The Aurora

Silver Bells, Durand Eastman Park
Silver Bells, Durand Eastman Park

As beautiful as the setting sun is tonight we are told a strong solar storm could disrupt power and communications. It also may set the stage for a northern lights viewing. Years ago we were down at Marge’s with our friend, Duane, and we caught a sensational display of green light. So we might just head down to the lake, for the second time today, once the sun goes down. I don’t think I can handle Marge’s though. We’ll head right to the beach and look toward Canada.

For the last. month I’ve been bearing down on a project that has sat around long enough. We usually record our Margaret Explosion performances and we put all the songs in a big playlist. Most don’t stay in there long though. We keep the ones we particularly like and dump the rest. We recently got a little more aggressive with our pruning and we got the list down to thirty songs.

I have been addressing one song a day and I have just a few left. You might wonder what there is to do with a live track but there is so much tidying up I can do in Garage Band. I dodge the wild peaks, mostly my errant percussion. Since the music is improvised we stumble into both the song and the arrangement so I often grab the bass and drum intro and then cut to the first solid section. Once the tune is established there are middle sections that can get halved. If the song goes on too long I remove the wank. Sometimes any editing at all disturbs the flow of the piece. The songs on our “per la prima’ album were like that, six or seven minute organic constructions. This time, with pieces on the virtual editing room floor, the songs are all around the three or four minute mark. From these edited finals we’ll prune the group further and put the rest on a cd. Working title: “Cloud Library.”

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