Svetlana Village now on DVD/Download!

In the fall of 2000, I traveled to Russia to make a documentary film about a farm that my brother had been working at for the previous 5 years. A Camphill Village, where half of the residents were disabled. I spent a couple weeks filming, and 10 months writing and editing, and then the film was released to good reviews and success. It was selected for the prestigious Ojai International Film Festival, and was picked up by the venerable Berkeley Fine Arts Theatre for a week long run. It played other film festivals and helped raise money for the Russian farm and village.

The film was also released on VHS (the format of the day), and many copies were sold, and local video stores in Berkeley displayed them proudly in their independent features library. But VHS, and independent theatres, are gone the way of the dinosaurs. We are just now witnessing the eclipse of DVD's and the dawn of downloading.

Svetlana Village: The Camphill Experience in Russia is now available on DVD and via download! Restored to the full digital glory which it was originally captured with! Own a DVD your family will cherish for generations, or instantly download it to your favorite viewing device! All proceeds from downloads and DVD sales go directly to Svetlana Village, so you can watch a good movie and do a good deed at the same time!

I'm still researching how to make the film available for free viewing (YouTube does not allow long films). If anyone has knowledge of places that will show the film online so it can be shared with an even larger audience, please let me know.

I'm Alive!!!

I'm alive, baby. I'm vibrating at ultra-high frequencies, even. Below are 4 reasons why you haven't heard from me lately:

1. Rewrite of The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World for another reading at Playwright's Horizons in late April. They're excited about the play, I'm excited about the rewrite, it's a lot of work.

2. Writing music and sound design for a new video game. It's great fun to go back and forth from writing music for a musical to writing music for a horror-genre video game. Variety is the spice of life.

3. The promoter I hired to get "Two Hands" to radio and press ran off with my money and left the project stranded. I'm filing legal papers against her (in case she tries to bamboozle YOU, her name is Kathryn Monohan - be warned!), and meanwhile gearing up to re-issue the CD with a different and much more reputable promoter. It's no small amount of work to launch a recording, and I've got to do it twice :(

4. I'm a stay-at-home dad with a wonderfully intensive boy to tend. I've got my hands full even if 1-3 above were not brewing, you know?

In further news, my 2001 film "Svetlana Village: The Camphill Experience in Russia" is now available on DVD and for download HERE. And, "Two Hands" is one of 5 nominees in the IMA's Vox Pop awards. Please cast your vote for "Two Hands" by rating it on my home page in the IMA widget. Just click on the stars!

I love the recording studio.

I still feel a thrill every time I'm in a recording studio, with the huge consoles full of buttons, the mics, the speakers, the layers of glass between the control room and the recording space. I was pretty stoked my first few times in rather flea-bag 4-track studios, hearing my music with reverb on it, making it sound "just like on records". But I was jaw-droppingly transported when I first was in a top-notch studio (Russian Hill Recording, in San Francisco). The huge 2-inch tape decks, the quiet, the looming mic stands. All the photographs of the Beatles in the studio that I'd studied in my youth - that's what this was like. I'd finally arrived. This was my dream - even more than performing in a concert hall.

For many people, the sense of "this will only happen once, never to be repeated" is what they love about live performance. For me, the same thing is true in the studio. If it's not fresh in the studio, there's no way it will withstand the test of repeated listenings as a recording. You have to stay present, over and over, take after take, delivering the absolute best, liveliest performance you can. And that, to me, is every bit as challenging and exciting as a live performance. Just me and the microphone. And then, when the work is done, it's preserved forever, to be enjoyed over and over. I LOVE that.

Of course, there is no audience in the studio, no sense of love and reciprocity, no implied challenge of winning them over, no applause. So live performance does have some powerful and unique aspects that the studio can't deliver. I can dig that..

But, as in many areas of my life, I can get tired of doing the same thing on a routine basis. Performing in a long run of a play, or singing the same songs night after night... sometimes boredom starts to edge in. I know how to look for the ways of keeping a performance fresh and alive over the long haul (heck, I sang Psycho Killer over a thousand times, and rarely did it ever get stale for me.) But I tend to itch, yearning to move on. In the same vein, I've never been able to stay in a job for long. It's how I'm built.

