Looking Up

The Good News: I'm recording a CD with one of my favorite musicians, UK artist Cary Grace...work has officially begun on our first collaborative CD and what I have heard sounds amazing...the engineering work was done by Cary and it is good. Really good.

She is recording the drums and bass in England and I will be doing my guitar work here...like science-fiction, it is.

There will be much more to follow...but first I'd like to let Cary introduce herself:

Summer: the ephemeral stuff of dreams.

Especially here in England.

The English summer is so scarce, so fleeting, so rare and precious, that it begs measurement in obsolete apothecary units such as grains and drachms. There might only be five or ten minutes in total of “summer” in any given year, and these may be split up over two months time, a minute here, a minute there, nearly lost amongst endless processions of murky drizzles and damp mists, but not forgotten—no—mythologized.

OK, that’s slight hyperbole. This is a truly beautiful country. A richness of history saturates its very bedrock, and there is a special atmosphere, a quality about the light here, that, quite simply, defies description.

When the weather is good, it is better than anywhere I have ever been. It is truly magical. There is a fairy light that permeates everything, especially at twilight—an other-worldly shimmer that dresses every blade of grass and every dancing leaf in the gossamer and silk of translucent but impenetrable mystery. In the long twilights of July, I could contemplate a wild rose petal for hours, as it twists almost imperceptibly in the gentle breeze, or follow the meandering path of a giant dragonfly as it dips and swings circles over a sparkling lake. When the angle of the sun is impossibly low, when its rays are suspended nearly horizontal, each molecule glints with a delicate inner phosphor.

Twilight time crawls, meanders, draws late into the evening.

One is lulled by subtle harmonies.

And then abruptly expelled into chill autumn with little warning.

At this time of year, when the days become shorter, usually I feel a sadness, a slowing down. There is a longing for those magic twilights.

Now, as the essomenic trappings of gaudy twinkling lights begin to appear on the shrubbery of the tasteless, any lingering hopes for one more scruple of summer have been dashed. I will have to wait over half a year, perhaps eight months or more, for another of those magicked summer days, but I do not feel sadness now.

It seems as if it took nearly the entire autumn to get here, but this brings me, at long last, to the point:

In addition to all my other ongoing projects, I’ve embarked on a brand new long-distance musical collaboration with Allan (hence my appearance here), which is winding up just as the summer winds down. There is a certain balance to it. It spins like a gyroscope. I suspect that between this and the other two or three albums I’m working on simultaneously, I will be far too busy to notice winter.

Christmas in July? That would be ghastly. But July at Christmas would be another thing entirely.

Many rotations may elapse before any more is revealed, but all will become clear—when the angle of the sun is just right.



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 Cary Grace discography links, all available on-line:

Perpetual Motion

Green Carrot Jam

Projections

Mendip Rock

Where You Go

And a great review of her latest double-CD album, Perpetual Motion.

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The Bad News: Bad News?  Dude, I'm recording a CD with one of my favorite musicians ; the first tracks have been started and they sound great.

There is no Bad News.