Sometimes The Sky's Too Bright
7/19/2010 - 11:57 pm
I'm writing now from Reykjavik, where I'm working at a recording studio/record label for part of the summer. On noticing that another six (eight?) months have gone by without any change in this journal, here's a recording of a duet I wrote this spring for viola and French horn.
Sometimes the Sky's Too Bright (mp3)
Actually, the title is oddly appropriate right now, because here in Iceland - at midnight - it's light outside. Not REALLY light, but dusky. Anyway, not any degree of brightness that I'd normally associate with this time of day.
Heavily Armed, Wildest Aim
11/11/2009 - 3:30 pm
Here's a free mp3 of one of the new songs I'm working on. It's still a rough cut, but I hope you enjoy it:
Heavily Armed, Wildest Aim - demo (mp3)
UPDATE (1/8/2010): It was pointed out to me that the above link didn't work for a long time, but I think it should be okay now.
Songs for Damian
9/27/2009 - 3:30 pm
I have been recording a bunch of new stuff lately, but it looks like it will be a while before any of it will see the light of day. That said, I do recognize that it's been a while since I put an album out, and to make up for the delay, I've decided to release a bunch of unpublished drafts, outtakes, and extras as a sort of free, imaginary, digital EP. They're compiled and named for my infant cousin Damian, whose parents were starting to go crazy after about seven months of listening to Empty Rooms on repeat in the car to lull him to sleep and wanted some new music. I do hope that these songs can find appreciation among listeners over the age of 1 too, but I'll take what I can get.
So here are the first few. Some (02) were composed for short films, others (01, 04) are things I recorded that just never made it onto an album. Still others (03) are drafts of new songs that will hopefully be on this new CD I'm sketching out now. I hope you like them. They'll be up here for a few months, but I'll unfortunately have to take the links down eventually.
[links have been removed... sorry!]Goods and Services
8/31/2009 - 6:00pm
I tend to spend my summers playing for tips in places that have pianos and will let me put out an empty hat. I've done it for a couple of years with mild financial success, and this summer, my entrepreneurial spirit led me to purchase a larger hat on the (admittedly not very logical) assumption that doing so would bring in more generous tips.
As it turned out, my plan halfway worked. Over just a couple of months, my hat yielded the following:
- an enormous chocolate chip cookie
- a multi-page 9/11 conspiracy brochure
- the business card of a plumber
- a note saying “I gave you two bucks but I’d rather give you my number”
- (I’m serious about that last one)
- a tiny toy dinosaur
- chapstick
- 5 bottle caps (from 5 separate dates/locations)
- a long handwritten note from some guy where he addressed me as
"compadre" and earnestly encouraged me to visit his art gallery
- a pen with no ink in it
- the shrink-wrap from one of my CDs
- an IOU (dollar amount unspecified)
- a note saying "here's a tip: don't stand up in a canoe!"
Whether these gifts have been the effect of people misunderstanding the hat’s basic function or if I’ve just been playing in places that rely more heavily than expected on the barter system, it doesn’t really matter. Maybe they just think the larger hat looks too empty and are trying to help me out by filling it with whatever they can. I've got to be honest, though - this whole thing may have been disguised as a vague complaint, but the truth is that I love getting this wacky stuff and am secretly overjoyed whenever I get any of it. In fact, I'm going to start putting out an even bigger hat. Maybe one day I'll come home with a microwave or something.
Back in New England
6/15/2009 - 11:17pm
So, I may not have mentioned this before, but I've just returned from spending the first half of the year in Northern Ireland, where I was able to spend a semester at the School of Music and Sonic Arts at Queen's University Belfast, studying composition and recording technique. Hopefully this information goes a little ways towards explaining both my disappearance and this website's subsequent stagnation over the last five or six months. It was a pretty great experience, though - the school's thoroughly impressive Sonic Arts Research Centre features a sonic lab where listeners are literally surrounded by roughly forty loudspeakers: beneath the floor, along the walls, in the rafters. Performers can then diffuse works across the space from a board in the middle of the room. Tell me that's not cool.
In any case, I'm thrilled to be home, and have started lining up performances for the summer and fall (so please, book me - I'm desperate to get playing again). I'll be dividing my time this summer between Boston and southern New Hampshire, and will hopefully be recording some new material along the way as well. More on that later.
Anyway, it's really good to be back. Sorry again for the delayed posting but at least this time I won't make the mistake of promising to be better about that sort of thing.
October and Previous Months
10/17/2008 - 10:31 am
It being five months since the last update to this journal, I thought it might be time to regale you with what passes for news around here. Empty Rooms has had a great first few months, and is now available on iTunes, CDBaby, in record shops all over New England, and even a few elsewhere... I drove cross-country this summer writing for a travel guide, and took the opportunity to deposit copies of the record in nearly every state I went through. Except for the South Dakota-Wyoming stretch, where you're hard pressed to find a music store. Or a building.
In the meantime, between plugging the album (incidentally, I also have a huge pile of remarkably attractive black t-shirts emblazoned with "empty rooms" and the piano hammer graphic from the cover; let me know if you'd be interested in wearing one) and playing wherever they'll have me play, I've been scoring some more- I just composed and recorded the soundtrack to a full-length film by Michael Van Devere called "Perkins 28," which should be finished in the next month or two. And David Rice's Do Rivers, the animated short I scored last spring, is being shown at film festivals in Northampton, MA and Madrid, Spain. Dave and I will hopefully be attending the Northampton one, but Madrid is... well, it's on the other side of a fairly significant ocean, which poses a few logistal problems.
Hope that all is well with all of you; keep an eye on the performances page, but I promise to keep this journal more regularly updated too.
