Carjack! and more works-in-progress

Yesterday I finally finished a presentable version of The Cheese... I'm sure I'll want to tweak it further, but the main thing is, it was good enough to post on my myspage. I've been holding off for awhile on contacting venues to try to get gigs, until I had more presentable stuff on MySpace. I really wanted to have even more of my songs on there, but lately I've been feeling restless, working in my apartment, feeling like I ought to be getting out and doing stuff... and I went to see this dude in concert Friday, called Carjack!, and it made me even more restless.

Carjack! put on a very good show, lots of energy and weirdness; I recommend seeing him if you get the chance. It was at this little loft space in Rochester called The Factory. The crowd seemed to be young hip-looking college kids and high-schoolers and maybe a few middle-schoolers. I was the oldest person there I think except for Carjack! himself (who's 35... this may partly explain why I relate to his music), Carjack!'s sidekick, and some people who looked like parents of people in the other bands that were playing. I danced some at the show but mostly the scene felt a little too uptight for me to get too loose... other people were mostly standing still, crowded back against the walls of the small space while Carjack! cavorted about in the center. I had the impression that Carjack! was trying very hard to get people into it, and failing, and trying harder and still failing, and that he must be a very sad Carjack!. After the show I bought a homemade CD from him and talked to him and he talked a lot about what an awesome show he had put on, how he must have totally freaked those kids out and they didn't know what had hit them. While he was talking he was standing very close to me in the cramped space, looking down at me (I hadn't realized how much taller than me he was) and talking very quickly, loudly, and animatedly. I nodded and smiled a lot.

I tried promoting myself there a little bit... I got the contact info for the person who books shows at the Factory, and I told Carjack! about my thing and said we should play together. I am still a bit uncomfortable doing the self-promotion thing.

Carjack! was followed by Aleph-1. For the uninitiated, Aleph-1 is the mathematical term for the first infinity larger than the infinity which is the size of the integers (which is Aleph-0). I felt special that I understood their name, but unfortunately they were too prog-y for my taste; I thought the music was a bit self-indulgent and lacking in substance. I fantasized about heckling them with mathematical jargon: "You call yourselves uncountable? You're in one-to-one correspondence with every bad prog band from the '70s! Take it to the power-set, guys, take it to the power-set!" But I'm not that big of a jerk, so I just left early.

So I went home and checked out Carjack!'s MySpace and all his side projects, and was reminded, again, that you really don't have to have your stuff be too polished to get venues to give you gigs. So the next day I did one final round of tweaking on The Cheese and said to hell with it... posted it, and then emailed six places (the Factory, the Luna Cafe [St. Clair Shores], the Blind Pig [Ann Arbor], the Neutral Zone [teen hangout in Ann Arbor], TrumbullPlex [anarchist co-op in Detroit], the Asterisk [place in Brooklyn where Carjack! is playing next week]), sending them my MySpace link. I'll email more soon... maybe wait till I get feedback on this round? I'm procrastinating a little; this whole thing is a tad scary.

Here's The Cheese.

While I'm at it... here's another work-in-progress that I've been adding to over the past couple weeks:
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary Free-Association Song
"I never have enough lyrics to go with my music, so for this song I'll just read from the dictionary and free-associate and that'll be another one down."

Last week I spent several hours trying, and failing, to get Partch's tonality diamond (see my earlier post) to play with my music software. I got sick of wrestling with my computer and just wanted to play something, so finally I just programmed it so the keyboard was split in half with the upper half a quarter-tone lower than the lower half, and I started playing... that was a thrill. Just savor those quarter-tones.

Here's my little preliminary stab at microtonal music: Ha What Did I Say

I'm pretty proud of it actually... though I don't think it approaches the awesomeness of the piece by Charles Ives that inspired it: Quarter-Tone Piece #3: Chorale