The following songbooks are available:
Nouveau Flamenco
Borrasca
Opium
The Opium book also contains a transcription of the song The Winding Road/La Primavera from the album Leaning into the Night. The whole book was transcribed by Daniel Ward, who played Flamenco guitar in Luna Negra XL from 1997 to 1999.
In december Genpo Roshi gave a Dharma talk in which he said that Zazen is delicious. Like a refreshing drink after walking through the desert.
I have not really enjoyed playing guitar for a while. Pressure of my own making was building up. My next recording has to be the best recording yet…(and La Semana is a damn fine record!)
But, yesterday evening playing guitar was delicious. Like a drink after a long day in the desert. Wonderful. Inspiring. You know, it was the kind of playing where one is amazed at what one can do! I could not wait to start playing guitar again and was in my studio at 8AM this morning…
You know what the secret is? Whether you love it or hate it you have to do a certain amount of practice – every day. Like Zazen, playing guitar requires certain abilities that can whither away if not nourished. Like Zazen one has to keep doing it in order to break through. There are many days that I am not happy with my guitar playing or my sitting. And then, like the Santa Fe sun finding a hole between tightly packed clouds and making the whole landscape radiant for a moment… I find a new vista… and it was all worth it… so worth it.
Work + Discipline = Excellence. Eventually…
Music: The Boy and the Tree – susumu yokota
It took less than five minutes for the hail storm to deposit this and the storm was gone as quickly as it came. Life on a mountain.
Thoughts on Tears in the Rain:
Tears in the Rain will be the second album in my BLUE solo series, the follow-up to In the Arms of Love, although quite different in character and not a lullaby record.
All song titles will contain the date stamp of the original recording file, which I will turn into one continuous number. I will use military/european 24 hr time and a day/month/year configuration. If the original recording was made at 3:47PM on May 13th of 2005 the title of the track would be simply: 1547130505
Since there won’t be any sign-posts in the form of words in the title, the emotional content will need to be discovered by the listener on his/her own without any suggestions from me. It might be interesting to publish my thoughts on each track online a few weeks/months after release of the album.
Every track will start out as an improvisation, captured on location with my new Sound Devices 722 recorder. However, I will not have a purist attitude about the recording (- like that’s something new, eh?)… That means that while the beginning of a track might be a pure stereo recording of my guitar playing, the second half might have added sounds and noises for example… or he other way around: out of a field-sound collage the guitar playing emerges…
I plan on adding location-recordings and will make use of digital editing capabilities to augment the original guitar recording, i.e. loop a certain part of my performance, change the attack of certain notes, alter the decay of other notes, and change the location of the sound in the stereo field etc….
I have not yet decided whether all of the guitar sounds for each piece have to come from the original recording file of each piece. That would be an interesting limitation that I may well make a rule for this recording.
Some of my catalog was added to iTunes: NF, Poets & Angels and Borrasca. I am working on making more of the albums released by Epic Records available on iTunes as well.
