More music...

First off... As I alluded to in my last entry, after being "in the works" for the better part of ten years, the debut record of my experimental literary-electro project LeVautourEnsemble has finally been released!

To get this thing out, we've teamed up with a great little record-label out of Newmarket, New Hampshire called Headhat Records. The partnership is a really good fit for the project... Since 2001, Headhat's been putting out interesting, experimental, and obscure material, with a refreshing strategy that reminds us of a digital-updating of the D.I.Y. attitude of the cassette-mixtape labels we grew up with.

The record was officially released Monday, 10/4/10, and is available for download now, with album-art, liner-notes, etc, here... and the best part is? It's available for FREE (or optional donation if you're feeling particularly generous and supportive).

Don't forget to browse the rest of the Headhat catalog as well, there's a lot of neat stuff over there.

Also, don't forget to stop by and "like" LeVautourEnsemble and Headhat Records on Facebook!

Other music news... 

Check out Pull Trouble From the Fire. I've been making some noise with these guys lately... very exciting stuff, a ton of fun... very interesting things to come on that front I'm sure.

Following up on something else from my last entry, the show that I sat in with The Tuna Fish Discrepancy last month was a ton of fun, and I want to thank Ross and company immensely for the opportunity to tag along and mangle their songs. 

Video-footage from almost the entire show is available here...

This is my personal favorite-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0YJFLZlT8Y

In news of other shows upcoming... mark your calendars... Friday, Oct. 22 will be the first in a (hopefully) recurring series of experimental electronic nights called "PASTICHE: an evening of post-modern sound-experimentation" at The Jam Factory (Next to Raxx, on Elm St.) in Manchester, New Hampshire... I will be playing an improvised LeVautourEnsemble noise-electro set, with The Attic Bits and The Ross Boyd Experience. A flyer and more details (particularly some crowd-response prompts to allow YOU to help me make my set as crazy as possible) will be coming in my next entry... hopefully tomorrow.

Catch-all seasons-change plugs-and-shout-outs.

A very long summer is finally over, and my last semester of my Master's program has begun.

Predictably, I had several blog entries in the cue that I had been trying to get in before summer ended, but that obviously didn't happen. Most notably, I realized I hadn't written any record or show reviews in a while, and wanted to get back to it a bit... more about that later.

This entry, therefore, will just be a truncated collection of plugs and shout-outs that I need to get out before I become completely swept up in reading and research.

First. Most of you (at least those who know me personally, or have read my blog in the past) are probably aware that I haven't played a live-show as a musician in quite a while (at least a few years? Maybe more?). Well, this Saturday (Sept. 11th) that's scheduled to change. And, hey, what way to get back in the swing than with something completely strange, right?

I've been asked to sit in that night with The Tuna Fish Discrepancy. Those good gentlemen were looking to do something a little more... abstract... for their set at this show... and I'm honored to have had my help requested in order to make that happen for them. Basically, I'll be throwing down some noise, on an odd-ball sort of "DJ"-rig.

...and, if we're going to make it a strange and memorable night you don't want to miss, we may as well go all the way, right? So, Nat Ward and I will be closing out the evening by throwing down a very rare sort of tag-team set of live, improvised, free-form electro-noise chaos. You're welcome. Be there. 

September 11th. Manchester, New Hampshire. "The Jam Factory," inside Raxx Billiards. 8 pm, 21+, $5 at the door.

Let's see... other news...

Oh yeah. I have finally put the final track on LeVautourEnsemble's "...whose wings are a dull reality," a record that's been in the works for the better part of ten years.... and I'm finally calling it officially finished. Options for its release are currently being discussed, and more details will come soon. 

Here's the video for that final track, called "Physical Consent"-

{Disclaimer- This song was composed to get inside the head of a fictional character and scenario. The lyrical content expressed herein does not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or ideas of Bernard P. Provencher LeVautour, LeVautourEnsemble, the Asbjorn Arts Collective, or their affiliates.}

OK, I think that's enough for tonight... part 2 coming, hopefully tomorrow, with the rest of the things I wanted to discuss... but tonight I need to get back to reading Chaucer.

Madcap Recap, Part 2: Transition-periods, Creative-writing, Workshopping-groups...etc.

OK, so I should really stop posting "to be continued" at the end of entries here. That phrase seems to be a bit of a curse on this blog; the trigger for some of my longer absences from posting, for which I have very little in the way of excuses.

So, where was I? I believe I was recapping a semester (and now half of a subsequent summer) in which I haven't posted much...

