Hanks Piperaceous vs. Millicent Ruckdeschel pg 1

reflections on youth and aging

The big news right now is my upcoming release for John Zorn's seminal experimental music label, Tzadik records. The record is called "Secrets of Secrets" and I promise I will be posting a blog here soon detailing all of the ideas and research and travails that came about while making this record. It certainly was an adventure.

Besides that loveliness, I am still hard at work on my comic book/rock opera masterpiece tentatively titled either "THe Dragon Awakens" or "Frowny Frown." I just finished the entire script for 8 issues, and just today finished the rough sketch for the first issue, titled "Hanks Piperaceous and Millicent Ruckdeschel." This project is super daunting and I really can't say if or when I will actually finish it, but I do know that when that happens I will be in a different place creatively I hope.

In the studio. I recently went into the studio with the great Bass Clarinetist and throat singer Arrington de Dionyso. We recorded over an hour of purely improvised music for bass clarinets, bflat clarinet, throat singing, electronics and percussion. It was fun and seriously challenging, as it was my first recording session with no roadmap! Look for that sometime later in the year.

Finally, I have another record coming out with my great working band from the last few years, Thorny Brocky. We are looking at a May release for this, and I will somewhat immodestly state that these are some of my favorite pieces I've written. Really looking forward to everyone getting a chance to hear this record too.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. And thanks to Peter Varshavsky from Porto Franco for putting so much time into making this site for me. Talk to you soon.

The first card in my Kabbalistic Tarot deck. I got into this project while studying hebrew and the kaballah for my Kabbalistic metal record "Secrets of Secrets" my girlfriend started studying tarot for a music project of her own, and one day I decided to see if there was any correlation between the two mystical practices, seeing how there were hebrew letters on some of the decks I'd seen. There was so much information, much of it contradictory, that it took me a long time to figure out the angle I was going to take for the deck. I decided to put all of the conflicting ideas into the deck, focusing on a few popular systems of organizing the tarot. I like the idea of having a deck that had many layers of meanings and interpretations, much like the kabbalaistic interrpretations I was reading. More specifically I used the Rider Waite system, with heavy handed nods to Levy's system of visual cues, and another heavy nod to the especially out there system employed by Carlo Suares. It was through Suares that I decided to make separate cards for the final sofits, the final letters of the hebrew alphabet. Please check out the entire deck on my Illustration page and if you like them you can even special order your own deck.