not much of the blogger lately, sorry

So I played out at an open mic at Jammin' Java in Vienna VA.

It was fun, they have a nice house system, the atmosphere is nice, the coffee is really good, the crowd is mixed in age and generally attentive. Most of the other performers were solo acoustic guitar and voice, one four piece traditional Celtic-flavored folk group, a piano player/singer, a blues harpist with a very elaborate wireless mic and amplification system, whose animated style of performance was thrown into sharp relief by most of the rest of the performers, who were, uh, more statically inclined.

I had an eight minute track, this was to be my sole offering for my slot, but they had some time for me to fill so I got to that plus an abbreviated mix of a track from my CD.

I generally like it, I want to get booked there, I'll try first as an opener.

Utenzil podcast on Garageband.com

I will add to this podcast from time to time. To subscribe to it, you need podcast browser/organizer software. If you don't have podcast software, check out iPodder (no, you don't need an iPod).

To subscribe to the podcast, copy and paste this link into your iPodder:

http://www.garageband.com/artist/utenzil/podcast/newsletter.xml

a brief foray with a performance

I played a two song open mic set, it was fun. There was a drag waiting for the prog to load up (lots of VSTs) but this was because the set schedule had shifted slightly and I fired up the notebook a bit too early, so had to shut it down (next time I'll sit next to an outlet while waiting, to avoid wasting battery, and also make sure that the notebook is fully charged).

My first track went great, people seemed happy. I got a little too bold because of that, and played something a little more CPU intensive than the track I had planned... it started to glitch, hard, so I basically munged it with the start offset marker, flying around in the track, wasting the beat. It was... not as well accepted, but they will have me back, and I will be more careful next time.

The lesson there is: stay with the plan, the plan is good.

some tangential projects

I have been putting together some experimental ambient tracks. I'm categorizing them as "psyterror". They will be longer (10 mins +), and not very "accessible" in the listenable/meaningful sense and have moments that range from disturbing to awkward to humorous to pretty. I will post links to them from time to time here, and will warn you that they are big downloads.

Some more encouraging news: Utenzil is among the top 20 Electronic Artists on MP3Tunes.com.

Long time, no post...

I am told artwork is imminent. There is a particular template that is needed to submit artwork to the duplicator, and one of a list of expensive graphics programs is needed to finalize the template. Fortunately, someone who is one of my favorite people in the world has this program, out on the west coast, and is working when possible on putting this together. It's taking longer than I'd planned because I don't know anything about making graphics look really good, which involves getting the right resolution and color balance for a commercial printing press, but I hope to have a first look this week.

Meanwhile, there was a mishap-- external disk drive burnt out, because I was not careful enough about which power supply I was plugging into it. The data on it is lost, which is a shame, but not horrible, because the Ableton set files I was using for the tracks are on my internal drive.

So I hope to set up the reproduction of the second Utenzil release very soon.

Another bit of good news, the first disc is now available on Amazon.com-- pretty neat.