a day in the life of piano monkey

for the month of april, monkey's doubling as a recording engineer. a fancy term if you ask me. am i really an engineer? according to the great wikipedia, the term is defined as following (if it's on web, it's true ya? heh.) An engineer is a person professionally engaged in a field of engineering. Engineers are concerned with developing economical and safe solutions to practical problems, by applying mathematics and scientific knowledge while considering technical constraints. As such, the work of engineers is the link between perceived needs of society and commercial applications. Some consider this profession to be the link between art and science. well, i would be a professional(am getting paid) in field of engineering (even when i may be standing in the middle of the field like a scarecrow in late fall that someone forgot to take off from the field, totally clueless), applying math and science knowledge (well i suppose i have to cut tracks and use basic science knowledge...

a juggler could tell you about the beauty of a ball when it arcs through the s p a c e upward before the descent pause defying gravity or its immediate fall all that momentum skilled curve from the hand forgotten under the sun, it is almost invisible for a second hangs onto that space between the d r o p s o f w a t e r life continues to whirl going around in a loop sometimes upward the other times downward and sometimes im weightless a perfect pause a graceful cusp point beauty of an arc existing knowing for just a split second i hang free in spaces between the drops of water a silvery projectile

grey blankets covering the sharped jagged edges of the city, once portruding buildings now disappear slowly into the fog, thick enough to be clouds, forgiving the unsorted mess of city skyline. the rain sings upon meeting the pavement, a quiet, gentle variations, irregular but happy. drip drip drop tap drip a gentle welcome for a child who came back to familiarity, however if with a morphed view. im donning my shoes to go for a walk, no longer in the tall mountains of canadian rockies, but in maze of city buildings and quiet humming of the march rain. unlike the calmness of the cloud above, the city is well-grounded. sediments. and from these sediments, many small vertical upward movements, for spring. buds. fuzzy. wet. anticipation. waiting. toronto's raining today. consistent, small droplets. droplets on the delicate spring buds, knock knock, wake- wake from your stasis.. it's time now. a little variations on pavement for the day so gentle. what a welcome!

yyz-yyc-banff--------banff-yyc-yyz. it seems rather surreal that i am back here in toronto. that three months, the first quarter of this year already flew away. i probably lived equivalent of a year in those three months. i crossed so many paths with so many different people. when i left, it was in midst of frost and ice, now it has been warm enough to be walking around in t-shirt and a sweater. quite different from banff's high tall majestic mountains, now im comforted by tall, illuminated buildings. however, i was also reminded that some will always be old friends, just meeting up now, realizing, hey, where have you been? ive been looking around. i didnt get to bid good bye to everyone, it being the last day, the aftermath of last reception etc., but soon we will all be back in the old world, and if one isnt careful, it will just become a piece of past- the snow, music, persons and thoughts, common experiences, differentiated opinions... i think i will be trying to attempt to ...

there has been a great commotion around the quiet mountains of banff in last two weeks called evolution. basically, the CBC is bringing back a composition competition back to life (which was defunct for awhile), and since it collided with the darwin anniversary, the team decided to put a new twist to the old game- not just the theme, but a great change in format. part of a process, i suppose. for the laymen out there (if you know how this goes, skip a couple paragraphs pls): traditional composition competition usually works in submission basis. meaning they put up a deadline, along with a couple guidelines of what they would like (such as ensemble formats, the length of the music, may be even contextual themes etc), and the usual red tapes such as ages, nationalities, etc. and as a composer, you submit a work. could have taken you a day or years. as long as it's printed on a sheets of paper, ready to be read/eaten/digested/played by the performers, then passed on to the audie...

as the steam rises from my pot,i look at the small, tiny discoloured leaves, uncurling and relaxing. the leaves stretch out from a long slumber- shreds of aspalathus linearis, commonly known as rooibos or red bush tea, grew in a small region in south africa, in cederberg region of the western cape province. rooibos tea is made from dried rooibos plant, from the needle-like leaves, so technically it is not a tea, but a tisane, a herbal infusion. from the initial planting, it takes about 18 months for the bush to mature for first harvest. each spring, little yellow flowers will come up and transform into a simple legume with single seed inside. then when it's ready, POP, goes the seed. tiny as they are, the bush tenders used to go to the anthills to collect the seeds. imagine the surprise from the ants: you are robbing us, we found those seeds and brought them home- well, nearly! thieves! literally taking it from our jaws! well, the seeds are collected little more ethically now, ...

