This week On Ensemble will be attending the Western Arts Alliance Annual Booking Conference. Here’s our showcase schedule:
Tuesday August 31st : 10:00pm
Wednesday September 1st : 10:00pm
Pacific Room, First Floor, Hyatt Regency Long Beach
We’re represented by Cadence Arts Network at Booth 431.
Like Kris just posted Brent came by the studio to do a photo session for his portraiture class. We went down to the LA river which is just a couple of blocks from the studio for the outdoor shots. Brent does a lot of design work for us including the hand printed cover of our last limited run EP. See more of his work at BPdesignlab.com.
Our good friends at San Jose Taiko team up with bay area DJ group Bangerz for a song about robots!
Okay so usually I would NOT turn OnEnsemble.org into an advertisement for anything but I feel compelled to let you all know know that I found something I thought I would never find: mainland shave ice that doesn’t suck! For years and years I’ve been wondering why it’s so hard to make shave ice like Hawaii’s famous Matsumotos or my personal favorite Waiola’s.
When I lived in Hawai’i going to Waiola’s was a religious experience. Inspired by chado I sought perfection in the ritual of my own shave ice ceremony. To arrive fully with all of your senses in a single moment to enjoy the pleasure of a lychee shave ice is to attain some kind of modern day enlightenment. (more…)
We’ve just got news that Yamasong will be shown at the upcoming Dragon*Con Film Festival! With an attendence of over 30,000 Dragon*Con is the largest multi-media, popular culture convention focusing on science fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and film in the universe! Maybe On Ensemble should write some songs in Quenya and try to perform at Dragon*Con. Or better yet Klingon… I bet Klingons play taiko.
Kris and Maz will be heading up to Mt. Shasta for the 6th Annual Shastayama festival this weekend! For those of you that don’t know yet Shastayama is one of the coolest taiko festivals ever. Of course I’m a little biased because Maz’s parents and my first taiko teachers Russel Baba and Jeanne Mercer organize the festival so don’t take my word for it go check it out for yourself! This year’s specials guest include: Taikoproject, Somei Yoshino Taiko Ensemble, Michelle Fujii and Toru Watanabe.
We had a great performance at the Musical Instrument Museum tonight! We’ll be doing some more post performance posts but I just wanted to do a quick one to say thank you to the great staff at MIM! The food was great the museum was amazing and the theater was beautiful. We felt very well taken care of! I also wanted to give a shout out to the Fushicho Daiko and Odaiko Sonora members who helped us load out and took us out to post performance drinks! Taiko people rock!
Here’s a link to some photos from Paradise Lost : Shadows and Wings taken by Scott Barnett. These were taken at the main rehearsal before the Carnegie performance and you can kind of get the sense of the epic nature of it all!