"The Interdisciplinary Student"

Michelle Jameson, a good friend of mine from Arizona State, put together a wonderful site of resources, tools, and ideas for students engaged in interdisciplinary scholarship.



The site is called "The Interdisciplinary Student", and can be easily found at www.theidstudent.com.

Oh yeah, and I'm honored to have been asked to contribute a blog-column to this great project.

Check it out.

Great work, Michelle, and thanks again for getting me involved with this.

Some Poetry...

Larger Constructions: Dedicated to the Influence of Walt Whitman, The Performance-Artist, Not the Poet, Documenting his Projects in Poetry.

I’m like a
Journalist on
Assignment, embedded
With a community
Of Artists,
Made up of
Mirror-reflections
And shattered
Refractions of
One.

Of course, to
Get the inside
Scoop, the
Journalist must
Also be a
member of the
Community, his
assignment part and parcel
Of the projects of the
Group.



And, some more poetry... this time on video, accompanied by live beats... This is "A Trilogy of Poems About Music."

Finishing Projects, tying-up pre-semester loose-ends...

... or, how many items can I cross off my "I don't have time for this during class so I better get it done now" list in a week?

In my last post, I linked to audio of a song that I had recently completed for LeVautourEnsemble... This week, I finished putting together the video for that track, pieced together out of footage snapped live while I was recording the track, on the webcam of a tiny blue netbook that I like to call the "baby robot." Obviously, there was quite a bit of editing involved here as well... Check it out.



I have also started a new Youtube channel for the Asbjorn Arts Collective. This channel is intended as a sort of evolving museum-collection, a kind of dumping-ground for content from myself, my collaborators and my friends... if you're interested in contributing content, or have material elsewhere on youtube that you'd like me to add to the page's "favorites," email me. The goal is to make this channel into a sort of one-stop-shopping destination for odd, abstract, and interesting videos from artists affiliated with present, past, and future incarnations of the collective. Stop by, check out some videos, leave some feedback, subscribe to the channel.

LeVautourEnsemble... back from the dead.

Sometimes projects that lay dormant for a while come surprisingly back from the dead.

I didn't see it coming, but in retrospect, my accidental decision to revive LeVautourEnsemble seems to make sense. The project was started while I was extremely busy with schoolwork as an undergrad. I think about things in an unusual way sometimes, so occasionally, when I was working on writing something or understanding a literary-concept, I would need to make some noise, drop a "soundtrack" for the scenario to tape in order to arrive at my "Eureka!" moment. LeVautourEnsemble was my solo-project dumping-ground for the outcomes of such sonic experimentation. The medium was mostly electronic, but quite a bit of other sonic textures slipped through the filters at various times as well.

During the couple of years I took off between degrees, I didn't need L.V.E.. I had collaborators around, and time on my hands. Fun records from both Tipsy Cougar and Swords We Swallow came out of this time. My first semester in Grad.school, however, I was back to the grind, with little of the vague "I'm a musician" time to work with that I had gotten temporarily used to. I still had sounds in my head, though, ideas that couldn't be worked through in any medium but sound. That's just how I work. So I kept a recording-file open on my macbook, and my equipment plugged in and ready to go, and when I hit a road-block, I would open it up, make a bit of noise, and let off some scholarly steam.

I ended up working on one track over the course of a single semester. It's called "Metamorphoses"... it's kind of a sonic and conceptual mess (as the single audible product of an entire semester should be, right?), but I'm fairly happy with it, considering...

So, between a new track that fits succinctly into the initial purpose of the project, and the video that I posted on Christmas Eve that I could think of no better umbrella to throw under, I guess LeVautourEnsemble is back... and my record "...whose wings are a dull reality." WASN'T really "completed" in 2006 like I thought that it was.

The track is available streaming on both Myspace (click here), and on our new Facebook fan-page (click here). Become a fan/ friend/ whatever... and let me know what you think! (Additional audio and videos from the project are available at both sites as well, and I would assume that more will follow. But as you can probably tell, this one's pretty much out of my control at this point.)

Welcome to 2010

Happy New Years.

I have a break from classes, and yet, so much still to do.

I have little new to write, really (although a whole lot in the works), but I figured I would sign on and share some footage of how the Tipsy Cougar crew rang in the decade at the Swords We Swallow Studios. Sara and I decided that, rather than going out, we would spend a quiet New Year's Eve at home, feel snazzy and drink martinis... then Ming and Dean joined us, which ended up proving that, in the right circumstances, four people can make for the most raging party in town. We ended up rocking out some pretty neat abstract, improvised electro-folk... noise... There are quite a few videos of this chaos floating around the interwebs right now, but this one (although long, I'm sorry) captures bits and pieces of most of them, and sums up the fun (and entertainment) of the evening nicely.