Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Low End String Quartet: live



Recorded live last week at "Word Free DC"

Friday, May 07, 2010

I think I get ice cream now.

It's been a crazy few weeks, work-wise, and is shaping up to remain crazy for at least two more... but I just finished a whole bunch of things that all had to be done at the same time. What just happened?

  • In the last two weeks, I got four proposals submitted to my county arts council. (They have all of their deadlines for the year in a three-week period, which is really awesome) Two from my nonprofit, and two from me as an individual artist. This year, I successfully delegated one of the Improv Arts proposals (thanks, Daniel!). We'll see if any of them work, but if funded we might:
  1. do after-school shows at Joe's and the College Park Community Center;
  2. hire a marketing strategy consultant to help us figure out how to put together all the different threads of our organization's communications - which is now a huge clusterf***;
  3. "commission" myself to develop more solo repertoire - so I can do more concerts like the one I did back in March;
  4. and take composition lessons from Alexandra Gardner.
  • I finished up a big job that had a very short timeframe: producing original (recorded) music for a dance / theater show that goes up next weekend. I'm really happy with the results, and the process. This one had enough of a budget that I was able to hire some great people to play on it, I recorded all the live tracks at home, then took it to a professional studio and got it mixed right. The end result is nice. Sounds so much better than what I can do by myself in my home project studio. (for info about the performances next weekend, see facebook event)

  • That job led to a booking for Low End String Quartet: we're doing "street performances" on May 15/16 in Reston, Virginia as part of the Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival. Our regular cellist is out of town that weekend, but I lined up Gordon Withers to join us again (he played with us at Comet last summer) and the contract and associated paperwork is all done done done. We'll be at Reston Town Center's "South Market Promenade" Saturday, May 15, at noon, 2:45pm, and 4pm; Sunday, May 16, 11:30am. Free free free. Hopefully the weather will be nice.

  • I'm working hard promoting "Word Free DC" on May 21st. That's proving to be a challenging task, but today we got some love from The Pink Line Project. Hopefully we'll get some more mentions around town in the coming weeks.
I'm also delighted to be back on my bike after a week. The weather is perfect and my nuts don't hurt! Yay!

Now I'm going to Island Style, where the non-dairy flavors still deserve the name "ice cream."

Later.