Synth Harmony: Electronic Keyboards with Don Slepian

We start by hopping and skipping along, up and down scales in scholarly scalar flippant fashion. Cosmic marimbas join the echoed underwater pianos only to display some ascending octaves in time for the chase. Marimbas solo for an A minor dance that ends up in E major.  Funny how that can happen.  Cue the dramatic piano with strings, one of Debussy's harmonies artfully cribbed with shades of polytonal pianistic impressionism.  Apply the F Maj 4-3 suspension soothing balm. repeat every two measures.  A good place to end, but no.  Enter the sparkling echoed underwater piano with the old dominant 5-7 to one.  Who's keeping score?  The xylophone dances in thirds.  Some Italians vocalize an aria in the next practice room.  Movie music, with a D minor close at 3:21.  3:45 gets all frilly, trilly, and rather courtishly silly.  Dissonance at 4:11 deserves a mutated repeat.  Where could this lead?  It could lead to a trill on a high C!  Gradually we float to earth, only to rise at last in a classical Japanese Hirajoshi-feeling D minor close.

By: Walt Whitman

I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning;

Continuing from the previous "Grasshopper" episode, a phalanx of Grasshoppers parade and precision march to project their strident orchestral calls and beat some big orchestral drums.  Ponderous, these little creatures they are.   Down the dark echoing harmonic ladder.  A serious look. Bang the drum.  This descent abruptly cuts to the pretty bells.  "Up so many floating bells down" said e.e. cummings the great unpunctuated poet.   Fade the arpeggiations as the cadence resolves with a whoosh of dribbling liquid frostings onto an A major 6th close.  Clearly time for bed.

"We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright."  --Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Arpeggiations in a G minor theme, the start of a march, then an accelerando to a higher level of energy.  All this while a curtain of deep resonant flanged noise slowly rises and falls in sensuous sinusoidal fashion.  A stab at 6/8 meter, then the arpeggiation takes over and in straight eights we fall into a diminuendo. A little Mozart and then the harmonic train jumps the track with a D flat tritone stab out of a smokey bar.  What the hell, call on the bells for a tonic wash in G major with a grin at the end.

Musically thinking about my day.  The morning started off with a bang in F major.  I went out for a walk in the afternoon.  Things got rather contrapuntal but that's just me thinking too much.  Took a deep breath and looked at the birds.  Calmed right down, floated for a moment, and then settled into a soft A major close.

Things are going fine and then I have a surprise visitor!  My housemate wants a ride down to the garage.  Life intervenes.  My life, like your life, is interrupted by other priorities.  Art will just have to wait.

It's morning and everyone in the house is fast asleep.  On with the headphones, on with the lights, on with the bathrobe, and catch the fleeting inspirations.

A desultory walking jazz escapade while daydreaming of a morning stroll.

A curtain of gloom

Nosheen Irfan

This was recorded in September 2017 as I first experimented with the four HD camera setup.  Things were not coming together easily or going well. This darkened my mood.  I must of been daydreaming of 16th century festival music mixed in with my own swirling thoughts.

Solo live improvised performance, Kurzweil K2600R MIDI module, Infinite Response MIDI controller digital keyboard.  I put on the walnut veneer on top of the keyboard since I was so very tired of black metal.  Yes, that's a Korg NanoKontrol sitting on top where I change my sounds, connected to a Mac Mini running Plogue Bidule which makes everything work like magic.