What's this?

why Many Arrows Music Notes, and where it might be going...

When it comes to sharing new music, every musician I speak with is frustrated. For me, the old “make an album, work with a label, hype with teaser posts, plan a release concert, etc…” model just doesn’t feel great anymore, if it ever did. And it’s not like very many of us are making meaningful money from it anyway (quite the opposite, in most cases, and certainly mine!).

I’m not doing anything revolutionary here, but I’ve decided that I want to release music in a more flexible, ongoing way, and have an opportunity to write a bit about what I’m releasing and invite collaborators to join in the conversation as well. Some of what I will post here will ultimately come together in “album” format and be released in conventional ways (primarily through Bandcamp, though sometimes also on older formats like CD and vinyl), but not everything; my hope is to have a more dynamic, fluid, informative and fun way for me to share music and more, rather than having “the album release” dictate how things go—put another way, I want to put the horse back in front of the cart where it belongs.

I plan to start with releases of a big project for bitKlavier—the Preludes—that I’ve been working on with Adam Sliwinski and Cristina Altamura; we’ve recorded these 12 pieces over the past year, sometimes in more than one way, so this collection comprises 17 tracks which I’ll release in 12 posts, with some writing about each piece and some contributions from Adam and Cristina. After they’ve all been shared here, we will release it as an album online, and also on vinyl (with a subset of the 17 tracks).

Once this gets going, I will release recordings of the bitKlavier Commissions, a set of pieces by a range of wonderful composers (Molly Herron, Jenny Beck, Pascal Le Boeuf, Annika Socolofsky, Noah Fishman, Bora Yoon, and Nate May), commissioned by the Cone Foundation; these will also come together in an “album” release once they are all shared. I have a songwriting/electronic music project—The Seventeenth Hotel—made with my daughter/vocalist Molly Trueman, friend/drummer Jason Treuting, and friend/producer Matt Poirier that will trickle out here as well, culminating in an “album” release online and on vinyl. And then, perhaps the occasional fiddle tune (along the lines of my album Fifty Five), one-off collaborations, and whatever else I’m fortunate enough to make in the coming years.

So that’s what this is! Or what I think it is, and will be going forward. But we will see where the music takes us…

Speaking of the occasional fiddle tune, here’s something I found recently, in AAEAC# tuning (bottom string up; so-called Troll or Drunken-Hiccups tuning) on my Hardanger d’Amore, recorded quickly just a moment ago, not sure what to call it yet, but going with He’s Gone Wandered Off Again, for now:

off and running….