the twin cities music community
Doesn’t need me to say how great it is-it’s doing just fine without me cosigning. That said, Minneapolis/St. Paul is one of the most collaborative musical places I’ve ever encountered. Musicians and makers get together and talk, eat, drink, and create. It’s a very kind atmosphere.
I couldn’t have actualized, absorbed or really done much of anything on this last album (“Things You Already Know”)without a lot of help from some very brilliant people. Friends from bands Zoo Animal, and Aaron and the Sea to many of the top players from the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Minnesota Orchestra and other awesome musicians were happy to pluck, strum, bow, run boards and put up with me communicating what I wanted. The process was amazing. Everybody on the “final” product are here as one big, crazy (albeit topically unrelated) family.
Homemade propane tank drums, tons of bowed psaltery, singing bowls, bells, indoor wind-harps, guitars, rhodes keyboard, drum kits, coupled with older or more standard instruments make up the ensemble. I chose these instruments because of their color palette and the way they sound when combined (doubling it down most of the time with amps and pedals) you get some unique colors and shapes. Also, because of the strengths and limitations of all these instruments working together, formal structures and how pieces are shaped, starts to open up. Some things whip by at light speed, sometimes things have to slow down in order for a player to take a chord out of one effect pedal and into the other or for somebody else to move from one set-up to the next. Practical, physical stuff. Hopefully the limitations became the strengths.