Being in front of a microphone and exploring the moment and knowing that whatever I do will be captured is an ultimate high for me. And...when the work is done, I get to move on to something new. That's nice!

Happy New Year

Here's a note of thanks for the year just past. Thanks for a son who is insatiably curious and who has a fantastic sense of humor. Thanks for a partner who also has a fantastic sense of humor, and is a polar opposite of me (and is thus a marvelous balancing force). Thanks for the elegant and soul-filling experience of recording "Two Hands" this past spring. Thanks for the energy to do the recording, and the fathering, and all the little chores that are a part of this life. Thanks for the support of fans, who allow me to make a living at what I love. Thanks for all the teachers and caregivers in my son's life.

While the year has presented many challenges, it was filled with much light, and I am grateful for it.

May we all be blessed with a good year to come.
Love, Gunnar.

My Romantic Tendencies

I have always been a closet romantic. I enjoy the sentimental side of things.

As a pre-teen, listening to my little panasonic transistor radio every night late into the night, it was almost all love songs, and the music meant everything to me. (Not the love-song lyrics necessarily - I remembering recoiling in 10-year-old horror at the saccharine "La La La La La Means I Love you " by the DelFonics. But most love songs I blithely took in).

My teen years were simmered in Zappa, who sneered at love songs. I learned to sneer, too. I vowed never to write a sappy love song. I laughed at love songs, ha-ha!

Sure enough, in my writing for The Bobs, I kept love at arms length. Well, more than arm's length. And even when I thought I might try my hand at writing something romantic, it just didn't work for me. I was more comfortable being funny. Yet, I still wanted to write beautiful music. Even when the lyrics avoided romanticism, the music to my songs tended to be consonant, not acidic.

When I write for the theatre or for film, where one writes for a character or a situation, I am able to explore my romantic tendencies.

For I am a romantic. I love beauty for its own sake. In the past I loved music and art that was acrobatic and virtuosic and acerbic and anti-sentimental, but now I crave music and art that tries for beauty. I still like acerbic. I don't like grossly sentimental things. I'm bored by virtuosity. But I love good music. Honest music, I like to call it.

Two Hands? It's my first time giving in fully to my romantic side. It's not written for a play or a character or a commission - it's written to please myself. And St. Cecilia. And anyone who cares to listen in.

The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World LIVES!

It's been a few years since The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World was produced. The legal problems which held it back were recently lifted, and an exciting developmental reading is slated for early December at Playwrights Horizons in NYC. I and my collaborators (Joy Gregory, playwright, John Langs, Director) met up in LA recently to look over our acclaimed musical. We came to it with fresh eyes and ears, and while we found many things to improve upon, the overall feeling was of exhilaration at having created such a fine piece of theatre. It's really good (he said with all humility). I'm currently spinning out new music for the reading. While the reading is not big enough to open up to the public, I can tell you that it sports a fantastic cast, including Tony Award Nominee Peter Friedman as Austin, Jamey Hood, Hedy Burress and Sarah Hays returning as the sisters, and broadway veterans Matt Doyle, Kevin Cahoun, Steve Routman and Anastasia Barzee filling out the cast. Returning as music director is the marvelous Aaron Gandy, leading a rocking band. This is, we hope, the first step towards a long run (Off-Broadway, anyone?)!

Recording Bandon at Skywalker (video)

Here's another video taken from the recording session for "Two Hands". It's not the take that is on the CD (that take was not caught on camera). If you compare them you can hear the subtle and not-so-subtle differences in performance. This one has some nice moment (but the one on the CD is deeper and better).

