From Salon de la Guerre’s 2018 album, Yipano.
Posts Tagged ‘Music’
‘Funny Drunk’
Posted in Salon De La Guerre, tagged Funny Drunk, Music, piano, Salon De La Guerre, Yipano on February 22, 2021| Leave a Comment »
My New Jazz Album
Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, Uncategorized, tagged Eric Randolph Rasmussen, Hot Tears, jazz, Music, Salon De La Guerre on November 30, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Within the next month or so, Salon de la Guerre will be releasing two new albums. One is best described as an “art country” album. More on that later. The other is my first album dedicated to jazz and it’s mostly in the Miles Davis-John Coltrane mood, though there are a couple of curveball songs.
Why did I do this? Why do I keep straying from the garage rock that is Salon de la Guerre’s main order of business? Well, there are a few reasons. One is that playing around in different genres helps me innovate and come up with new ideas. Next, I had built up a collection of melodies that didn’t really fit into pop or punk or rock songs very well. After enough of them piled up, I decided to do the right thing with them.
Then there were a few mundane, practical reasons. As regular readers know, I’ve made a few short films; for years, I have had to hide one of my student works from 2006 because I had put a popular Louis Armstrong song on the soundtrack. It was going to be a huge burden to pay for the rights to this song every year, and so I tried to think of a way I could capture the spirit of the piece and make my own jazz song to save the film, “Scrabble Rousers,” from oblivion. I took a huge risk and tried to score it using my own saxophone playing (something I’ve done only a little of since high school). Once I had the sax in my hands, I thought I might as well go all in and record an entire jazz album.
Sorry for the long-winded explanation. The upshot is that I’m fairly proud of the result, which is called Hot Tears.
Attached is a song from the album, which is almost completed.
My New Album
Posted in Salon De La Guerre, tagged abstract, classical, modernist, Music, musique concrete, Salon De La Guerre on March 21, 2020| Leave a Comment »
In a few weeks, I will release my 23rd album, Golem Vs. Duende. It comprises 10 movements of microtonal experiments and musique concrète.
For this new album, I took iPhone samples of my home environment and the New York City subway; it employs the percussive use of scissors, pots and pans, fences, doors, escalators and all other sorts of found objects that allow me to play the wannabe microtones my piano and guitar would not. I just recently discovered Maestro Harry Partch and his ingenious system of tones. However, I have not developed my own musical notation system nor have I built my own instruments with 43 pitches per octave. So I had to make due with playing the non-instruments around me. Then I mixed back into it my more traditional melodies on piano and synthesizer.
If I were to continue on this course, I would likely move it back around to pop music or work the approach into some type of roots music. I don’t have the musical training, but I have strategies. If this is your first time listening to my music, I should remind you that I’m all over the map, and that most of these experiments feed my alternative rock albums.
In this time of despair, I still see endless possibility. Though my family feels a little cooped up during the quarantine, we are creative and have plenty of things to do at home. So that’s what I’m going to depend on in these crazy times: My imagination.
The album was composed and performed by me at my home studio (and on location) in early 2020. I also did the cover art.
Listen to a sample of the album here:
Into the Many
Posted in Poetry, tagged dissonance, Music, poem, Poetry, Relationships, Wittgenstein on October 11, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Understood, she said
But she didn’t understand.
Message received, he thought, but they were
Using terms differently.
My green isn’t your green
My over isn’t your over. My silence is only my silence
Not your aggression.
You argued the words
And missed the sentence.
“Stupid” sounds worse to her than it did to me.
“I love your body” sounded like I didn’t love her mind
The resonant frequency of the building was ineluctable
The bridge jumped
Dissonance was the music.
You cannot live with two sounds now
You must go out
And live among the many
The Sirens
Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged Alternative rock, From Sour To Cinnamon, Music, Salon De La Guerre, The Sirens on October 9, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Tangled in the sun, the bird he flew
Came back, didn’t say what he knew
Came back with a song he knew only as a scream
Came back in a life he knew only as a dream
Wax in my ears, the siren quakes the sea
I don’t know what the sirens sing to me
Basaltic rock you wake dead or as a king
When you hear the sirens sing
Stuffed my ears with the wax from the bees
I don’t know what the Sirens sing
I ate a bird, something that flew
I wondered if it he knew he was through
I fly when I dream and that means I fly
People think they can’t, I don’t know why
Tangled in the sun the bird he flew
Came back didn’t say what he knew
Wax in my ears the siren quakes the sea
I don’t know what the sirens sang to me
Basaltic rock you wake dead or as a king
When you hear the sirens sing
Stuffed out ears with the wax from the bees
I don’t know what the Sirens sang to me
(Lyrics to the song “The Sirens,” now available on the Salon de la Guerre album From Sour To Cinnamon, copyright 2019.)
