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…

Here is “Rain 1″ from Ice Guild Kaiser, which is also the first release on Webbed Hand available in a lossless (.flac) option. The album description:

This recording is a product of Ice Guild Kaiser’s research into Webbed Hand’s venerable “Rain” series, and it bears structural similarities to the earliest releases, while showing the influence of later mutations. He acknowledges that, at heart, “Rain” is functional music, a remote descendent of so-called elevator music, easy listening, new age and other genres composed for relaxation and unfocused audition.

It’s too soon to say where I’ll go with this project. I’m planning to move Djinnestan further away from where it started, so Ice Guild Kaiser may be a good place to assign works that are in the style of earlier Djinnestan.

I recently decided to shelve Drone Wallah, as I feel it may be a wrong path for my musical experimentation. Art should be a means, not an end, and I’m starting to feel like Drone Wallah was making sounds an end in themselves, without expressing much. Listeners tend to agree, as the audience has dropped off considerably over the past few albums.

The next projects I will be giving my focus to will be Saluki Regicide and Djinnestan. Byproducts of these might become the basis of new releases by Ice Guild Kaiser and Tree Helicopter, if all goes well.

Ice Guild Kaiser – Rain 1

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.

At some point in the making of the album I decided to limit the tracks to 26 and name them alphabetically, with obscure concepts and archaic words. There’s WWI army slang, thieves’ cant, outdated colloquialisms, regionalisms, and whimsicalities. I feel doing this adds some depth to the piece, by rewarding the listeners who look up the words, thereby enriching their vocabularies, and suggesting a relationship of the title to the character of the recording itself.

Drone Wallah as a name borrows the word “wallah” from Hindi, which is used to indicate someone who’s a specialist in something. Thus, a drone wallah is a person you seek out if you want drones. Playfulness with words is an important part of my creativity, and although I don’t write songs, I make up for it with evocative names and titles.

The cover image for the album uses a painting by Aria Nadii which I found to have an abstract quality reminiscent of drone music.

Visit the release page at Webbed Hand to see more information about this album and to download it for free.

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.

The 90s were not wasted years, in fact they were very interesting, but they were not especially creative ones for me. I put in many more years of college, read voraciously, and started discovering the world wide web. It was the internet that reconnected me to my youthful vision of growing up to be an artist.

So what happened on March 31, 2001? I started an internet forum (actually a Livejournal community) called Automaticwriter, which in its heyday was quite happening. The focus was on abstract poetry, and it unleashed in me a torrent of writing. It was a lively scene back then, and participants gave great feedback and many ideas were shared.

Then, in 2002, while I was taking graduate courses, I became obsessed with the idea of making sound art again. Again, that is, because in ’88 and ’93 I had done a couple of one-off experimental tapes. This time I had the advantage of a good computer, mixing software and effects, and this passion so eclipsed all other aspects of my life that I dropped out of school.

In 2003 I started a label for my music, and the need to make cover art got me back into the visual stuff. Digital art, collages, and lately some arty music videos for my recordings.

Another very significant event of 2003 is the beginning of my relationship with Aria Nadii, whose vision and artistic drive blends so well with mine that we make an excellent creative partnership. The similarity of our ways of seeing the world is uncanny, and this leads to a great deal of mutual inspiration.

Thus I have steadily been pulling together all the creative ambitions I had in youth, and am realizing those dreams I once had, that I’d grow up to live a creative life. I want to keep at it, and I hope this blog will be a good place to report on what I’m doing, thinking, and planning.