I have some exciting music happenings to talk about. One of the biggest is my ongoing long-term collaborative project with my friend Paul Frick.
First a short bit about Paul. We met several years ago, as Paul is my daughter’s boyfriend’s father (yep, they’re still dating). Our families have always gotten along well, and it seemed natural to extend our relationship into music. Paul is an experienced live musician, having played extensively with church groups on guitar, bass, and piano/synth, while also running sound, doing FOH mix management for years. On top of all that, Paul’s a great guy, and a relentless comic punster.
Paul and I started doing weekly sessions at my house every Wednesday night (lives and wives permitting), back in January 2014… a year and a half ago. Wow, time flies! The main goal of our project has been to spend time together as friends, developing our mutual understanding of electronic music through discussions, listening, and recording. It’s been a fruitful relationship on many levels.
Most obviously, we’ve worked on nearly 2 dozen different song ideas over that time, some of which we’ve finished, polished up and released on my SoundCloud account page. So far, we’ve been calling the project Collins & Frick. At this point, we’ve released 6 tracks, and they’re some of my favorite songs. Give them a spin and let us know what you think!
https://soundcloud.com/arcanor/sets/collins-frick
We’ve got several other tracks kicking around, and we’re hoping to release a full-length collaborative album in late 2015 or early 2016. Stay tuned!
But besides the recorded music, we’ve both learned quite a bit from our discussions and listening sessions, not to mention our experiments (even the failed ones) as we poked through our synth libraries finding sounds to emulate some of the things we heard and enjoyed together. We’ve listened extensively to tracks by Fila Brazillia (including other Steve Cobby projects like Solid Doctor, and Cutler), Dzihan & Kamien, Boards of Canada, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Adham Shaikh, Puff Dragon, and more. These are some of my favorite electronic music artists. I learned of them by extensive listening to SomaFM and their internet radio station Groove Salad. I can’t recommend highly enough that you should spend some time checking it out if you’re a fan of this kind of music.
In closing, I want to send a shout out to my buddy Paul. Thanks for working with me! I’m always looking forward to our next session.