I’m currently in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania airport food court awaiting my connecting flight to Vegas after spending a week with Nick Zammuto (of The Books) and his fiancee Molly. It was a very enjoyable stay, and North Adams, Massachusetts is an interesting place with lots to see for a town of its size. The MASS MoCA institute was particularly great with a gallery full of strange and interesting exhibits, with some especially jaw-dropping ones by a Chinese artist named Cai Guo-Qiang. His Web site has a bunch of his incredibly large-scale exhibits, including a few of the ones I saw – Inopportune: Stages 1 & 2. Another highlight of the trip was being able to see Bang on a Can performing Brian Eno’s Music For Airports live. It was definitely one of the best live performances I’ve ever seen. It’s the sort of music that’s so beautiful it evokes tears. Now I’m headed back to Vegas, and from there, straight to California tonight to hopefully work on some new Grimfeather material with Erik. The projects I’m involved in are progressing welll, and I look forward to being able to share some of the new ones soon!

Glee. I finally got ahold of a very nice microphone which I hope to be using on a bunch of upcoming recordings. Since I’m nearing completion of the Unwed Sailor Web site, I intend to shift my focus completely to music for awhile here. This week the plan is to record bass lines for two Grimfeather songs and an old Elmo track called “Senex.” In the area of Web design, I did a small bit of Web work for a talented photographer named Jaret Farretusco today. The Web site is called Corpse on Pumpkin and is well worth visiting if you enjoy creative photography which is mostly of different people. In other news, I comically sunburnt both of my knees severely to the point that they’re both purple and it kills to walk. In addition, I accidentally cut one of the burns open, which is not really the equivalent of eating ice cream with bunny rabbits in a field of wheat under a pastel rainbow if you know what I mean.

Well, the ambitious plans I made last week to work on three songs didn’t quite come to pass – I did, however, finish off bass work on Elmo’s “Senex” which I’m pretty happy with. The bass and I are in California now where Erik and I intend to work on a bit of music tomorrow, which will hopefully catapult me into a bunch of recording next week. Everything seems pretty unpredictable though, which keeps things interesting, yet chaotic. The work for Corpse on Pumpkin is complete, and the Unwed Sailor site is inching further toward its publication, which means that I should have much more time available for musical projects soon, as well as the long in-progress An Umbrella Web site.
On a different note, I conversed with Bradford a few days ago and learned that his latest musical project is taking place this weekend. He informed me that he’s recording a brand new song with the vocal aid of his father Joe Johnson, who put out a couple of albums a few years back.

So there you have it — the latest from both Bradford and I. Hope the second half of the summer fares well for all of you! Farewell for now.

As I’ve been continuing site development for Unwed Sailor, a few more potentially interesting things have been put up on the temp site at unwedsailor.com. There is now a message board, which has already racked up about 95 posts in its first week of existence and has served to be a pretty nice place to find out about other pleasant bands from the different visitors.
The other thing I placed on the temp site, which is probably a bit more exciting, is a collection of eight full-length, high quality Unwed Sailor MP3s, which you can now download. I’m currently working on a fully playable discography, similar to the one on The Books‘ site as well. On the band subject, I’ve begun writing more to the Grimfeather material and am working on upgrading the sound quality of our recordings while Robby finishes work writing his drum parts in Iowa.