More Asbjorn music, and Portishead fan-geek-ery...

Alright, so...

In my last entry, I pretty much blatantly ASKED you to call me crazy. I requested that my readers psychoanalyze a recent dream that I had, and the only responses that I received were from a couple of people that know me personally extremely well. The rest of you are slacking. You almost passed up an opportunity to tell me I'm as off my rocker as you think that I am. But it's not too late. I'm still curious. Let me know what you think is dancing around in my subconscious.

In other news, as more notes of continuation of my last entry...

Shortly after I posted last with recent updates from music projects affiliated with the Asbjorn Poetry and Arts Collective, Nat Ward's Aperture project posted a set of new dark ambient electronic tracks to their page. Definitely solid mood-music and atmosphere and texture tracks well worth checking out.


In broader musical news, after a rather questionable decade, things are starting to look up. Retrospectively, of course... but after cultural situations spend a time falling backwards, sometimes it takes looking into the recent past (a point prior to things going awry) to move into what is to (positively) come.

Yes, I sound like a fan-geek. Yes, this is old news in the music blog-o-sphere.

But, as I see it, this is one of my only massive cultural weak-spots. The only issue on which I AM, admittedly, a bit of the fan-geek.

That's right, I'm talking about Portishead.

If you haven't heard, they're back.

Here are some videos of new songs from their recent All Tomorrow's Parties appearance.

Strange Dreams and Music, Music Out of Strange Dreams...

I have finally gotten around to establishing an online presence for the acoustic/ eclectic-folk songs that I've been dabbling in for years and am just now starting to focus more of my musical attention on. So, check out my new music profile on Myspace, listen to the songs, add me, and leave some feedback.

What's up on the site right now are merely some extremely rough mixes for the sake of the songs alone, and most is not even, honestly, terribly "new" material. In fact, the only track that's actually "new" is the first one on the player, "The Substance of Logic." It is dedicated to someone who would have heard it prior to now, had she bothered to open the package that I sent her. The second song, "Symphonies and Dorian Dreams," was briefly debuted on the LeVautourEnsemble site a couple of years ago (when it actually was a "brand new track"), but I soon realized that it was not nearly "electro" enough for the record that I was putting together for that project. The other two songs currently on the player ("The Box" and "13.5%") were composed and recorded shortly after I moved to Arizona, about four years ago. Both require some lyrical tweaking and new recordings, but what I have will have to serve as sufficient examples for the time-being.



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In other musical news from the Asbjorn Poetry and Arts Collective family...

I have added a spirally, surreal instrumental jam called "The Pits are Deep" to the Myspace player for the Phoenix lineup of The Green Sea.

I added two more tracks from the LeVautourEnsemble record "...whose wings are a dull reality..." to the player for that project for free download.

I tossed a couple more tracks from Ashes of Frost's 2001 "release" "Mysts of the Iced Morn" up on the retrospective profile for that outfit.

Wes Hopeless, my principle collaborator in the Phoenix lineup of The Green Sea, has added a new song to the profile for his electronic project, Entropy 33.

Jacob The Dandy has recently added a new track called "Expletive, Expletive" to his iSound player that's pretty neat.


In other news, I had a very strange dream last night that I can't seem to get out of my mind. I was on some sort of "family vacation" (although I don't recall any members of my family being present). My car was stolen, converted into a convertible, and used as some sort of a suicide-bomb on a cul-de-sac. Meanwhile, I was left to care for a baby that wasn't mine, who quickly and before my eyes began to age and grow. She rapidly became a toddler, a cute little girl placing her hand in mine for protection, ad then a competent, well-spoken, smart and well-mannered young woman, pulling herself closer into me as she aged, kissing me, as we walked together, still hand in hand, toward the burning wreckage of my now-topless little white car.

Go ahead, psychoanalyze me. I personally have no idea what this means.

An Introduction to Miss Chloe Claustrophobia.

One of my primary intentions with this blog involves the construction of a centralized location from which to synthesize and blur the lines between art-genres as they weave in and out of each other as the multiple mediums that I work with engage in the same projects from multiple simultaneous angles in attempts to more thoroughly adress the same concepts.

Whew, that was a mouthful. Basically, this blog is a place for me to put it all together, to place in the appropriate context {the piece of music} that needs {the fiction sketch} that needs {the visual image} that was rendered in response to {the critial review} in order to fully make sense or create the sensation or idea that it is intended to. (obviously all {brackets} in the foregoing statement are examples interchangeable with countless other variables. I think you get the point.)

This catch-all idea is also intended to afford me the oportunity to address other topics that enthrall me, using my own work as examples, such as the lack of binary and objective certainty in matters of creativity, such as ambiguities as to the "source" or "credibility" of artistic creation (see my prior post about windchimes), and similar ambiguities about artistic "end-results," questions of which stage in the artistic process constitutes the "artistic product." It is this last question that I wish to adress by introducing my readers to a multi-faceted project that I'm engaged in. That project is, loosely, the construction of the artistic identity of an otherwise non-entity that I call "Miss Chloe Claustrophobia."

Miss Claustrophobia, as a project, is currently still in the nascent stages. I am by no means currently exibiting a completed work, as the "completed work" of the project will involve many elements and may never completely exist, although many of the elements leading up to the hypothetical "completion" of the project will be exibited in "completed" forms. Many "completed" pieces of work will therefore be exhibited as components and raw-materials for a larger work-in-progress. In theory.

This project is not a puzzle. If you watch the updates on the project that I leave in this blog waiting for some sort of thorough-going "answer" as the project gets closer to "completion," you will be sorely disappointed. I don't believe in binary "answers" to artisitc questions, or "statements" made by art that can be "cracked" so definitively that they hit you like the punchline to a bad joke. Much of the concept itself has to do with the necesity for conceptual subtlety and the lack of finite answers to questions of statement, purpose, and intent.

Miss Claustrophobia began as a dream. A very vague dream that I remember almost nothing of, at that. But a dream that left me with a very definite impression of a better understanding of latent human (and personal) phobias, obsessions, and insecurities upon waking. The day after waking from this dream, I wrote a song with my Doom-Rock band The Green Sea called "The Plea of Miss Claustrophobia" that captured the concepts of the dream as they seemed in my mind at the time, in an appropriately vague, elusive, and frantic manner.

This is the song that therefore began the project-


This is a video of The Green Sea performing that song while writing it the day after the dream that inspired it-
Snake pitt

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I will continue this explanation, with some of the images and ideas that followed, as well as future plans for the project, most likely tomorow.

Until then, stay out of the snake pit.