Music & Images
5/8/2008 - 12:07 pm
So as some of you know, I've recently had the chance to try a little film scoring, and have had tons of fun in the process. Two of the results are being shown tonight at 7:30 in Harvard's Carpenter Center Lecture Hall: Do Rivers (pictured) by David Rice, and Fortunes by Tiffanie Hsu are among a set of roughly 2 dozen short films being screened tonight, and though the event is ticketed, admission is free.
I had a blast scoring each of these films, and am deeply grateful to both directors for asking me to help. The whole process is crazy to watch and even crazier to be a part of. I hope I'll get to do a lot more of this in the future, but these first experiences with it were awesome ones.
In other news, Empty Rooms has finally made it onto iTunes. Check it out, write a review, tell all your friends:
CDBaby
4/25/2008 - 12:07 pm
As of last night, Empty Rooms is officially available for purchase online through CDBaby at the following link:
http://cd.cdbaby.com/bencosgrove2
Take a good look at that link, learn it well, and tell everybody you've ever met about it. Even if you already have the record (and liked it... only if you liked it), you might considering dropping by the CDBaby page to write a glowing review. I'm just saying.
Thanks, by the way, to the startling number of you that have already bought the record- I slaved over this guy for long enough that nothing is so supremely satisfying as seeing people consume and enjoy it. So thanks for the support, and please continue to give me feedback. I'm actually very interested in what people have to say about it.
It's Here!
4/9/2008 - 11:02 pm
Empty Rooms arrived a few days ago and had its formal release in Cambridge tonight- thanks to those of you who made it out! It's not online yet, but I am happy to ship copies anywhere on the planet until it shows up on iTunes and CDBaby in a month or so. And even after that, I suppose.
For now, you can get a CD for $10 by contacting me at kindofblue49@gmail.com. I'll hand-deliver to anyone in Cambridge or Boston, and I should be coming through Amherst/Central Mass this weekend with a huge batch to hand out there as well. But otherwise, if you just mail me a check (we'll work out shipping costs), I'll mail you a big CD-filled envelope.
Please let me know what you think. I hope to get some more stuff on the site about it in the coming weeks (as of now, there are several song clips posted on the "recordings" page), but for now, I'm just incredibly glad that this is done. Thanks again to everyone who helped me with this project; it's been like no other I've ever worked on.
Empty Nest
3/19/2008 - 2:31 pm
My baby has finally grown up and left the house. I sent the masters for Empty Rooms off to the factory yesterday, finally proving wrong the voice in my head that kept telling me this thing would never be done. So when I say that it will be released in a few weeks, I'm serious this time. Accordingly, I am pumped beyond belief.
In the meantime, I have no idea what to do with myself now that the album is out of my hands. As such, I've been taking all sorts of other projects on to distract myself, and will be spending the spring writing and recording scores for two short films. I also wrote the incidental music for a Harvard production of 12 Angry Men, which closes this weekend at the Loeb Experimental Theater on Brattle St. in Cambridge. Go see it if you can; the directors are good friends of mine and the actors are awesome.
There's also going to be an exhibition of my photography, which I'm hoping to tie into the release of the record, opening on April 9 in the Penthouse Cafe at Hilles, off Garden St. in Cambridge, MA. So come to that if you can, too. And if Empty Rooms has by then returned from its rite-of-passage journey to the manufacturer, hopefully I'll have some to hand out.
So again, only a few more weeks... I'll keep you posted on any major developments, but hopefully the next time you hear from me, I'll have a few thousand CDs to distribute.
In the meantime, enjoy this other new track- it's a big one, with Rey on trumpet in the middle and other friends of mine contributing drums and violin, respectively. And I even play the melody on trombone:
Come Down
3/4/2008 - 12:28 pm
This is one of the tracks from the new record, due out in a month or so. Let me know what you think, but only if you like it.
Also, the final track list for Empty Rooms is as follows:
1. harbor
2. on acrobats & calculus
3. distant music (song for michael furey)
4. toulouse #4
5. unfolding
6. many waters (elegy for dana, enfield, prescott, greenwich)
7. new salem
8. public alley 429
9. shoulder high
10. come down
11. armory road
12. anchor & crane
13. all that surrounds it (postscript)
Tell all your friends
2/13/2008 - 1:41 am
Yes, after 3 years of slavish toil, the new record, now featuring an actual title, is finally at the stage where it's almost ready to be born. Keep checking back for a track list, sound clips, release dates, and other information. Things will hopefully be getting interesting very soon.
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
12/8/2007 - 12:21 pm
Just a reminder to check out the performances page for a list of several upcoming shows around Boston & Keene over the next month or so. In addition, in Cambridge this Friday (12/14) at 8pm, I'll be performing my new electroacoustic piece "Inside/Around" on the 32-speaker Hydra system as part of a 2-day concert series with several other electroacoustic composers and performers at Paine Hall, Harvard University. Admission is free, but seating's limited. For details, check out huseac.fas.harvard.edu
Also, the new record is coming really, really soon (i.e. in a few months, I think). I promise. Seriously. More info will be here as progress is made.
And then there was website.
11/29/2007 - 11:54 pm
Thanks to the travails of web design superhero Zach Arnold, this website is finally up and running, and with no obnoxious junk (well, none that we didn't put here) all over it. Though it may take a little while for all the desired content to make its way onto these pages, we should have a pile of such novelties as links, performance dates, and even cool things to look at/listen to. So keep checking back.
Ideally, I'll occasionally have something profoundly insightful or noteworthy to say in these journal entries, so keep coming back here as well. But no promises.
In any case, welcome to the new site, and thanks for stopping by! And if any of you in your travels happen upon one Zach Arnold, whether or not the two of you are complete strangers, give him a thumbs up or maybe a hug and just say "thanks." Either he'll know what it's for or it'll be pretty awkward for both of you.