notes from the kelp

…click to listen:

…about the music

Stealth.

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Tumbling out of the dinghy one day this summer and stepping foot on the little uninhabited island of Sucia, I was soon met by the above, um, native. He (yes, I think it’s a he) glared at me as I approached. Threatening. Massive, at twenty feet across.
“What sayeth thou who dare to pass here?” his gravelly voice boomed with disdain. I think the earth even shook a little bit.
Unfazed, I raised my camera.
And he turned to stone.
Ok, well, he was already stone.

But I was fascinated by this visage, and by the Rorschach-like effect on my perception. This sort of thing happens around here quite frequently: creatures appearing out of nowhere. Even before I start taking the psychedelic hallucinogens. Which clearly, I do not need. I am my own acid trip. Probably way too much of the time.

There are far more interesting and important musings I could share with you right now. Oh, yes yes yes. Life has not been dull recently, what with another jaunt this past week to Manhattan, a side trip up to Yale to give another very fun ASCAP Composer Career Workshop, a new piece, Kettle Brew, for timpani, percussion and prerecorded electronics that is dangerously close to being completed, and an entertaining, if ominous looking, hail-infused storm that sped across the Strait of San Juan What the Fuca quite suddenly this afternoon:

…which accompaned me as I caught up on everything on my desk, having survived everything in the above paragraph.

Yes, I could share other things with you. But instead, I am choosing this: the sight for a short while from one of my windows yesterday.

Pretty exciting, huh? Sure, you see the edge of my deck railing, some well-dried tall grasses courtesy of about 80 rainless days in a row, and then a really wonderful glob of igneous rock called “ribbon chert,” that upon closer inspection, truly appears as though lava is careening right toward the house. It looks like this:

What you probably do not see, at least on first or second glance, is the decent sized animal in the photo. Gazing out the window in search of some of the right notes (having done a superb job finding many of the wrong ones for that piece I’m dangerously close to finishing), neither did I.

Nice rock.

Until it moved.

Wait for it…

And moved again.

Meow?

Wait for it…

The ultimate, um, catouflage. If I can make my musical notes as gracefully elusive and perfectly blended as a soft cat can make itself against this hard rock, well, I’ll have achieved something magical. Stealth has never been so impressive, nor so cute.