After a four-year hiatus, I’m getting ready to release my sixth CD,
Specters of Twilight. It’s a major departure from my previous music, reflecting the influence of Nine Inch Nails, MeShell Ndegeocello (
The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams) and Tori Amos (
Venus and Back): industrial, strange, anti-pop. The music consists of fragments of melody, distorted sounds, obsessive ostinati and recurring themes that linger briefly before vanishing. Less visible links connect the songs, too, with passages from some tracks manipulated electronically and reincarnated in other tracks.
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Tags: science & technology by Jon O
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The John Lennon Educational Tour Bus is a non-profit mobile recording studio dedicated to providing students of all ages with hands-on opportunities to make music and produce video projects. The traveling program works together with local partners to create free events for middle, high school, and college age students to tour the bus and participate in the production of music, video and digital photography projects reflective of their ideas and concerns, regardless of their levels of expertise. I was able to visit the Bus during its stop at the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. and was impressed by the state-of-the-art equipment on board. [Read more →]
Whenever I hear Steely Dan’s “Babylon Sisters,” it’s suddenly fall of 1980 when I first moved to San Francisco. I see every detail of my studio apartment in a 1920s brownstone on the border of the Marina district: the honeycomb-patterned tile on the bathroom floor; the wall niche for the telephone; the space in the kitchen that once held the icebox. I relive the emotions of those early days in a new city, the excitement tinged with longings. “San Francisco show and tell.” Most songs don’t have this kind of emotional valence for me. But some do. Why is that? 
The answer, you might guess, is both.
