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Meet Alphonse! With a frame made by Greenspeed in Australia, and parts assembled by Bent Up Cycles in Hollywood, this is our dream bike! It’s 10.5′ long, fast, and really fun!

I had long planned to build a recumbent tandem. The bikes are surprisingly expensive, so I figured I could buy the welding tools and pay myself to do it and still save money. But just before the holiday break I happened to learn of a used Greenspeed GTT recumbent tandem going on sale. Suddenly, Hiro and I were excited about the possibility of having a tandem now, rather than five years from now, so we jumped in and bought it.

I’m surprised how fun it is to be recumbent. It feels sort of like flying, and cars generously share the roads with us. It’s easy to chat with your partner and it’s nice to feel the push of another set of legs. We are recent converts to clip-in pedals, which are even better on a recumbent trike where you can’t fall over.

The long-term dream is to be able to do taiko tours on bike. I’m not sure how feasible it really is, but I’d very much like to find a way that future career success doesn’t mean environmental failure.

We’re heading out on a two-day, 65-mile trip right now. More tomorrow on how it went!

Last weekend was a blast working with the Dancing People Company here in Ashland, Oregon. We had four performances at the historic Armory performance hall for DPC’s annual winter solstice celebration concert “Call Back the Sun”. This time I didn’t collaborate with them using taiko; instead, I used berimbau, cajon and dumbek. It was a slight challenge writing the music for their dance piece “Grassfire” and I’ve realized my potential for alternative percussion set ups. I hope to post some footage of the performance soon.

What else? I currently have 5 taiko students that are showing lots of progress. One in particular, Megan Janssen, is amazing me with how quickly she learns. This is very, very inspiring. I’m planning next year’s Meidoko Green shows which will this time incorporate more students. If all goes well these shows will definitely be something for you all to see.

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March 11, 2012 will be the SoCal debut of the Matsuri Crashers battle! More than a dozen players have signed up to participate and we’ve had a great time practicing thus far. We will each be developing a solo to fit the “battle structure” of our choosing. There are currently six structures, named after Los Angeles freeways, each designed to allow a player to focus on some aspect of slant-drumming, from basics to new movements, rhythm and timing, to playing fast.

I’m pleased to announce we have completed rough drafts of the written scores and audio recordings of the structures! You can download the individual pieces below, or the full zip file containing everything.

We’ve been working on some exciting new moves and some basic-strike research and I’ll be posting more in the coming weeks. As always, if you would like to participate, contact me at kris at On Ensemble dot org.

Happy drumming!

(The written score and audio recordings are released under the Free Art License 1.3.)

Written Score
battle_structures_111130a.pdf

Audio Recordings (mp3 format)
5_jiuchi_111128.mp3
10_jiuchi_111128.mp3
101_jiuchi_111128.mp3
110_jiuchi_111128.mp3
134_jiuchi_111128.mp3
405_jiuchi_111128.mp3

Audio Recordings (ogg format)
5_jiuchi_111128.ogg
10_jiuchi_111128.ogg
101_jiuchi_111128.ogg
110_jiuchi_111128.ogg
134_jiuchi_111128.ogg
405_jiuchi_111128.ogg

Graphics File (Inkscape SVG format)
structures_print_111130.svg

Everything
matsuri_crashers_battle_structures_111130a.zip

Hiro and I are lucky enough to live near the Torrance Farmers’ Market. We were so enamored with the beauty of the produce, we took photos of the bounty for a year. Here’s the result! (Click “Read the rest…” to see all the pics and roll-over individual images to see the dates.)

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Tonight was the debut of the new arrangement of slant-drum movements Maz and I have been working on. We survived without dropping a batchi! Here’s a video of the piece from the rehearsal. Thanks to Maz, Shoji, and Kelvin for all the time they put into the piece!

Thank you also to the enthusiastic audience at tonight’s show, as well as Lisa Shimamoto (and Shojin vegan restaurant!) for the great, pre-concert food, and all the folks at the JACCC, the Torrance Cultural Arts Foundation, and the Armstrong Theater! Thank you also to our 2011 FoundatiOn Team donors who empowered this spurt of new creative work! It was an honor and joy to debut three new pieces!

Here’s some footage of my recent collaboration with Phoenix Sigalove last Friday evening at the Tatanka benefit concert. Here’s the link below: