The aforementioned project, Ice Guild Kaiser has been one of the more active of mine this past year. There are two newer releases since Rain, highly recommended:
The most recent, on Webbed Hand, is “The Goat Encompasses” which I describe as “dark, atmospheric improvisations on heavily effected guitar.” It’s the first thing in my discography created almost entirely on guitar, and I’m quite pleased with it.
Earlier, I created an Ice Guild Kaiser as a tribute to a netradio program called Sadayatana, which has some great dark ambient and experimental music, and has been a champion of Webbed Hand Records.
The album is called Asphalt’s Parrot and was released on Buddhist On Fire, the home netlabel of Sadayatana. If you like my music, you’ll like the works of the numerous artists found on Buddhist On Fire and in the Sadayatana podcast.
At approximately the same time that Asphalt’s Parakeet came out, I also had a release on Treetrunk Records (you may know its proprietor as Thomas Park of Mystified). This time it was from my project Drone Wallah, a longform work called “Swamp Magnetics” which bears a relation to one of the tracks on Asphalt’s Parakeet.
Not long thereafter, Mystified remixed one of my older Drone Wallah albums and the result, released on Treetrunk, is called ZZDronia. Also a longform work.
I don’t know if it’s interesting or exasperating to my listeners that I have so many different projects, many of which blur into each other stylistically. Some artists prefer to use one primary project name and allow it to mutate into any style at all, from track to track, or album to album. Mostly I don’t do that, although Djinnestan and Tree Helicopter have changed over the years.
Ice Guild Kaiser is a new project I’ve started, which is mostly an alter ego (and anagram) of Saluki Regicide. It was spawned (sort of) from necessity. Both Saluki Regicide and Djinnestan each have their three Rain albums, which is the arbitrary limit I’ve set for any individual project to contribute to the series. Yet I have a new Rain recording which could fit into either of those projects, but not any of my others. So…
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It has been hours
since I pressed eject
and flipped the sky over
to hear the stars walking
like distant beekeepers
next up:
beach voices
the fading of names
Tenochtitlan bump & grind
tears colliding in traffic
endless blessings echo
in hollow mountains
Another “automatic writing” poem from about 10 years ago.
(illustration, detail from “whisper” by Aria Nadii)
all those who take hold
glimmer and go forth
thrill with a touch
tribes of the field
dim green water-fire
floor of April mould
And her cloud
beauty of gold joy
thrills of a new drift
under the brooks
colors the tribes
of the hills
of birds and brooks
come
polar tides glimmer
and currents buoy
spread of the earth
sheering down
to touch the frost
maple seed
thy purpose is down
in and of the ground
and the unquenchable joy
they perish of joy
beneath the eaves of night
the spread rises
the marsh profound
we are no more
we
in dim green water-fire are lost
thy will melting
wind of the very winds
disperse
a germ in the gloom
we are thee
the never still sea
still the joy
dreams the glad earth-children
the earth takes form
on a tissue of butterfly
(from circa 2004)
Sweet moths purr soaring
they swim above the sun
as hungry alleys juice
the frantic pedestrian
sincerely take my aching arm
licked by the roof-monster’s whip
stolen hair a mask of stealth
burnt in floods behind the shadow
I whisper the beauty of my black picture
drive away heaving the sore skin
rinse the baby rinse the sun
rinse the gates of alcoholic grace
forest creeping in crepuscular red
forest creeping to the urban edge
squirrels with machine of war
catapult your ancestors’ bones
into the windows of your childhood
those gray things
those awful gray things
the ones that pass outside
the ones that take detours
detours through your dreams
awful angry detours through
your slumbering phantasmagoria
those gray things
those awful gray things
they are not called jeeps anymore
I recently searched the entire 10-year archive of the LJ community Automaticwriter looking for forgotten poems that I’d posted there. Most of the pieces I found were from ’02-’03, often written and posted without revision, spontaneity being the goal and method at the time.
As it turns out, there were some good poems, as well as some that could be improved with revision. Here is an example of one of my finds, that I have no recollection of having written:
Second-Tier Interaction
The world, it was alight, melting.
Leaving the structure of impacted humans,
dogs on the beach distribute an ambience of
minor music, superior artillery.
How sweet her interactions, and deep her institutions.
Across the box on which a map of Afghanistan revealed
within some caverns and stark echoes.
Sweeties torment with heirloom musics,
and the beauty of plots in the desert.
Stars wave and dance over concrete pillars,
where evolved a danger of drumming.
Outside mountains soften the feet of travelers.
One of my more recent projects, Drone Wallah, has been focused on very long-form drone-ambient recordings. Until “Abecedronium” that is.
When I started work on the album I had the idea to make a collection of 20-30 very short drone pieces, each with a different way of generating the sounds, so no two tracks are alike. I used a large variety of instruments. Guitars, flutes, synths, a vintage chord organ, voice, whistling, to name but a few, as well as processing prerecorded samples. Also I used a lot of effects: delays, convolution reverbs, stretching, vocoding, a mix of hardware and software tricks. One track uses the warbles of a musical saw, played by Aria Nadii, that I processed in a number of ways to arrive at some complexity.
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This new thing is a long time overdue.
For many years (since late 2002) cpmcdill.com was a static html site, which has barely changed in all that time, except for minor page updates and a circa 2004 upgrade to include css.
It had come to look quite stale, and I’ve outgrown the design I’d originally given to it. It just wasn’t me anymore. As there are a lot of different sides to my creative work, I hope that instead of just making very rare page updates, I can report on my doings in this more dynamic blog format, and keep the activities grouped as categories or keywords.
I feel today marks a certain important anniversary. On March 31, 2001 I started getting serious about being creative again. Growing up, I was always doing anything creative I could, making drawings, paintings, sculpture, poetry, music/sound collage, stories, yes literally anything. This lasted right up through the years of art school in the late 80s, and then it kind of died, except for very brief flashes every few years, seldom lasting more than a week.
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