red sea studios

These past days have been full of sun and breeze here in PDX, and I've spent many hours in the studio with the windows open, swaying in the warm, dry wind.

The studio was once used as a chapel for a baptist school that occupied the entire building. The carpet is a beautiful, bright red and you can see the outline where the stage or podium set in the middle of the room. Windows are dated, abundant, randomly opaque and translucent rectangles on 3 of the 4 walls.--gorgeous creativity in a warm red tone and the still small voice of the Spirit of the living God.....

Usually, I bring the kids with me, and they work and play by my side. I've found that there is solace in the unpredictability and accidental atmosphere they carry with them and it pushes me into greater depths of understanding the beauty of "accidents" in my own work. It wasnt always this way. I used to enjoy working by myself, locked away, an island of inspiration surrounded by a mass amount of ego. Ive become addicted to the sounds of their little souls clamoring about making forts or painting with water colors or tipping over containers they shouldnt have touched to begin with.

small beginnings for future music videos

Yesterday during my lunch break I found a piece of tracing paper in my bag and spent some time making notes on it and brainstorming about a couple of music videos I want to make.

I hope to release an e.p. this fall and have been thinking about making videos for a couple of the songs and putting them up online at the same time as we release the record. Since the theme of the album is based on certain telecast events that shaped my childhood and young adult life, creating videos for some of the songs seems very appropriate. I will continually keep the blog updated as to the progress of the ep. and accompanying videos.

As the ideas for the videos begin to consolidate and actualize on paper, I realize how much I enjoy this seedling stage of the creative process. Everything seems to begin somewhere deep down in the recesses and dark matter of your brain, where you softly hear the quite whisper of an idea(s), sparking life and vision into your thoughts. Whether complex, impractical, or beautifully simple, the idea begins to develop a beating heart and take shape somewhere behind your temple until it swells to an uncomfortable size for just your thoughts and comes spilling out in some actualized artistic form. In these beginning stages of creation, the vision for the work is on the move through the corporeal world. The creation has become incarnate and you can map it's progress through time and space. It has a beginning and an end, and you've become the surrogate for its voice and vision.