2025-11-07: happy birthday to my...uncle?
the family whatsapp chat lights up: my uncle is turning 80 today. disbelief, that's a grandparent age. but my remaining grandmothers 95, 100. things shifting, as they ever do.
next week, my wind band concert. saturday, our last rehearsal. things feel both tighter and looser than last time. i don't know how it'll go. we need to sell a lot of tickets. we're counting on a lot of at-the-door traffic. we've had tv, radio spots, one national. hopefully it goes well. the hall not cheap. nothing these days is cheap.
once this is done, things will feel a little lighter. i've taken on too many things. adding wind band was maybe too much on top of what already felt like too much. but the alternative is to not do it at all, which feels worse. i've always been jealous of the people who manage to excel by focusing like a laser on exactly one thing. i'd rather do many things worse than one thing well.
not quite music but when i was visiting my family, i came back from the shops sunday morning and the church bells were urgent and clamorous. made a field recording on my phone, and when i got home, loaded it into reaper, worked the wind out, tweaked a few things. a couple of months ago i bought some music from a friend who has made ambient, electronic, & experimental music for decades, and we got chatting again, for the first time in almost twenty years. he asked if i'd been doing anything in the ambient/drone vein. i said no, not yet, but have been working on some little experiments, trying to get a feel for it. he said that if i ever had anything, even something half-ready, to please send it his way.
i sent him the walking & the church bells.
first snow yesterday. wet and heavy. it felt eerie in the moment, in the now-earlier dark. but gone this morning. the temperature dropping, but hovering around freezing, the only trace of it in the frost lining the street.
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