This post is a short discussion of the work I did on my wife’s film adaptation of the Korean short story “Daerijeon” by Djuna. It’s got a free downloadable copy of the soundtrack available for anyone interested.
Daerijeon OST
Tag: my music
Bodhi Dharma’s Work Song
I recently made some updates to the Dabang Band subsite, mainly just fixing broken photo galleries but also adding song lyrics from the old archived site so they’re better formatted and more easily reachable. While I was doing that, I ran across lyrics for a few songs that never got recorded. One of them wasn’t mine, so I don’t know how the melody went–I’m pretty sure I never even heard the song, and I’m not sure how it ended up on the website. However, I also found the remnants of several of my own long-ago attempts at songwriting. It was a tough, …
Learned in the Studio
Recently I stumbled upon a track online that happens to be the first studio recording I ever made. It was a guest appearance on a folk-pop album titled Xylon I, by a local musician named Xylon Cozens, and I play soprano sax on a single track. It’s odd: there’s basically nothing online about Xylon, or the album, even though it was recorded in 1995: I guess that says something about my own personal sense that the Internet caught on about that time: it did for me, but everyone was still on dialup, and it didn’t seem apparent that the Internet and music would necessarily …
One More Composition: “When She Dreams of Moonlight” (1994)
I’ve added another composition to my Music page: it’s an underwhelming score, in fact a royal mess, but I figured it was worth notating in Musescore for the practice, as well as to capture the way I thought about music and composing in 1994, about halfway through my formal music studies. I suppose you could call it my attempt to compose “Third Stream” music: that is, music that combined jazz and classical approaches to create something new and alien to both sides of the divide. Here’s a copy of the score, though it’s pretty useless without the tape (and still …
Sopranoed! WX5ed! Fluted! But… Argh!
UPDATE (27 March 2014): Hold on! Looks like my students were wrong, and there is one sax tech somewhere in Saigon. Problem is, I’ll have to track him down myself: I went to the music shop my student mentioned to see if they had something that could remove the stuck swab, and they told me that, no, they can’t, but there’s a saxophone repairman in District 10 who can do it. They called him and he confirmed that he could. The catch? They tried to tell me I couldn’t go there myself, I had entrust the horn to their care. …
Akai EWI 5000 announced
UPDATE (25 Jan 2014): Video of the thing in action. Doesn’t reveal much, but I’ve added it anyway: Original Post: I plan on getting back to my promised post about Korean education, but this news deserves a little post, so: Although I have a Yamaha WX5 waiting for me in Seoul, my newest piece of musical kit is an Akai MPKmini, which I picked up to help me get some soundtrack work done for Mrs. Jiwaku’s latest ongoing film project. It’s an SF film, so a spacey, electronics-heavy soundtrack is needed, and the MPKmini is cheap, portable, and versatile enough …
다방 밴드 Flashbacks
A post announcing the publication of a memorial website for a band I played in back in Korea… plus photos from back in those days, and some reminiscences.
“The Logical Question and the Decaying Answer”
Whew! I’m feeling a sense of immense achievement, probably a little out of proportion to what I’ve actually done. Then again, this is a blog, so… I haven’t composed any new music (in terms of writing it down, I mean) in a couple of decades, but I have finally finished inputting the first of the pieces I’m notating with Musescore. Here’s the first page: I’m pleased because Musescore also lets me export audio for the pieces. The renderings are not perfect–honestly, they show the flaws of the piece, in that a human touch is really necessary for the piece to …
Altissimo and Productivity
In middle school, and early on in high school, I remember loving Saturday Night Live… which, for me, means “classic” SNL which, because I was born in 1974, means John Lovitz, Phil Hartman, Dennis Miller, Victoria Jackson (sigh) Jan Hooks, and Dana Carvey, mainly. But a highlight of the show–and what I always wished they’d include more of–was seeing (or at least hearing) Lenny Pickett wail on the tenor saxophone, as he did on the closing tune, week after week: http://youtu.be/lPAeCZZstK4 I’d wait through the R.E.M. and Randy Travis and Linda Ronstadt for those little clips of the house band… they were …
Eine Kleine Zombiemusik
I’ve just put the finishing touches on the music for Mrs. Jiwaku’s third short film, a zombie movie. Over the course of the project (developing the music, I mean) I’ve posted in-progress clips to Soundcloud, but now I’ve got the final, tidied-up and cleaner tracks up. They are, for the moment, downloadable–in part because Mrs. Jiwaku will need to download them. They are quite loud, by the way: I de-normalized the output because it seems to fit the aggressive sound we need, especially in the non-autonormalized version of Track #3. Just a warning, for those listening on headphones or about …