Todd Clouser: BLOG

I've been badly neglecting this BLOG. We're in Truckee, California, a small town just north of Lake Tahoe. It snowed about 10 inches here today.
I found this song, thanks to John Lurie. Its completely beautiful, and the title is poetry.
 
    
I wrote this in the afternoon - I'm ill-equipped for the outdoors on days like this, and have been wanting to spend more time writing.
If the snow is a dancer
I am the blind one
Eyes rolled softly to the back of the Earth
 
Its been piling and falling 
under and into
its own weight
for hours, since the morning came in wind
 
God howl, exhale from
the top of the moon
 
through all the light
passing through all the light
that happened before we see it
 
and weaving new lines
on our faces
as we clench our arms
arms of each other
lovers, children
walking to our hiding homes, 
buried under the weather
 
All our love piling
the awe
and falling under itself
to where no one remembers
and tomorrow, God, [...]

This was written recently for some folks interested in how this all happened, our band, getting out, living in Mexico, so on. Thought it may be of interest to post here.
 
A Love Electric began as a reaction to my experience in the traditional music industry. After living and studying in Boston for three years, I moved back to Minneapolis and began performing often in mostly rock clubs in the Twin Cites, eventually through the greater Midwest, working in studios, and producing records of my own as well as a series of records that came out on Liquid8, the one that got the most notoriety was a Tribute to the Beastie Boys and a band we had with my brother on drums that ended up being called 4 Letter Man. I haven't heard those in years. By the time I was 22 I had performed on a number of records and released a few of my own out of my basement, but was largely unhappy playing clubs and with the music we were making, or at least the way we were going about it. I grew cynical fast, life felt [...]

"20th Century Folk Selections" is meant to transcend, and challenge our concept of divisions within music. In creating these divisions, we've created a nonsensical distance between each other as human beings. The music we share and love, the very existence of music, is of far greater importance than any one person's, or group of people's perception of how sound should be organized.
With a bit of willingness to listen and consider as the only prerequisite, this is a record meant to celebrate the believer. Its a record of hope. 
I
 Last year when constantly on tour we would go in and have sessions with A Love Electric whenever in MX City at a studio called Sala de Audio. I had a ton of music I wanted to record, and had thought about a double record. The concept was records that commented on each other, a record of traditional music, later I called it folk music as more tunes on the record came to be selected, and a record of original music that was the confluence of many of the [...]

Back in Mexico City after a really great weekend playing trio in the Baja with Seba Dimarco on bass and Sergio Hesting on drums. Tonight we're at Film Club in MX City, where our first gig was that anybody showed up to, a little over a year ago. The same friends still come, it overflows now. I'll be forever grateful to Film Club and everyone who hangs there. I took the metro, the MX City subway this morning and made the following observations :
Things that make the MX City Metro superior to other mass transit Ive spent time on1 - Stops are marked by symbols as well as words (ex. this morning I am taking apple past Moses to flowers)2 - There are no stoplights (Boston T Green line)3 - You can buy action figures and small candies on your ride4 - It is clean and relatively Tag-free and the equivalent of about 25 cents 1 way5 - The doors stay open for only a short period of time, riding requires commitment
Then there were these toys being sold on the wall outside

 
I'm madly addicted to [...]

I took a class from Marc Ribot once. I love most everything about his playing. What I took above all from the 90 minutes or so was his adamance on avoiding cliche, predictability, repetition in improvisation. There are countless guitar cliches, musical cliches beyond that, and we run the risk of just reciting licks or patterns that are comfortable to us if we don't carefully seek new approaches to creating a solo, tune, or whatever it is we're doing. Assuming we don't want to sound the same each night.
One way I've been trying to assure Im discovering each time we improvise recently is to consider tunes I know the lyrics to from my youth, using their rhythmic phrasing as the basis for what I'm playing. For example, I can still recite Method Man's "Tical" record more or less front to back from my days as a teen. Same goes for the first Wu-Tang Clan record, some ODB, and Bob Dylan. Some masters of phrasing.
  So I'll take "Bring the Pain", and if Im not particularly inspired by anything [...]