This piece, "Bandon", is particularly poignant for me. In the summer of 1964, when I was nearly 8 years old, I took a two-week trip to visit my great aunt and uncle on their cranberry farm in Bandon, Oregon. All by myself (along with 18 or so passengers, and a very nice stewardess who had very red nails and gave me a pilot's wing pin), I flew up on a DC3 or DC8 or some such old plane. The visit was much more playful than the music suggests, yet this is the music of the memory: Fishing for trout with a spool of thread and a bent pin; the swimming hole with the zip line running from the cliff to the beach; driving a tractor with my uncle; arguments over Elvis vs. Beatles with the local tomboy (in her room lined with posters of the King); picking blueberries; and struggling to sit still while my Aunt Gunny (Gunhilde) painted a watercolor portrait of me. That portrait still hangs on the wall of my parents' house. It's titled "A Poor Attempt at the Beatle - 1964". I must have been a non-stop Beatlemaniac that summer. When they asked if I'd like a souvenir to bring home from the trip (they were probably thinking of one of the locally made toy models of fishing boats) I pulled them to the record shop, where they bought me "Meet the Beatles" - in Stereo! My smile couldn't have been bigger. Their puzzlement couldn't have been deeper (I recall they played nothing but soupy Henry Mancini in their house). Aside from the Beatles, my visit with them was one of the highlights of my elementary school years.

Our Amazing Brains (aka My Sony Tape Deck)

When I was 15, a friend and I worked most of the summer painting my family's house. With the money I earned I bought a reel to reel tape recorder. It was one of my proudest and most useful possessions. Not only could I record my nascent songs, and experiment with sound-on-sound and varying the speeds (the wow when you played something back at 1 7/8 ips was REALLY cool), but at 3 3/4, I could put 2 entire LP's on one 'side' of the tape. 4 LP's on one 7 inch reel! it was an early form of piracy, before piracy was even an issue. But I was a poor teenager, LP's were expensive, and I could borrow records from my friends, tape them, and expand my musical library, while having to live with a modicum of tape hiss.

Here's the really cool part - I had always gone to sleep while listening to LP's. But you only got 20-25 minutes of music that way. But put a tape on, and you got 4 times that amount of music. And the music went deep into my brain, a kind of sleep teaching if you will. And even though my piracy was relatively cheap, tape still cost money, and my listening library was still very small (by today's standards). I listened to the music I had over and over and over.

I didn't realize how deeply this music was in my brain until recently, when I treated myself to a couple of recordings that I'd had on reel-to-reel, but hadn't heard since (the tape deck fell apart from constant use by the time I left for college).

One of the albums, Tower of Power's "East Bay Grease", I got a couple months ago. It was SO great to hear it again. It's a flawed record, but there's great stuff in it, too. I was a devoted fan of them when they first appeared on the scene, they gave a great live show, and I devoured their record when it came out. I've listened to it a few times over the past couple months. And then, while gardening in the back yard a few weeks back, I started humming the sax solo from "Back on the Streets Again". And I kept going. And I realized, I know every squeak and honk of that solo, and all the horns hits behind it. It's all in my brain, every moment of it! That shocked me.

And now, just the other day, I treated myself to "The Bill Evans Album", another recording I used to go to bed to night after night. I downloaded it, heard the first notes, and was instantly transported to my 16 year old self, the joy, excitement, and comfort of this music. I LOVE this album. And as it played on my computer, I realized I know every note of every solo. Especially the bass solos, I love humming Eddie Gomez's lines. But I know every stab and comp of Bill's too. This music is deep inside me. I thought I'd forgotten it. But hearing it just once brings it all back instantly. Aren't our brains amazing?

All in Three Quarter Time

Here's something you might not have noticed: All the music on "Two Hands" is in 3/4 time.

I didn't really plan it that way. I did have it in my mind to someday do a follow up to "Spinning World: 13 Ways of Looking at a Waltz ", and so my sketchbooks of ideas did have a lot of 3/4 time pieces. But for "Two Hands" I did not want to be constrained in any way, so I wrote and rehearsed and even recorded some pieces in other time signatures. But none of those pieces fit on the final album. They stood out awkwardly, interrupted the flow of the CD. And some of them are really really good compositions (they will someday see the light).

