journal

Notes in the Margin is officially released today!

FYI: For those looking to purchase it in mp3 or digital format it will be available via you can download the album now at CD Baby and then iTunes and the other major Digital Delivery sites in the coming weeks. CD Baby handles the digital distribution for me and they say that iTunes is usually very quick (1-3 weeks) others can take as long as 4 months.

And don't forget to tune into The Rickter Scale today at noon EDT for the premiere of the CD (or Wednesday at 7PM EDT). I will try to chime in here and there on their chatroom to the extent my day job permits.

To mark the official release of the new album next Tuesday, Rick Dashiell will be playing the CD in its entirety on "The Rickter Scale".

"The Rickter Scale" airs every Tuesday from 12noon-3pm EDT on Delicious Agony, with an encore presentation on Wednesday nights 7-10pm EDT.

Abstract Expression will be featured on the March 8th edition of The Richter Scale. Rick's show airs every Sunday 6-9pm EST and again Monday 11am-2pm EST on Delicious Agony Radio.

Rick is a great DJ and always has an interesting collection of music so check it out if you can.

Update: Here is the review of AE Rick (host of The Richter Scale) wrote up back in 2007.

Here's a review of "Abstract Expression", a new CD from Dave Kulju. I picked this up without knowing anything about it being released. I have the Electrum "Standard Deviation" CD, and find that fairly interesting. That's Dave with a couple of bandmates from 2002. It's kind of fusion, but a bit more experimental.

Having a bit of predjudice about what I was expecting, I was thrown off. AE is a wonderful instrumental record that never bores. Dave brings some great ideas and mixes them with some unusual patterns that makes a winning combination.

The CD opens with "Internal Combustion", which is representative of the great fusion discs. It has a bouncy, happy driving feel like a Frank Gambale piece. However, most of the instruments are Dave (except for Bryan Powers on drums, this tune and next) - that gives it more of a song structure instead of a wankfest. The use of keys in the bridges is a great touch. Some soloing throughout, but not overbearing. A great opener.

"Don't Mind Me" is a song that takes you back a few years in its style. A nice, easy start with lots of full chords and piano (I'm a sucker for piano). The connections between verses are very post-Counterparts Rush, with the bounce on the bass and the full guitar. About the three-minute mark Dave throws in a ass-kicking solo, just when you get comfortable. There's a lot of this surprise on AE, some unusual patterns. I find this almost a necessity on an instrumental record to keep the interest throughout. The Rush-guitar reappears to finish off the song.

"Hieland Road" trades off on alternately complex and simple verses. It appears from the liner notes that this is a one-man song. The midsection has a little "YYZ" action...you'll understand when you hear it. After that another sweet lead, one of the best I've heard here. Supported beautifully by the drumming and the acoustic guitar. Another winner of a song.

Read more below the fold...

I took the night off playing music to do a little work on the the site. In addition to the obvious new banner up at the top, I've done a few minor tweaks on the navigation and upgraded to the latest version of b2Evolution, in preparation for another tweak I'm going to make soon.

The guitar picture at the top of the site is one of my custom guitars made by former Luthier Neil Bryan. I think the new picture brightens things up a little. I took some photos of it this evening with the same rigged lightbox I used to photograph the AE cover.

I actually liked the photo below better than the one I used in the banner.

On the music side I've got a brand new composition well underway.

Counting Stars (the long tune) runs a full half hour now, and I've put a fork in the arrangement on that one - still a tiny bit of rerecording work to do on that demo.

Update: The final bit of functionality is in place. It is now much easier to leave a comment. In order to keep spam bots off the site selling their various... er... enhancements I had previously required registration before a visitor could leave a comment. No more. Now you can just click "Discussion" and say your piece. You will have to fill in the answer to a quick captcha test so the blog knows you are a real person.

I dunno about this whole online "social networking" business the kids are all doing nowadays but for what its worth I've got my own myspace page now.

So now you can come be my friend.

In other news after I got back from a vacation in Florida my motherboard, which had been showing signs of trouble, finally just refused to boot up. The thing wouldn't post at all, couldn't even get into bios. So after being without a PC for about 3 weeks I'm back up and running with a shiny new motherboard in the system.

Just finished re-skinning the website. Still many things to tweak but all should be functional now. More later...

[Update] A bit about the new design. First of all the color pallet for this design, like the previous version, is from the painting "smoke and lipstick" at kolur.com. Kolur is a terrific site and has a dozen or two pallets to choose from each one based on a piece of artwork. Personally I find picking a simple pallet and sticking to it (no matter the temptation to add yet another accent color) keeps my designs reasonably cohesive. I'm the same way about fonts as well. One or two is all I usually use.

The banner image at the top of the site was created taking 'Violin and Guitar' by Pablo Picasso and running it through a texture/background technique I read about years ago. I used the same technique to do the banner at Progressive Soundscapes, but in that case it was with a photo of fallen leaves. With the Progressive Soundscapes image the original image was much harder to recognize than it is here.

And as a launching point for this design I used the EvoCamp skin. In most ways it doesn't really bear any resemblance to the original but a lot of the code came from there.