Field and Life Recordings
As I mentioned on the photoblog, we had a baby. Her name is Juniper and she was born on June 26, 2017. She showed up more than a month in advance so they shipped us out of the Potsdam hospital to go to Burlington instead. Sarah took a whirlwind ride in an ambulance, Otis and […]
Otis has a book of Nursery Rhymes. (This one.) He loves it, I think it’s just OK. Some of the poems are slightly different from the versions I grew up with (“washed poor Itsy out” instead of “washed the spider out”) and I’m always torn between singing what sounds right and what’s on the page. I also think the […]
Here’s the email warning I received: Helicopters landing on SUNY Potsdam campus on April 14 & 17 SUNY Potsdam would like to alert the campus community of an upcoming Reserve Officers’ Training Corps exercise that may draw your attention. At 9 a.m. on Thursday, April 14, three Chinook helicopters will land on the athletic fields […]
My friend Ed is a bit of an organologist and one day, while we were both still students at UCSB, he cranked up the old Aeolian player organ in Geiringer Hall and threw in a roll. Ed was planning on giving a talk (or something) about the organ and needed thirty or seconds of a […]
Pops performed Steve Reich’s Piano Phase with Gene Baker in the third installment of the Bakery Concert Series. It was great! We prepped Otis all morning, telling him the details of Western concert music attendance protocol and he was an excellent member of the audience. He started getting a little antsy toward the end, so we absconded […]
Recorded from the porch of our old digs in West Stockholm.
When we lived in West Stockholm, our landlord took a pretty hands-off approach to getting things fixed around the house. (After all, our three-bedroom apartment was only $550/mo.) At one point, the water pump started malfunctioning. Then it wouldn’t stop malfunctioning. It would ka-chunk into action, spin its motor, ka-chunk out of action, and make a […]
The sound of several audible crosswalk signals at this intersection in Melbourne, Australia is not unlike that of a marina full of boats at night. The echo-y polyrhythms sound, to me, just like a bunch of halyards slapping against masts as the boats get hit by passing wakes at different times and intensities. (Not Dad’s […]
One of the gifts we brought the the White Elephant at Mt. Macco last Christmas was a little thumb piano I found on Amazon. I can’t remember if it went with Grandma CC or Grandpa Larry, but it ended up in Manchester. On a recent visit, Otis and I snuck upstairs at one point for […]
On shitty days, we often find ourselves driving to the big city… Watertown, NY. (I’m being ironic, but they do have a Chipotle, a selection of thrift stores, and an indoor playground.) One of Otis’s favorite pastimes on these trips is to go to the Salmon Run Mall and look at (and run around and […]