there's a new surprise, a limited release at the vistas cafeteria at the banff center this week. there is no menu board and sometimes, like all cafeterias, they run out of stuff, so if you dont pay attention, you lose out. as long as you never know what you lost out on, i guess it's all alright. what you never knew, you cant miss! what im beating the bush around for is: a baby. if i remember correctly, she's yeh-high and this-big. about 14 months old and has strawberry blond hair and still indecisive hazel-green eyes. like the trees. and four teeth, two on top, and bingo, two on bottom. i mean, who really cares about the can-be-numbered things anyways. numbered things can stay on paper somewheres, or on a database for a record. if you ever need it, just look it up. it's all the un-numbered things that makes an entity unique, i believe. if you dont believe me, look into a guinness book of record and see how many of those numbers will actually provoke or aspire yo...

so monkey just got a word recently from the people high up in the world that she's back next fall for the banff collaborative residency. hooray. it's amazing to think what this all entails- first of all, it means that i dont have to go nutty worrying about what i am going to do for living. from september to december of 2009, monkey will be back in the middle of the canadian rockies, having the luxury of watching the sunrise in the morning, the mountains turning from bright green to the calmness of grey. and the lengthening of the winter evenings, getting slower and darker, mellower and quieter, until the next peak, the winter solstice. watching the process of such inevitability and huge scale in middle of mountains will be spectacular. as i had the fortune to watch it turn from the gravest point of the winter, at its rem sleep, then slowly letting the blood flow again, to the farthest digits, warming up for the next cycle of spring. and i will get to play music. and even fo...

spring equinox is here. officially on upward motion. the sky grows higher, the wind a little gentler. little puddles of wet, now melted ice and snow, creeping up to the ankles as you drag your pants ever so slightly on the ground. the bare branches now nurturing little fuzz-haired buds, some already half-waking in their slumber, just a crack on the sheath, barely showing their most gentle colours, the petals that will be awaken with the sunlight and a warm-hearted urging of spring rain. little green tips poking through once frozen earth. the light getting longer, the shadows dragging a bit longer when dusk falls. day by day. warmer. gentler. excited. anticipating. the rockies are still a bit grey and cold, holding the last bit of shards of ice and the calm, dark blue coolness of winter mountain gale. but when the sun was heading down for another rest, i saw a hint of exuberant joy of spring to come, not in the setting sun, but on the reflection on the cloud, beautifully set in pale...

individuals, the smallest, no longer divisible, mingling, crowding. crowd is no longer a noun, but a verb, existing in the present, acting and interacting. pub. beer. glasses full of liquid dreams and aftermath of daily rituals of carving/mangling self. wanting to, striving to, trying to be what one is compelled to be, now left with only half of a self, trying to mend, before the new day begins with fresh wound. dosing ourselves with the medication that is stronger than opium- the belief that things will turn out. or even better, that things no longer matter. amnesia. amnesia for the mind. for the body. for the future. for the present. in conversations lost in noise and movements, ideas spring up, bounce of the shields of one another, the guises we put up to be happy and content. the guise that is strong enough to fossilize oneself into.. a shell that one may no longer realize where or how it all started. growing roots out of our feet, becoming part of the ground, eventually, bec...

all these ideas and words, a desperate attempt for the sake of expression, are represented by somewhat unreal world of world wide web. it exists in a sincere relativist/existentialist context, as i could read, write and others may read and write, talk, think, whatevers, all coded in somewhat complicated maze of 0s and 1s. i connect to this tabula rasa, 'post-create,' which awaits me with infinite patience and calmness through electronic signal and whatever i type in are coded in a blogger-specific platform, then 'published' by stroke of an enter key. an enter key! think about that! whoa, by pressing a simple button, all the sudden you are inviting/letting whoever peeks into the door to walk right in to the middle of a personal jumbled thoughts. one has it easier than alice now- we dont even have to make an executive decision to eat nor drink. just a click on an index finger, and voila, thoughts, once private and plastic as external concrete expression. and these word...

in recent window gazing, i was left standing with a map in my hand, wanting to look for the girls, at the peak of their youth, at the cusp point, immortalized by two particular artists, millais and klimt. their girls are the youthful ones, have this same look of fleeting beauty, like early spring flower petals that has been surprised by the last frost- even more beautiful since when the frost melts away, their capillaries and cells would collapse from the previous expansion of water, leaving them eventually colorless, shapeless, a past. i used to have all these girls hanging up in my otherwise sterile dorm room. gazing at me as i gazed at them. http://www.millais.info/bridesmaida.htm http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Millais_-_Ophelia_(detail).jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana%C3%AB_(Klimt_painting) all these passing beauty, in the richest colors of gold, midnight blue, amber, van dyck brown, winter green contrasting so sharply with their pale skin only accentuate...

