Music Lately (Brought To You By Music Day)

Some music I've discovered recently (you know, aside from the new John Schlitt album):

New Earth (Single)

Jason Zerbin (2011 - independent release)
iTunes here; YouTube here.

Never heard of this guy until the other Sunday night. I was almost home and the PFR CD had reached the end of the song. There wasn't time enough for the next song, so I switched to radio and hoped the station wasn't playing Mandisa, tobyMac, or Phillips Craig and Dean's disgustingly-overplayed Revelation Song.

And it wasn't. It was playing this song.

It made me think of the Kimberlites, though not as heavy in the style (the Kimberlites are good, but you can only take so much). It was happy (come on, there's whistling!), the bass was perfect, and it was a fast beat... so not typical for the local 'Christian' music station. I was hooked right away. One day there will be a tap dance to this.
(Also, apparently he's Canadian -- in fact, it sounds as if he's from the same area I am.)

Your Great Name

Natalie Grant
Love Revolution (2010 Curb Records)
iTunes here; YouTube here.

I'd heard this before on the radio, but kind of ignored it. After all, if you weren't paying attention (and I usually wasn't), it sounded like standard 'inspirational' radio fare. Everyone who listens to these stations knows Natalie Grant without realising that they know Natalie Grant -- she's played constantly, but somehow slips beneath our consciousness.

A few Sundays ago, though, our pastor played this song -- the full six minutes of it -- before communion. I dimmed the lights (for I was on lights/PowerPoint), the sound guy cranked it, and we all sat and soaked in the song for six minutes. It had been a pretty slow service, and this really brought it back around. Even the slightly compromised YouTube quality added to the experience.

This song is totally different to me now. I recommend blasting this at top volume. Connect high quality speakers to your computer if you have some, and close your eyes as you listen. It will make all the difference.

Liquidity
Kerry Livgren
Odyssey Into The Mind's Eye (1996 Kerygmatic Music)
iTunes here.
I heard this one on classicchristian247.com. Normally I don't get into instrumental stuff, but this one got my attention. (Probably the synth -- I'm a total sucker for a synthesizer.) The song seems to go on for quite a long time, yet as it starts to wrap up one starts to feel sad that it's over already -- it's so beautiful. And Liquidity is the perfect name for it -- it all flows and sinks and blends and eddies and drapes itself nonchalantly over everything and yet the underlying beat keeps the silky quality from slowing it to a stall. It's fantastic.
I listened to this the other day at about 2 am and accidentally choreographed most of the ending before I realised it. So then, of course, I stayed up till 3 am writing down the choreography so I wouldn't forget it. (I think it was even a dance night too -- meaning I had to be up at 7.30 the next morning for dance class.)
Sometimes this song almost makes me think of White Heart -- something Mark Gersmehl might have come up with (and come on, can you not see Billy Smiley rocking that guitar interlude?).

National Choreography Month - Day 30

Finished The Gift!

It's definitely my best work so far. I wish I could see it on the stage right now.

Also, not only do I have the dance complete, I also have backdrops and lighting figured out (I may or may not have been procrastinating at the time...)

So, with all three of my planned NaChoreoMo dances done, I'm now in the process of picking my next project. I don't expect to finish it by tomorrow at 11.59 of course, but now that I've found my way back in the groove again after basically going artistically MIA for two weeks, I'd like to milk the momentum The Gift has given me for all I can. I feel like I kind of cheated myself out of NaChoreoMo during those two weeks and now I'm trying to make it up to myself. Because really, I could have accomplished so much more than just three dances but I didn't because I let Apathy Alert pysch me out for two and a half weeks.

It's kind of weird having free time, actually. I hadn't realised how much I'd been holding NaChoreoMo over my head until I finished The Gift and sat back and thought, 'so what do I do now?' So for the past two days I've been importing cassettes (White Heart's Redemption and Petra's Captured In Time & Space -- and oh, is a live album ever a nightmare to split into tracks).

I intend to start work on another dance tomorrow (or possibly later tonight). I'm a bit undecided as to which one, though. Usually I have one that jumps to the forefront of my mind and won't let go, but this time I had to scroll through my iTunes library a bit and compile a list.

It's about five songs long, but the two that really attract my attention are PFR's Them and Farrell & Farrell's Hosanna Gloria. As of this moment I think I might go with Them.

Also, for those who care about statistics...

Seven minutes forty-five seconds of music. Seven pages of notes. Fifty-four pages of choreography, at a minimum of sixty frames per page. This equals approximately 3,240 frames, since I know for a fact that there are a few pages which had more than sixty frames on them.

Note that those are the numbers for just the three dances I had originally planned on doing at the beginning of May (King Of Kings, Apathy Alert, The Gift). This does not count the rather sizeable chunk I composed for part of Kerry Livgren's Liquidity, the intro to White Heart's The Cry, or the ending sequence to Petra's Counsel Of The Holy. Take that all together and you could probably add a good minute and a half onto that first number.