Friday, August 14, 2009

Where is that sound coming from?

Well, it's been a fairly quiet and lazy summer. Between everyone being out of town and a lightened workload, I've had a lot more free time to.... well....what have I been up to again??

Oh yeah.... I guess the big news is that I'm back to playing music, after an almost year-long exile from my oldest dearest friend. I've been practicing weekly with my new french friend Clementine. We're going to start off by playing covers of old standards and early rock music and once we get our sound down we'll starting working on originals. I have a lot of ideas for directions to go with it but the only things I'm sure of is that our music will be 1)synthy 2)noisy 3)fun and 4)good (not sure if I've ever been this confident about future creative output but maybe moving to the other side of the world and starting your life anew does something for your self-confidence). Clementine's got a wonderful voice and I've been finding my voice more and more, thanks in part to the help of karaoke night at the Blind Eye (which I co-hosted for a couple weeks while Noah was out of town). We've been practicing in the centruries-old basement of Clem's apartment building in a space we've dubbed "the Dungeon". During our first practice a man was subdued by heroic firemen while attempting to jump off the roof of the building across the street and since we've moved our operations into the Dungeon it has rained during every practice, so maybe we're fated to be a little goth, too. I also suspect that I'll be starting a solo project at some point in the near future, as an outlet for my even noisier inclinations.

Other than music, the second most exciting part of the summer has been that after a lifetime of slowing down and scanning for shamrocks when walking by clover patches, I've finally found not one, but TWO four-leaf clovers. Not only that, but in the same week that I found the first I saw a full rainbow. I'm not generally superstitious but hopefully this indicates good things to come.

One beautiful Saturday a couple weeks ago, Clementine and I were tempted away from a planned band practice by an offer from a friend of hers to take a daytrip to Český Šternberk, an old majestic castle out in the countryside about 50km from Prague. We drove out there and spent the majority of the day walking around the town, hiking in the woods, and generally soaking in the fresh air and idyllic scenery. It was a perfect break from the bustling city life.

I'm proud to say that I've also managed to spend a lot of my free time studying Czech. I'm still pretty far from being a conversationalist but I've almost learned all of the convoluted case endings and I feel like I'm getting a much better grasp of the language.

Other than that and teaching, I haven't really been doing much. The biggest and most exciting news on the horizon is that Derek is coming to visit me in a week and my mom is following suit a few weeks later! It'll be fantastic to see people that I've known for more than 8 months. And even moreso that I'll be able to show them around this crazy town.

čau!

2 comments:

Ronispictures said...

Hey glad to hear you are making music, my creative friend! Hope to hear it someday.

Roni Z

PS. Need a backup singer? :)

Kyle said...

Maybe eventually. You got any friends who can record high quality stuff on their computer? Or any plans to move back? I'd like to have a really harsh industrial project with some good backup doowop girl singers.