Even though the music is all in 3/4, "Two Hands" does not feel whirly, or light-headed. Very few of the pieces are played in strict tempo, and those that are ("Oak Sky" for example), are more moody and insistent than danceable. This is not a CD about dancing. it's a CD of mood and emotion - in any way or form. It just happens to be in 3/4 time.

Desert Rocks and Gunnar - the Connection?

Rob Jenkins - master of the lens.

None of us involved in putting "Two Hands" together can explain why Rob's photo (of the mysterious rocks of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley) seemed the perfect compliment to my solo piano music. It just was. We considered lots of other cover ideas, but none was as soulful and complete.

Rob is a charming and amazing guy (you should see the complex shadow-box creations he's made for his wife!), and when he takes a camera into his hands, it dances and finds the moments that beg to be recorded. His nature photography (like on the cover of "Two Hands") is elegant and fresh. His portraiture, especially of kids, is remarkable for its honesty and simplicity and, again, elegance. I know of no other photographer who is so adept at revealing the complex emotions of those fleeting glances that children have. His sense of color is startling, and he frames everything with a true artist's eye. Check out the work on his site RobJenkinsPhotography.com. He's in NYC.

Marie Antoinette & Gunnar - The connection?

I've known Kent Sparling, the producer of "Two Hands", since he was a young man. I've known his music since he was a teenager.

Back in the early 80's I had a few piano students, and one of them was a wonderful teenage girl. She gave me a tape of her boyfriend's band, Riis Spargo. Yeah, okay, your boyfriend's band, sure, I'll listen...

But it was GOOD. I played that little cassette over and over.

Years later, I hooked up with her boyfriend - Kent Sparling. He was in a monoprint class that my wife was taking (Yes, he's one of those multi-talented types). We became friends. I played keyboards sometimes in his follow-up band, Eyeland. Kent is a wonderful carpenter/electrician, and together with a craftsman pal of his helped us build the studio where I've done much of my work over the past decade.

But besides being a visual artist and a songwriter and experimental musician and electrician and craftsperson, Kent had another dream - to work at George Lucas' Skywalker Sound. To get there, he moved to Vancouver, BC, where he apprenticed in the sound for film world. His experiences there filled out his resume, and he returned to the bay area and knocked on the door at Skywalker, and they hired him.

Nowadays, besides being a visual artist/experimental musician/etc., he's also a highly respected and sought-after mixer for films. He's done many of the the foreign language versions of Star Wars, he helped sink the Titanic, he's mixed a ton of films including some knockout ones you've seen and heard, like "Lost in Translation", "Adaptation" and "The Virgin Suicides" and, yes, "Marie Antoinette". And then, he makes his own wonderful, ethereal/trippy music using state-of-the-art retro synthesizers. And he does his own cover art. And he wired his own studio. And, (how lucky can I be?), he's produced 3 of my CDs along the way. More on Kent at his website.

Miles Davis and Gunnar - What's the connection?

Janet Boye Jenkins is the creator of the glorious design for Two Hands. It is by no means her first CD cover. Straight out of Pratt Institute (where she was my wife's irrepressible roommate) she went to work for Elektra records, where she designed dozens of discs. From there she went on to Sony where she designed yet more fantastic CD covers - Her design for the Miles Davis Quintet 1965-1968 Box Set on Columbia was nominated for a Grammy. She went on to design for a variety of other labels, before branching out and working at Nike and Sesame Workshop. I was able to lure her back into the music business for this project :)

As a young child, Janet was into crafts. Graphic design was a logical career step. But her inspiration comes from many places: listening to architects talk about their work; evocative movies titles; walking in NYC and Tokyo. She says "I once saw an Alexander Calder show that blew me away, he just never seemed to stop creating. This is so not me but it is inspiring, the idea of creating without needing everything to be a perfectly complete piece."