My 300th Song
Posted in Life, Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged ageism, Music, Salon De La Guerre on October 1, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Last week, I sent my 300th song to the U.S. Copyright Office.
Of course, a few of those hundreds of songs are repeats and reprises from my two classical albums, but if you add in the smattering of songs I’ve thrown away, it’s a wash, and 300 is a good official number. And of course, I have proof of this on my Bandcamp page, if anybody wants to fact-check me. Go! Count them! (The last 10 are going up within a week or two.)
I have a new milestone in a couple of months that also has a zero in it. That one I have less control over.
And that’s led me to a message for older people out there: I wrote more than two-thirds of this music in the last three years, a period of explosive growth for me as a songwriter, and during what people would call middle age. In my 20s, I wrote only a few dozen songs, and perhaps doubled that number in my 30s. But since 2016, at which time I was well into my 40s, I’ve made 14 albums, writing music everywhere–on the train, on the plane, on the treadmill, on the couch. I even tried to stop for months at a time while I worked on fiction, but it got to where I was writing songs unconsciously just walking around the store.
You might sniff and say it’s just the robot software doing it all. I have been, after all, writing stuff in GarangeBand–on my phone–and a lot of my work involves tape loops and buttons. But that’s the wrong conclusion. My guitar playing, both in speed and nuance, got three times better in 2016. And I suddenly started playing piano with no training in 2018. The iPhone is helping me, but it’s not writing the music or arranging it.
How have I become so prolific later in life? I don’t know. I have no idea why it all suddenly came to me. It’s been said and demonstrated to me over and over that we’re all supposed to lose inspiration and start sucking at art, and especially uptempo music, when we get older. We lose our muse. We get complacent. We resist the new ideas; our minds are less malleable, less playful, less able to assimilate new truths and discoveries and all else that makes you a great artist. That’s the conventional wisdom.
It’s also a crock of shit. Your ability to discover new talent within yourself has no age limit. Your style has no age limit. The idea of your imminent deterioration as you age is largely a mental and social construct–not unlike the fabrication that high school was the best times of our lives. Both ideas, we ought to suspect, have more to do with other people’s pitch to sell us stuff, and less to do with essential truths.
So this is something new I hope I could offer, besides my music itself: I can tell you unequivocally that I found an ocean of inspiration in my 40s, that these have easily been my peak years as an artist, peaks I hope will be eclipsed in my 50s.
‘Under the Wing’
Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged Air Is a Public Good, alternative country, country, Eric Randolph Rasmussen, Music, Salon De La Guerre, Under the Wing on September 29, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Another song from my album Air Is a Public Good.
Music and lyrics by Eric Randolph Rasmussen.
“Under the Wing”
The devil now I know walks among us
The devil has a condo on Lake Tahoe
I would never know the path
That bell I can’t unring
And the devil had me under his wing
I was selling real estate
To a couple from Sulphur Springs
And the devil had me under his wing
They wanted more than a town house
They wanted to share their lonely love
With me
And now I know the darkness
And now I know the need
And the devil had me under his wing
They wanted to use my body
And prey on my clean living
And the devil had me under his wing
God you can’t sell real estate in this
Sinful town
Heaven don’t have a toilet for fallen angels like me
They wanted to use my body
And prey on my clean living
And the devil had me under his wing
Who I Am Not
Posted in Comedy, Fiction, Music, Poetry, Salon De La Guerre, The Retributioners, Web series, tagged alto saxophone, Clam Fake, Eric Randolph Rasmussen, Fiction, jazz, Letters To My Imaginary Friend Leticia, Music, Novels, Red Clay Moses, Salon De La Guerre, The Retributioners on April 17, 2019| Leave a Comment »
There are a lot of Eric Rasmussens in the world, many of whom I’ve recently discovered are tilling the same fields that I am. I’ve seen Eric Rasmussens at work in journalism, law, literary criticism, polemics, music and fiction. That’s bound to create confusion.
Again, my full name is Eric Randolph Rasmussen. I’ve written a companion piece for this post telling you who I am. Out of respect for the other Eric Rasmussens, I felt the need to give you a list of the ones I am not:
Eric Ralph Rasmussen, pro baseball player.
This one seems pretty obvious. This was the only other Eric Rasmussen I’d ever heard of growing up. I never worried people would confuse us. I can barely pitch, catch or bat.
Eric David Rasmussen, physician, medical ethicist, humanitarian
Again, I’m not too worried about you getting us confused. This guy has an interesting career and is worth your attention.
