east paris

new east paris demo - “wildfire”

http://socialunlock.com/east-paris/wildfire

This song, which you’ve heard snippets of in past posts, is based on Paul Grellong’s half-finished play dealing with a range of issues, including terrorism. We didn’t plan the release of the demo with recent events in mind, of course, but terrorism has been on my mind this week. The tricky part about Paul’s play is that it does, indeed, end in the middle, right at the point where characters might make decisions for good or for ill. I can’t know for sure or even really guess what they will decide and what will motivate their ultimate actions.

I tried to think about the bigger picture - about what might motivate someone to choose a path of violence, and what the consequences of that path can be. I thought about natural disasters. The human-caused tragedy of terrorism is certainly more heinous, but is similarly indiscriminate. Whatever a terrorist act’s target or goal, innocent, unsuspecting people are caught in the wide wake of destruction it leaves.

W.B. Yeats’ poem “Easter, 1916” came to mind as well. In that poem, Yeats commemorates the sacrifice of those who staged the Easter 1916 uprising against British rule (from the post office in Dublin, where you can still go and see the bullet holes). I don’t think I have ever thought of those nationalists as ‘terrorists,’ perhaps in part because I understand their cause, but there’s a fine line. Yeats, though sympathetic to the nationalists, seems to feel rather ambivalent about violence as a means to achieve an end. As do I. There’s a part of the poem that stuck in my mind as I thought about Paul’s play: 

Hearts with one purpose alone

Through summer and winter seem

Enchanted to a stone

To trouble the living stream….

Too long a sacrifice

May make a stone of the heart

Oh when may it suffice? 

I am thinking about the ways violence hardens the heart this week. I’m ultimately glad to see a symbol of global terrorism fall, but I keep thinking about the normal people who lost their lives on September 11th, the sacrifices made both unknowingly and willingly. The lives of so many were - to borrow a phrase from Yeats - “changed utterly,” but I hope we can choose a peaceful and loving way forward. 

- KH 

hi-ho, hi-ho…

Off to work Mike goes. This is fantastic for our household, and maybe less fantastic for East Paris, BUT we are actively making plans to record the six songs we’ve written more ‘seriously’ this summer and release an EP. Stay tuned for news about that, and hopefully for some more demo-snippets. 

Next week, I have a show at Cafe Muse again (April 28), and I’m hoping Mike will be able to join me for a couple East Paris tunes! 

distracto-ville and demo #2 progress

It seems like the whole point of tumblr is to post stuff pretty much allll the time, and I/we have failed miserably at that for the last couple weeks, because there has not been a lot of East Paris activity to report. There’s a lot going on with us personally, including Mike having gotten a job - hurrrray! That definitely puts more pressure on us to get some demos done, but there are all kinds of other ‘let’s do this before I’m working all the time’ things that Mike wants to do, too. 

Also, we make progress but sometimes it’s slow and boring to blog about. Working at home allows for multi-tasking but is probably not terribly efficient. Like, we’re working on this demo but I’m also doing laundry…

At the moment, I’m about to record some scratch vocals for our song “Wildfire” - scratch only because I think Mike wants me to do them again with some crazy effect-y stuff. Mike obsessed over the beats for the song last week, which has paid off, I think, because the song now has almost a Portishead/Massive Attack feel that I really dig. He and I have been trying to write a song like that ever since he bought me Portishead’s Live at Roseland Ballroom DVD as a gift and we watched it over and over and over. So: I am excited. Despite the fact that I now have to take a break to go put the clothes in the dryer. I hope to have more to report - with an actual song! - before the week is out. 

recording: today’s the day

Today, song snippet #3 is poised to become the song “Today’s the Day,” based on David Garcia’s blog  ”One Year Ago Today.” We performed it at Cafe Muse, but in lieu of more videos, we’re hopefully going to be posting more polished demos of all 6 songs as they come along. We feel like we already have a good template for this song, so we’re starting with this one. It has nothing to do with the fact that David’s been badgering me on Twitter …hee hee.

So: today’s the day for making the East Paris EP, or at least the demo version, as reality. Our dog Scooter is pumped. If pumped means “totally asleep in his bed not at all caring what we’re doing.”

East Paris performing “Balloon” Live 2/24 

Live performance video of our 6th song “Balloon,” inspired by Stacy Elaine Dacheux’s piece “The Balloon” (included here). 

East Paris performs “Balloon” live at Cafe Muse 2/24 from Kristy Hanson on Vimeo.

slacklust:

In 2006, I picked out a yellow balloon from a grocery store. The woman behind the counter slapped it onto the tank, blew it up, pinched the end, then stretched the latex out and around her fingers, before twisting it into a knot. “Pick out a ribbon.” I pointed to a pale white one.

Is it a birthday?

She handed it over to me for 68 cents. I tugged on the ribbon and shrugged.

Read More

crawling to the finish line

Because we already had a show scheduled for February 24, Mike and I stopped recording demos late last week and started figuring out how to perform the songs we’d written live instead. We finished song #6 - 6 songs had become our goal - on Monday of this week, and were successful in performing all the songs last night at Cafe Muse. There are a lot of “life” things happening right now that unfortunately make it impossible for us to just hole up in the studio and finalize this EP, so on some level, I suppose we’re not quite finishing the challenge. But we do have SIX NEW SONGS that we didn’t have before, and we like them so much that we want to record them properly, and possibly extend this project. 

Tomorrow I’ll be posting a video of perhaps my favorite performance from last night, “Balloon,” the song inspired by Stacy Elaine Dacheux’s slacklust.com piece. And starting next week, I’d like to post videos of all the songs. Some of them are a little rough and raw, but I’d like to continue letting you in on the process. I’m hoping by the end of March that we’ll have polished demo versions of all the songs for you, too. 

day 13 & 14: new inspiration, new song

One cool thing about this project so far is that it’s encouraged us to work with people whom we haven’t worked with before. One of those is DC Pierson, who is just a ridiculously multi-talented person. So we were very pleased when he sent us a link to a piece of his. It’s already been published on the web…he calls it: 

“Killing Time By That Bend In The Universe, Waiting For You But Not Really.”

This piece of awesomeness was really inspiring for both of us, and song #4 has come along very quickly! I’ll post a snippet later this week, but I hope you enjoy today’s more ‘literary’ post in the meantime.