3.16.17 :: New Shows! Things A'Working...

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April 8 :: Metro Music Fest - Full-band show headlining the Sonic Stage, 10pm, all-ages, free

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April 29 :: Festival Of The Arts - Duo-band show at the Couch Stage, 12pm, all-ages, free

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I will also be playing a lot of music over the Norman Music Fest weekend, including keys with Beau Jennings + The Tigers, and drums with Stranded At The Station. 

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Do not muss Judith at Okay Yeah Co. / The Plant Shoppe on April 1st - I will be doing the live audio and enjoying their amazing songwriting. Info HERE.

 

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    In other news, I am writing a lot of new music and creating a lot of new musical tools, all of which might show up as mathy weird loud rock under another name, a set of Max for Live tools that hopefully you all with create with as much as I will, and a melodic, ambient drum suite that gets as close to proper electro-acoustics as I've done so far. Oh yeah, and plenty of new Young Weather work too. 

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    Like all artists, and humans, really, I'm kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight, over and over. I hope to share some of the fruit of this labor soon. 

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    Peace to you all. Dustin

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10:20:16 :: False Autumn (a blog, if you will)

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    We won't have a freeze in Oklahoma before November. My impatience with summer has many more teeth than it used to, as one tends to play with things that are not a threat, and this long heat (sweating indoors and out well into seasonal Fall) is a threat.

    "Suffer me to care and not to care" is a common prayer for me, lifted from TS Eliot, but it also reminds me I do not want to let go of a sensitivity to the seasons, one of the dwindling number of virtues I can dig out of the red clay that is my home state. Yet this same seasonal-affect drives me further away.

   

    It has been a few years now of really not being a traveling musician, or of that being the sun around which any number of freelance jobs would revolve and evolve. In these few years the net effect has been a massive growth in humiliation and humility. A loss of identity. A loss of time. Really, a net loss, to be completely forthright.

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    I know that a marketing aspect of being a freelancer is the sunshine pumping of "hustlin.'" In no sphere of contemporary life have I seen the lasseiz-faire dream more toothy than in freelance work. The idea is: if you're not working your dream job then you're compromising something about your true self. OK. Then, if you're not being successful at your dream job then you just aren't working hard enough. OK. Then, if you manage a reflection or two on your state of working so hard the folds of your brain are flattening out, and how that kind of sucks, then you should be working and not reflecting. "Don't complain. Do." It's probably on a million Twitter statuses and blog posts at this point.

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    I reserve this space to rebel against this empire of hustle.

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a lull in traffic to discuss the traffic of current projects:

plenty of university teaching (which I do deeply love)

working hard to acquire some alternate, steady work to supplement teaching (I mean, I even updated LinkedIn. Yikes)

still building some realtime granular synthesis Max for Live patches and composing into them some percussion works. My hope is to have an entirely new live and studio suite of works written into this (to me) whole new way of treating percussion and drums with melodic potential

sessions, which simplify in ways I am constantly grateful for, especially sessions as a drummer

all manner of work at Frontline church in downtown OKC

live work as Young Weather and on keys with Beau Jennings and the Tigers - again, clarifying, though too rare

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    I'm falling back from the lines of a battle I don't want to be in, to repose in the woods like a useless partisan poet. I'm trying to branch together a fire to warm anyone else who is just exhausted from the empire of hustle.

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    To stare down 35 years, 21 spent playing musical instruments, 13 spent working in some kind of musical career, and to feel this deep, bone-deep, level of exhaustion isn't a hustlin' success. It's armistice. You win, whatever and whoever is out there fixing the game. Including myself, and the choices I continue to make. Gaming my own game. Drawing me into roles that wear my soul down, bone-deep. Drawing me into new fields I love but are financially limited, asking everything and returning very little.

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    I even saw a horizon: a break in the trees. I walked into it, and felt the cool air, the promise of a new provenance. Then the break closed back up. Not even of my own doing, this time. That taste of a better shore, and make no mistake, there are absolutely better shores and worse shores, that taste hurts more than three years of disappointment mixed with triumph. What to do with that, when one cannot act on it, at least for the time being?

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    Just reflect, I guess. To remove oneself from the noise of usefulness and into the quiet of relation to the world again, not predicated solely on task, but on encounter.

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    Sure, this is vague right now. But I hope to get more specific as time goes, and clear up some of these thoughts. Weary music-makers and all, take a second to admit just how damn tired we all are and it's okay to not accept that as fate.

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7.23.16

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I have written three wee instrumental pieces and released them digitally on SoundCloud and Bandcamp, and here on the website. 

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It is called Pro and Contra. Enjoy it wisely, and fully. 

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7.22.16

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Hospital Music is out in all digital sources, including in the Shoppe here on YoungWeather.com. iTunes, Spotify, Bandcamp, Amazon, etc. are all represented. 

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You can also get Hospital Music as an LP, on 180g high-quality acetate. You get a free download with the LP version, of course. This is available at shows, and in the online Shoppe. 

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There is also a new T Shirt, limited edition to Hospital Music's release in limited quantites, available, yes, you guessed it, the Shoppe!

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