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 October 20 cover of The New Yorker recasts the masked ball scene from the classic silent film The Phantom of the Opera as a scene from Wall Street. The phantom, costumed as Death, looms over terrified brokers as the market plummets. You know the gory details: worst financial crisis since The Depression, exploding unemployment, people losing their homes and retirement income. The economic bust has already affected musicians and threatens to further change a musical landscape that has been under assault in recent years. 
What better way to celebrate the season than with some ghost stories? “Air: Ghost Stories, Spirits and Tales of Passage” is the fourth chapter of my collection of stories for Song of Fire. In 
October is the month when I sometimes put on ghost parties, inviting a group of friends together for an evening of ghost stories. Candles flicker inside grinning pumpkins. In a dark corner, a hooded ghoul sits propped in a chair. Some of the stories are macabre and disturbing, others melancholy and filled with pathos. Nine Inch Nails has recorded a set of instrumental “ghost stories” titled Ghosts I-IV that superbly captures this spectrum of the spectral. 