my position here at the banff center is somewhat unusual. we are all called 'artist,' which is bizarre- i mean, who gives someone the right to call oneself an artist? but even beside that, most residents at the S+M building (music and sound building; but i often call it the noise or sound building; all music is just noise, which becomes sound when one pays attention, then becomes music when it's contextualized. if you are curious, i think there are several posts regarding that issue already) are classified as 'residents.' residents, in banff context, live mainly on the site (some are off-site, esp. the ones who actually live here all seasons of the year), applies to the program with specific project ideas and such, and the center provides work spaces, tech gears, etc. they are free to schedule their own recitals/performance/concerts/happenings, hence allocating their time as such. well, see, my position is an intern. intern is something slightly close to second ...

i just had a small rated-B epic wknd and all i could say is that sometimes things have way of resolving themselves in the ways one does not expect. especially if it has to with one person to another. whether it be a companionship, friendship, casual acquaintance, etc. the line is always so hazy and people always move around in relation to you, making it rather impossible to define such things for the third person. now, you may wonder what the heck im talking about, or even hoping that i will spill some gory details of monkey's 'epic' wknd. well, you arent going to get any of that, so don't get your hopes up. i do not believe public announcement for private matters. now most people would assume then it was a case of private matter. i love the way this works. haha. this exactly the same reason why i have the 'adult content' disclaimer on my blog. just for the hell of it. whenever people see that, they expect hype, scandal, gossips, etc. etc., forgetting t...

as we were taught since wee kids, i often ask strangers and friends alike, how things are going. and it's amusing where that simple stock question may take you. just a while ago, so casually, over the time zones and a small puddle of water called the atlantic ocean and such, one of my friends (who i still have to come up with a code name) answered THE stock question that his feet are wet. as i was ready to make fun of him for drinking his pints with his shoes, he jumped the gun and explained that the situation was entirely nature-induced, that it was simply raining outside. okay, you drew faster than i. i will not give you a hard time. so what are you doing to get dry? and he mentioned stove. burning things inside of a metal chamber, creating heat and warmth (that is so much greater than the hallmark imagery that we are all desensitized to). you mean you have a old school stove?? and the answer was.... yes, lump coal stove!! we used to have coal stoves when i was growing up i...

it is really funny to think about the differences between simultaneity and cooperation/collaboration. lot of times, it is the misuse of the words that gets us into the hot water. one of my friends so poignantly pointed out that hot water is just good for tea and no one seems to be willing to take a dunk in it, which made me think of the unfortunate case of the dormouse in mad hatter's tea party. haha. tenniel was a genius. anyways. there are many of us in this world, the conscious living beings, considering each self as an individual. individual meaning it can no longer be divided. the smallest part of the whole. so we all co-occupy the space and time, being born, getting old, then dying. and one life intersects countless others, whether they may or may not be conscious of it. but most of the time, like walking in the sea of crowd, mingling among strangers, one happen to ride the same flow of time at the same instance, as an individual. hence, living simultaneously. even wh...

outside my window is swirl of grey and blue. the mountains appearing and disappearing, as wind brings the thin veil of floating snowflakes around the quiet afternoon. i have much work to do however i am not able to concentrate on task on hand. this is rather unfortunate since even if i work around the clock, i will not be able to complete as many tasks i would like to. but what is the point of getting angry at the score- it wont reveal anything to me, until i take the time to sit down with it and have a real conversation. hey score, what are you all about, really, what are you trying to tell me? i know you are just a messenger and that you probably will bring me more questions than answers. but i still want to know what you need and want to tell me. i will stay quiet and pay attention, i will try. and if i cant listen and see what you need to show me, i may as well leave you for now, rather than trying to mold you from me. you are already set in concrete form, black inks on whi...

this was the virus that went around facebook for awhile, where people took 25 things about them and created a random list of.. well, themselves. and knowing that some of my peeps are against the vicebook, i figured i could also post them here for them to read. somewhat amusing,and i meant... well, all of it. and if you read it already, well... you are spared for a day i believe. 1. I think this 25 things plague is hilarious. In this world of supposed individualism and free-speech, we are still getting into this sheep-herd mentality and ‘trying’ to express self in the conformist way. Way to go people. Hey, don’t get me wrong, I am also doing it. 2. There is a world of difference between what a person claims to be and what a person is known as. For instance, not all self-proclaimed musicians are musicians. Often they are simply people who are making sonic events that only exist in time, and whether it is music of not, who knows. However, if it isn’t music, then they are not music...