Since I left off with some site-housekeeping, it seems appropriate to resume on a similar note. You may notice that there's a bit of a new look around here... I figured it was time. Let me know what you think, I'm still tinkering with it, and there are elements that I'm not sure whether I like or not.

You may also notice, if you had scrolled to the bottom of the page recently, that I finally got around to putting together a new logo for the Asbjorn Art Collective. Again, it was time.

Continuing, then, with assorted Asbjorn news... I'm pretty sure that since my last regular updates, there have been quite a few new videos added to the collective's Youtube channel, from Tipsy Cougar, Civil Vain, The Green Sea, LeVautourEnsemble, my solo acoustic stuff, etc. Stop by, check them out, leave snarky comments that will make us laugh, share the ones you like with your friends.

You may also notice, by the badges on the right sidebar, that there are now fan-pages on Facebook for LeVautourEnsemble, The Green Sea, Tipsy Cougar, and Swords We Swallow. Stop by, check out some audio, and "like" us (well, if you, umm, like us...).

One of the side-effects of grad-school is that my creative-writing work has taken a near-complete hiatus for the last year. (It's seemed increasingly ironic to me lately that there's such a wide disconnect between studying Literature and writing [non-critical] Literature.... and I definitely have some personal qualms with that gap.) Therefore, one of my personal assignments to myself for the summer has been to get my chops back up to where they were prior, resolve some craft-issues that have been sitting on pause, and hopefully have some of my own non-academic work written, edited, and (ideally) ready to be submitted for publication before the next semester starts. To help with this goal, I've been working on getting together a new work-shopping group, with both online forums for critique, and, hopefully, physical meetings, to help our members push each other toward achieving their personal writing-goals. We are still actively looking for members; If you're interested, stop by the Asbjorn Writers' Workshop group-page on Facebook, take a look around, and send a request to join!

My first piece that I'm working through with the group is tentatively titled "Nails... Dig... In," a short work that I've been somewhat snarkily referring to as "commercially viable, gritty, art-house fiction." At this point I'm in the brainstorming stage of my process... to be perfectly honest, due to a particular quirk in the way that I tend to write, what I'm working on right now is putting together a recording of a track that the DJ in a particular scene might be spinning, to help me to better "get inside" the story and the idea in my head... chances are this track will appear soon from LeVautourEnsemble, since such experimental aspects of my writing-process are pretty much the sole reason that that particular project exists.

In other new-music news, Tipsy Cougar is working on a studio-track? That's right, my noisy indie-electro outfit that has stubbornly prided ourselves for a couple of years on our extremely primitive recording techniques (much of our record "Immaculate Conceptions," which we keep claiming is done and then changing our minds, was recorded live with a single mic in the middle of the room, sometimes straight to cassette-tape) finally decided to see what would happen if we actually {*gasp*} record something. What happens? Well, it's not done yet, but so far it reminds me of what it might sound like if Lou Reed, Prince, and Kanye West teamed up to collaborate on a club-banger for hipster electro-DJ's. I might be exaggerating a bit, but I'm definitely not kidding.

On a more personal note, I'm tired of transition-periods. And it feels, lately, like my life is a constant string of them. I moved from Dover last month, and I'm currently staying with family in Manchester until I move in to a new place in Portsmouth in August. I'm living out of boxes and spending more time than I would like commuting to work on the coast. But, if you're in Manchester and want to meet up before I head back out that way and things get hectic again, be in touch.  

Madcap Recap, Part 1: Semester's-End-Scribbles, Food For Thought, The I.D. Student, New Orleans, etc...

It's been far too long since I've posted here. This past semester's been rather hectic. Crazy, even. How crazy? This crazy-

(my paper-writing-process: scribbled on the living-room walls)

This entry, then, will be a sort of haphazard recap of the time since my last post, some lingering thought-fragments, etc, that I'd like to get out of the way before resuming "regular" postings. This will presumably end up being the first in a two-installment series on the topic, as there's quite a chunk of chaos I'd like to cover...

Some food for thought first, from Bruno Latour, inspired by an ongoing dialogue I've been having with another grad-student from a different University...

"Military experts constantly revise their strategic doctrines, their contingency plans, the size, direction, and technology of their projectiles, their smart bombs, their missiles; I wonder why we, we alone, would be saved from those sorts of revisions. It does not seem to me that we have been as quick, in academia, to prepare ourselves for new threats, new dangers, new tasks, new targets. Are we not like those mechanical toys that endlessly make the same gestures when everything else has changed around them? Would it not be rather terrible if we were still training young kids- yes, young recruits, young cadets- for wars that are no longer possible, fighting enemies long gone, conquering territories that no longer exist, leaving them ill-equipped in the face of threats we had not anticipated, for which we are so thoroughly unprepared."

