I heard CDs are coming back.
We still sell cds at our shows and people often ask, “which cd best represents what I heard tonight?” or something to that effect. The players and instrumentation have changed over the years and it is tough to recommend one. I often recommend the very first cd we did, 1998’s “Invisible Idiot.” Our most recent cd, “Field Recordings” is sold out and so is “Disappear“. I’d like to say, just get a streaming subscription and you can hear them all but I bite my tongue. We need more product.
We started collecting songs we played live a couple of years ago and eventually we whittled down the list to fourteen. We sent those to Arpad for mastering a few weeks ago, he brought them to life and we are headed over to his studio tonight to make a few final tweaks. Now we need the artwork.
We named a live piece we did “Bohemia” and created a video for it. The song made the cut for the new release and I thought it might make a good title for the cd. I found a print of a photo (above) I had taken in Indianapolis in the early 70s and thought these guys made pretty good bohemians but the print had what they used to call “satin finish ” and I wasn’t able to get rid of the pixelated look without buying an add on for Photoshop.
I switched gears and started working with the ‘Arcadia” concept. I took this photo on the windward side of O’ahu when we were visiting Matthew and Louise. John Vaccaro recently sent me a scan of a sheet of press type, a font called “Jackson,” and I used that for the title.” Peggi and I used to see this font in Spain. I drew enough of the letters to create the Refrigerator logo back in the nineties and I am thrilled to have a whole alphabet.
That first one looked like a travel ad for Aruba so I swapped out the beach photo for one from Rochester.
And then tried this one. The central figure, the girl standing alone in the water, looks like a Rinekake Dijkstra subject and mood goes in a dystopian direction.
This photo, taken out the window of the back seat of Matthew’s car in Honolulu, fit the dystopian mood and I switched the title after we watched the fantastic”Blast of Silence,” sometimes described as a tone poem.
I lightened up for a few minutes, long enough to entertain putting our cello player’s son on cover.
And finally settled on using an abstract I did incur garage back when we lived in the city.
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