in the next couple of days. Then to top it all off after the concert a woman came up to us and gave us a koto! Thank you Akiko-san for the wonderful gift and we’ll put it to good use!
My brother-in-law is a graphic designer and is designing the packaging for EP 5. He came up with a great idea to screen print the cd packaging which fits in perfectly with the personal hand-made aesthetic of the EPs and our limited budget:) On Saturday he came over and we did the print run of 110 in our guest bedroom and he put together this cool video to document the process:
Check out more of Brent’s work at bpdesignlab.com!
We’re nearing completion of our new tracks for EP 5 and I have a fun experiment for OnEnsemble.org readers. This track is actually based on a groove from a song called Zeecha!! that has fallen out of the performance repertoire. A while back I had recorded two amazing percussionists Somnath Roy and Patrick Graham playing along to the groove and I thought it would be to remix what we had recorded for a track on EP 5. Here’s the opening minute of the track:
As you can see the track has no name right now and this is where your feedback comes into to play. Post your ideas for names for this track and I’ll pick a winner and we’ll put it on EP 5! It doesn’t need to be descriptive in any way or even make much sense, the more creative the title the better!
Our next performance will be in at the University of Nevada Reno. We’re performing Thursday March 4th at 7:30pm at the Nightingale Concert Hall. Tickets are $24 for adults and $12 for youth and can be purchased through the University of Nevada Reno’s website. If you know anyone in the Reno area help spread the word!
Okay so I’ve been thinking recently about how to make our website more interactive and use this forum in more engaging ways. So far I’ve come up with two ideas and want to see what you all think. One would be compose a new song by website feedback. It would basically work like this we would upload short clips of possible song ideas then you would be able to comment on which one you like. Then we’d go back to the studio with the clip with the most feedback then present two more possibilites and the process would continue until we had a finished song.
The other idea would be to put up on the website al the parts for one of our songs like “Gengakki” then all of you could download the parts re-arrange or remix the song and we’d upload the remixed songs for everyone’s enjoyement.
Suggestions?
Today was a huge day. We finished our last FoundatiOn Team funded workshop for Glassel Park Elementary. We did a short performance and then all of the kids that participated in the program got to perform in front of their whole school. It was great to how it all come together and we have some great documentation that we’ll be sharing soon.
After that we finished filming the commentaries and making of documentary for our music video/short film Yamasong. Sam has finished the film and the final version looks amazing! He’ll be submitting it to film festivals soon so keep an eye out for it! We’ll post news here but here’s a pic to whet your appetite:
We brought Kelvin down to Los Angeles this week to work on new material for EP 5. We pretty much spent the whole week at the studio and the tracks are really coming along. We’re shooting to have it all finished by the end of the month so those of you that donated to the FoundatiOn Team this can look forward to new On Ensemble music soon!