"Is it really asking too much from our collective intellectual life to devise, at least once a century, some new critical tools?"

Just a thought. Ok, then... where to start with the recap? Since my last pre-hiatus entry was a plug for my column at The Interdisciplinary Student, this is probably a good time to point out that I've since added another entry to that site, a bit of a playful deconstruction of the idea of "comparativism" and my tenuous involvement with it, prior to traveling to present a paper at the American Comparative Literature Association's annual conference. (Which reminds me that I never followed up at that site either... sorry Michelle... that's about the point in the term when things got really crazy.)

Logically, that brings me to my next topic. This semester, I travelled to New Orleans for my first literary conference. I was hoping to compile either a photo- or video-blog of my experiences that weekend, but unfortunately my Blackberry decided to come down with an odd ailment halfway through the trip, making this more difficult than it should have otherwise been. Here's a selection of photos that I did happen to capture, however, with brief and scattered caption-commentary-

Yes, I'm a big enough geek to take a picture of my name-badge. It's my first one. So what?

Arrival. The famous Hotel Monteleone, primary venue of the conference, and my Easter-weekend residence.

Royal from Bourbon, in shadows.

The view from the window of my room.

Oh yeah, did I mention I'd never been to New Orleans before?

I have a soft-spot for trellises...

Bourbon Street, predictably blurry at night...

La Fie Verte.

Odd juxtaposition. Holy weekend, Catholic city, notorious street of sin...

The "Literary Traditions" of the Big Easy are, of course, far cooler than elsewhere...

OK, that's probably enough for today...  lost-time-recap to-be-continued. 

Oh, one last thing, though, a brief house-keeping note- I've been getting a lot of spam comments lately... like junk about cheap generic drugs, websites featuring taboo sex-acts, or links to help me spam others with promo-bot-software. Does this mean my blog's hit some sort of a web-traffic radar? (I doubt it, but that's the best positive-spin I could give it...) What it DOES mean, though, is that I've changed a few minor settings about the way that things are set up around here (as it was, I can't seem to figure out how to delete them.) Most noticeable change is that if you leave a comment now, it will say that it needs to be approved by the admin before it posts. I want to make it VERY clear that this ISN'T in any way an attempt to censor comments here, or because I don't want discussions or feedback. It's merely because I'm tired of checking my phone and seeing that there's more corporate junk littering unrelated threads on my page. My apologies, wish I didn't have to do this... hope you'll understand, dear reader... and continue to communicate with my posts on the comment-threads.

"To Bridge or Wedge the Fault-gap..."

My second blog-installment for the site "The Interdisciplinary Student" is now up. In this entry, I discuss the crux and confusion of the current/ future place of the humanities in the academic world, and how the term "interdisciplinary" can either become an important component to finding/ building our futures, or a meaningless fiscal/ institutional catch-phrase that merely makes the problems bigger.

Check it out, here.

...a couple quick things...

My time is limited, since I'm knee-deep in research, so I have to make this quick... but there are a couple brief things that I wanted to point out.

First, you may remember a couple of months ago, provoked by a comment to a prior entry, I dove headlong (at least temporarily) into the heated ongoing debate about the name of the "era of thought" that we currently reside within, and what might come next, with a belated critique of Alan Kirby's 2006 essay "The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond." (follow that link if you don't recall). Well, due (I presume) to the wonders that are Google, another blogger/ artist (with whom I am not personally acquainted) stumbled onto my piece while engaging in the conversation from his own angle. I am flattered to be cited on the reading-lists/ bibliographies for two consecutive entries of his blog, along-side such names as Derida and Lyotard. He has some really interesting things to say on the topic; I strongly encourage you all to head on over and take a read- The Art of John Bittinger Klomp.

Second, I want to congratulate Mr. Macalastair Ming (slide-guitarist for Tipsy Cougar, etc.) for currently having the most views on the new Asbjorn Collective Youtube Channel. One night recently, I really wanted to make some music, but didn't have time... so I challenged Ming to record something weird and post it. I'm not sure that I'd call what he posted "weird," but I would call it "good." Check it out. I'm glad to see there's finally content up on that channel that I'm not in, which is definitely one of the goals. While you're there, I just posted a new acoustic track tonight, and Wes Hopeless stopped by to add some old footage from The Green Sea days in Phoenix. If you're interested in contributing some material to our little odd-ball museum-collection, please be in touch. My friends be warned- I've now discovered that challenging talented people to produce content on short-notice is productive and fulfilling for all involved... so it WILL be happening on a more regular basis.

"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.