Eric Rasmussen, writer, editor of Barstow & Grand
This Eric Rasmussen is a Wisconsin-based fiction writer and very nice guy who sent me a nice note and has an excellent blog and lots of excellent fiction. I do not wish to steal his thunder.
Why the confusion: We are both literary fiction writers. I do not see any novels on his resume (he mentions an unpublished manuscript), and I have never published any short stories (outside of a few bad experiments on my blog) but there are obvious reasons people are going to confuse us. For that reason, I have made sure to put “Eric Randolph Rasmussen” on most of my fiction, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to see it on my journalism.
Eric Rasmussen, jazz saxophonist, composer, band leader of the Eric Rasmussen Quartet, director of instrumental music at Scottsdale Community College
Alto saxophone player Eric Rasmussen has played with a number of big jazz names (you can find some of his music here), and his musical focus is jazz while mine is alternative rock and punk, but there are several reasons people might get us confused, especially if they knew me back in the day in Oklahoma.
Why the confusion: Several reasons. We have both been New Yorkers, we have both lived all over the country, we are both composers and we both play alto saxophone (though he actually worked at it his entire career while I gave it up for two decades). I have mostly stayed away from jazz on my albums, but Salon de la Guerre fans know that I have wormed my way through all sorts of different genres and finally jumped into some jazz a few years ago, yanking out my long-dormant alto sax chops for two songs on Salon de la Guerre’s album Clam Fake. I have done only two extended improvisations with jazz saxophone, one of which is on a song called “Red Clay Moses,” which you can hear on YouTube. Jazz sax player Eric Rasmussen deserves his many accolades, but “Red Clay Moses,” a cross between jazz and Sonic Youth guitar, is all mine.
Eric Dean Rasmussen, associate professor of English literature at the University of Stavanger.
I first followed Eric Dean Rasmussen for a couple of reasons: He was a literature guy and, more important, he was the first of us with the cunning to grab the Ericrasmussen.com domain name. There can be only one, Highlander!
That said, most of his work, as far as I can tell, is literary criticism and theory, subjects I’ve studiously avoided since college. I never worried too much people would confuse us. Besides, he was in Chicago and then later, apparently, Norway.
Why the confusion: Still, we are both lovers of literature, and we both somehow at some point met with (and wrote about) famous superhero literary publisher Barney Rosset, founder of the Grove Press and publisher of Samuel Beckett and Henry Miller. Eric Dean met Rosset through his work at a literary organization. I met Rosset at a bar. Though the other Eric was seemingly better prepared for the encounter and knew more about Rosset to begin with, I must give myself some points for not misspelling Rosset’s name. (I have some advantages being a journalist.)
I see that Eric Dean and I also have a very tenuous connection through the website Altx.com. He has articles posted there, and I used to be associated with a literary magazine called Io that had links to the site as well.
Eric Rasmussen, internationally renowned Shakespeare scholar, foundation professor at the University of Nevada at Reno
Again, I wasn’t too worried about being mistaken for a Shakespeare scholar, though we are both authors and we are both on Amazon. He’s even on YouTube!
Eric Rasmussen, actor.
I took an acting class once and I’m enthralled by the subject, but I have mostly left that field to my wife.
Eric Rasmussen, professor of communication.
I don’t see much room for confusion here, though I do have a communications degree (in journalism) from the University of Texas, and it could be somebody somewhere gets us confused.
Eric Rasmussen, Twin Cities broadcast news investigative reporter, KSTP TV
This guy’s been in Boston and Minneapolis. I’ve never been in front of a camera, but we are both journalists.
Eric B. Rasmussen, business professor at Indiana University. This guy is known for tweets deemed by many to be sexist and racist, and the university itself has called his online sentiments “vile.” I won’t link to him, and I am only including him here because I want to make sure people never confuse me with this person.
I will leave it at that. I recall seeing other people with my name also pursuing music journalism (an old part-time vocation of mine) and statistics and hockey, but I’m not too worried about being confused with those people. I’ll add names to this list later if I think anybody is going to mix me up with someone else.
Yipano
Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged Music, Salon De La Guerre, The Donner Party Follies, Yipano on September 28, 2018| Leave a Comment »
Over the next two weeks, I’ll be releasing two new albums under the name of my musical act “Salon de la Guerre.” The first, Yipano, comes out Monday and is my first-ever album of piano compositions, some with lyrics, others totally instrumental. The other is an album of punk songs called You’re Going To Regret What You Did.
Here is a sample of the former, a song called “The Donner Party Follies.” Enjoy.