A couple of years ago, I served as the organizer for the Saratoga Native American Festival (2006 and 2007). During the 2007 festival, I had the opportunity to sit in with Abenaki storyteller, author and linguist, Jesse Bruchac, for the first song of his set. Below are two cuts, the first is Jesse on drum [...]

Back in 1990, Erik Huber and I set about to record a theme album about an old man who confronts his inner demons. We called it Since Childhood (I introduced it in this post). The inimitable Emily Kate Hall is the female vocalist… Without apologies for its synth patina, from the cassette vault: sc-02-coming_home.mp3Enable Javascript [...]

Side B of Since Childhood (introduced here). In case you missed Side A, you can find it here. This time, I want to give Steve Scalfati a shout out for his collaboration and creativity. He was listed as the “one-take wonder” in the liner notes. So true. Without continued lack of apologies for its synth [...]

These two songs are place together here just so I could name a post “Pure Maple Sugar and the La Brea tar pits”. Mission accomplished. May I just take this moment to thank you for spending time out of your busy life to listen to the sounds herein. My assumption is that you are reading [...]

These songs share little in common except that they both read like a roadmap to my dream mind. The latter, an untitled improvisation, is sloppy – off-rhythm, occasionally atonal. And that’s just fine. I have vague memories of being very sick when I recorded that one and at one point actually falling asleep in the [...]

This song contains some samples from the William S. Burroughs tape cutting experiments (like Curse Go Back here). I have a secret bond with initialed odd fellows: William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, R. Buckminster Fuller, Douglas R. Hofstadter, etc. The song is a kaleidoscope quiltwork of dreamsounds and cognitive cloudbursts. And that, sir, was [...]

Back in 1996, Joe Rojo invited me to play flute on his Holiday Reunion album released on Global Pacific Records. I was flown down to California where we stayed on a relaxing horse ranch and made music in a fine recording studio. Joe is still making music in Seattle at Martin’s Off Madison. The title [...]

I’m not talking about room to breathe – the title is in reference to a virtual room that I created in my mind while practicing self-hypnosis in my teens. I would “go” to the room and pull my brain out of my head and engage in meta-hypnosis by meditating on my brain as an object. [...]

Why? Because nobody else had written a song about them… “In recreational mathematics, a polyomino is a polyform with the square as its base form. It is a connected shape formed as the union of one or more identical squares in distinct locations on the plane, taken from the regular square tiling, such that every [...]

I guess I’ve stopped trying to present songs thematically. The title of this post would be evidence of that. What does tie these two together is that they are both solo piano pieces. Off the Coast was recorded during the Since Childhood sessions. It was conceived as a background track for a seal clubbing documentary [...]

You are being eaten by the sky. There were lyrics to that one – about how when we are children we crawl, then we learn to walk, then we fly when we’re older, and eventually we’re just eaten by the sky (please refer to this post if you would like a happy song). The other [...]

The first one below is titled The Secret World of Cardinal Fox. It was written long before the recent scandals hit the Catholic Church. It is a reference to the name of my character in the role-playing game called Top Secret. I can’t remember much other than my weapon of choice – which was a [...]

In my defense, these and the last post’s songs where recorded solely on an Alesis QS6 and a four track to cassette. Not much of a defense, but I’ll take what I can get. Here’s the thing… I’m not really proud of these songs – they aren’t shining examples of my best work. But, and [...]

This and the next post constitute a package of songs I wrote in the early 2000s, but should have written in the late 80s by the sound of them. And oh, what hideous names I chose to call them. Bolerical (which I guess isn’t too bad) has a few musical shout outs to my man [...]

Back in late 80s, someone I knew (sure can’t remember who now) was connected with a project to turn Greg Bear’s Eon novel into a video game. I was asked to score some short orchestral bits that were to be used in the demo of the game. I have no idea what ever became of [...]

These two songs mellow me out. The first one, ‘I am not inside of me’ was written as soundtrack music for mind flying. It works for me… by the end of the song, my eyes are closed and I am soaring. It starts out mildly grating because that’s the sound of the world that the [...]

Listening to Lost Tongues from two posts ago, I was reminded of other World Beat inspired songs I recorded. Mixing instrument sounds from around the world can be very exciting. I get the same feeling when mixing textures and colors of glass for a stained glass window. Sometimes the combinations are illuminating. Below is Invocation [...]

For a brief period, I was really into the idea of creating music that took hold of the brain and held it in a state of suspension. It’s not trance music, but the three tracks below are meant to be subtly hypnotic. If I put each song on a scale, they are about 50% samples, [...]

I served in U.S. Army Infantry from 1991 to 1993. When my Mom found out I had enlisted she was torn – she felt that the experience would douse the fires of creativity that fueled me. I can see how that might happen to some folks, but I found many outlets that kept me sane. [...]

In 1990, Erik Huber and I recorded a dark theme album called Since Childhood. It was about the stuff most kids think about at 19: Satan, arson, inner demons, Revelation, redemption… you know, the usual. The project included Emily Kate Hall on vocals, Steve Scalfati on sax, Bruce Huber on cello, Greg Strickland on guitar, [...]

At night my family’s dreams are nurtured by sounds from the CD players in our bedrooms. Tynan favors stories from the oral traditions of the Haudenosaunee and Abenaki, Sawyer likes mellow music or talk radio, and Becca and I have a few different mixes of mellow instrumentals that we rotate every so often. Over the [...]

When my son Tynan was born, I wrote a couple of instrumental tunes that we could dance around to and be silly. He’s now nine – all grown up and serious. I’m still dancing around and being silly. So it goes, so it goes… oppenneer-tynanagogo.mp3Enable Javascript to play audio content on this site. 0:00 / [...]

While listening to Mickey Hart’s ‘Planet Drum’ album, I became enamored with the idea of collaborating with him on some tunes. Since our social calendars (and the fact that he doesn’t know me from Adam) never quite allowed us to work together, I did the next best thing. I sampled some beats from the CD [...]

Back in August of 1999, Erik Rockom, Donovan Curry and (I have recently been reminded) Bryan McGriff were chilling out in Erik’s living room working the 4-track. With Erik on bass, Donovan on percussion, Bryan on shaker, and me on piano and flute (though obviously not all at once)… erik_mark_kitchen_sink.mp3Enable Javascript to play audio content [...]