Tem Noon dot com

I took the RPM Challenge and finished an album in February.

See this directory for easy download of all the MP3s.

Here are extended liner notes from my RPM Challenge Page:

This is the most ancient story from my fictional home galaxy. It tells how Qaec (which means “Boy Genius” in Maec) was raised to be a brilliant scientist, who discovered a whole new and more accurate way to understand the world, from the inside.

When you are obsessed by something you are ready to throw your life into, or from another perspective, throw your life away on...you have to be pretty sure you are doing the right thing.

And so I struggle to define an emotional calculus. How to calculate how I feel now, and how those feelings will change, as I do things about them.

This is a challenging science, since how one feels now about how one will feel in the future leads to actions, which may not turn out to be accurate once the future arrives. Sometimes drastic actions.

Check out this video, I'm playing percussion for Mess, who frequents the Open mics between Bleeker and 3rd St, Sullivan and Thompson. This was taken March 31st 2008, at the Back Fence, at the corner of Thompson and Bleeker.

I put the Music is quotes in the title, because as it has been and as we use that term, it's been more industry than music.

KH, my total favorite songwriter of all time has helped put together a system that just may work. Check her blog at cashmusic.org You can download, you can pay what you want, you can subscribe.

I subscribed.

about CASH Music

With my new interest in the Hanuman Chalisa, I've started looking for other sanskrit scriptures which are traditionally chanted, and ran into the Heart Sutra. Here is a You Tube slideshow including the words as they are chanted.

The wisdom of the Heart Sutra is boundless, because it focuses on the intense infinite overriding power of emptiness to shape the universe, and the incredibly creative ways nothing has figured ways of acting by borrowing either space or time from the other. Forms of emptiness.

So many recording opportunities, I've again fallen way behind in editing, and even further in posting.

Here are three sections of the Drum and Dance from last Saturday's COSM Full Moon/Solstice Drum & Dance - Dec 22nd 2007. The first two are from the beginning, and the last is the very end...

Note that they sound better if you can get serious bass out of your speakers. Drum circles tend to sound very different depending on where you happen to be standing. The recorder was on the shaker table...the table with all the miscellaneous percussion, so all that stuff came out high in the mix, while most of the drums sound a bit farther away.

Sita Dasi leads the Chalisa from memory in any of seemingly endless melodies, and tempos. I've edited the latest Kirtans into individual Chalisas. Gets to the good parts quicker. And (if you're seeing the summary page) be sure to click on the title or "Read More" to see the full post, and the track with the English along with the sanskrit words.

From 4 Dec 2007 Kirtan: Harmonium & Tabla

Hanuman Chalisa 2
Hanuman Chalisa (Rockin' Tabla)

I've been playing tabla, the North Indian set of drums, since 1979, and especially in the last 10 years have been playing a lot of Kirtan, which is the east Indian spiritual chanting.

Recently, while fixing my friend's computer in her tiny house, we've been doing impromptu kirtans, mostly consisting of a long chant (rather than the more common repetitive short chants) called the Hanuman Chalisa. It is a chant to the Monkey God Hanuman, a devotee of Rama.

You have to understand that Sita Dasi is the sort of person that doesn't mind being called at 11:30pm to leave her house, bring her harmonium, and lead a series of Hanuman Chalisas. She'll just show up. And it's as much fun as anything I've done musically doing anything else. I love the way she sings, and I love Mary Grace who's crazy enough to make the call, and flips pages to keep up. Now I know if Mary needs computer help, I bring my tablas.

I worked in the production of "A Dreamer Examines his Pillow", a John Patrick Shanley play, which had only a one weekend, three performance schedule. Below is a link to pictures from the two Sunday performances. I played percussion between scenes, and along with certain scenes and the spoken dialogue.

It is a story that spans a lot of the void of the universe in the story of a man, his girlfriend, and her father.