Happy New Year! I hope the few of you who read this are enjoying your lockdown.
That fine singer, Meg Reichardt, has revived her Holiday Recording Party after a hiatus of seven years. She’s posted it, along with the past sessions, on Bandcamp. My contributions for 2020 are a new song, “When a Snowman Melts,” and a piano arrangement of an old Norwegian folk tune, “Underjordisk Musik,” attributed to the trolls in the caverns.
My book on anomalous music, Music from Elsewhere, is slated for publication this year from Strange Attractor Press off in London, in association with MIT Press. Mark Pilkington urged me to collect my research into music attributed to fairies, trolls, aliens, spirits, angels, and other unusual sources, and it’s on its way.
My translation of Charles Cros’s treatise Principles of Cerebral Mechanics is also due out this year from Wakefield Press. Cros, remembered not only as an exceptional poet, but as a pioneer in color photography and recorded sound, analyzed visual perception by designing imaginary machines that perform visual functions. A curious work, indeed!
My translation of Alphonse Allais’s collection 2 + 2 = 5 is also scheduled for this year from Black Scat Books. It’s the longest of that unique writer’s “anthumous works,” and is supplemented with an introduction, notes, and four extra stories from his exchange of columns with Octave Mirbeau.
The inimitable director of Black Scat, Derek Pell, and I are collaborating on Patents Pending, a collection of original and often unpleasant inventions. Such innovations as Evangelical Shrapnel, the Narcoleptic Leisure Suit, Cocktail Haggis, and the Anti-Pacifier will soon be available to haunt your dreams and attract investors.
Since it’s been years since I released an album, I’m recording a new one, with Brian Dewan at the controls. The provisional title is Twilight in the Sinkhole, and it’s coming along quite nicely.
I continue to teach ukulele classes and private lessons, over Zoom, through the Jalopy Theatre. If you want to enroll, here’s the info.
And I plan on posting here more regularly. I don’t know who reads these posts, but I see them quoted in Wikipedia and elsewhere, since, true to its mission, the site documents various things that nobody else does. And, again, Happy New Year!
(Posted by Doug Skinner)