Some of her favorite jobs? In the music business, she claims that I am fun to work with, and loved Keb Mo because he was such a pleasure. "He let you do your job. And he had enough success that the label allowed it." One of her favorite Nike projects was working on a beautiful retail space in Kyoto, which "allowed me to be in Kyoto during Cherry Blossom season. How could I not love that :-)"

Recording Nino and Me (video)

I did not wish a camera crew to intrude on the intimate, sequestered recording process of "Two Hands", but we did set up a stationary camera to capture some of the proceedings. Here is an alternate take of Nino and Me, played by just me (if you look very closely, you can catch the shade of Nino sitting on my shoulder). Click the rectangle in the lower right to enlarge to full screen, or click on the YouTube logo just above that to watch it on YouTube. The audio is from the video camera, so it is not full quality :)

A solo piano recording? From the singer Gunnar Madsen?

Piano is really my main instrument. I taught myself guitar and piano from the age of 15, and then started classical piano lessons at the age of 17 (practicing 4 hours a day), then went to UC Berkeley as a music major, where I took both classical and jazz piano lessons. I sang in the choir at UC because it was required, and while I enjoyed singing, I never took lessons. I was primarily a composer and a pianist.

By starting The Bobs, I did not intend to leave piano behind. But, of course, the Bobs success led me towards singing more and more, and left me with little time for piano playing. (And with all that singing I got serious and started taking singing lessons.)

Before the Bobs, I was doing quite a bit of work as a pianist. My skill set is limited, but I dove in head first to just about any job...

While a sophomore at UC, a professor gave me a score to the Brecht/Eisler play "The Measures Taken" and encouraged me to arrange it and music direct a local production. I had no idea what I was doing, but the show became a huge success nonetheless. Based on its success, I was employed as the music director of the newly-minted center for the study of Bertolt Brecht, "Epic West". I continued to learn on the job, about theatre, about Brecht, about arranging, about actors. It was all rather intellectual for my tastes, but I was grateful for all the experience.

When the noted interpreter of Brecht/Eisler songs, Ina Wittich, came from East Germany to give a California tour (1981 or so), I was recommended as the local Brechtian expert. Hah! One of my rules of life is to almost never say no to a job, so of course I said yes, and became her accompanist for the next two weeks.

Eisler's songs are pretty easy, and Ina croaked them out in a Lotte Lenya kind of way. Piece of cake. But for our performance at UC San Diego, she wanted me to play Eisler's Sonata for Piano. It's dissonant and difficult technically. After 2 weeks of intense practice, I still was nowhere near having it. Onstage at Mandeville Hall in San Diego, in front of 900 or so people, I flailed my way through it, making up parts and then picking up the real notes where I could. After the show, at a wine and cheese deal, a music professor buttonholed me. He looked at me very seriously, and said that my 'interpretation' of the sonata was the absolute best he'd ever heard. Well, he certainly heard the piece as it had never been heard before :)

With the plum job of accompanying the diva of East Germany under my belt, I started to get other piano playing jobs. I got a gig playing for a semi-famous Broadway vocal teacher. Lots of private lessons, lots of practice transposing at sight (I could, at the time, play "Memories", a big hit at the time, up or down any number of half-steps). But I was fudging my way, using the chord symbols to get the basics, and reading only some of the notes.

This teacher took me with her to teach a master class at UC Davis. A student put an intricate version of "I Could Have Danced All Night" in front of me. No chord changes - just thousands of fly specks! And she wanted it down a minor third - Aughghggh!!! I was freaking. This was not like faking my way thru the Eisler sonata in San Diego, these were notes that everyone would recognize. Everyone but me, that is, because I had only a fuzzy idea of the song, so faking it was beyond me. Uhhh...I played it, but I somehow grokked it was a waltz, so I was comping chords in 3/4. The student was totally lost, and stopped me. The teacher was puzzled - she thought I knew how to play, and how to read music. I'd fooled her for a whole year before she found out what a charlatan I am when it comes to reading music!

Apologies for CD Baby problems

Some of you have had problems trying to order from CDBaby this summer - they're the company that have, for years, provided such excellent service for people buying CDs from my website. Well, they were recently bought by another company, and it appears, from the anecdotal evidence, that they've fired everyone that used to work there and have hired one person to work weekends to replace them. It's a shame. I'm hoping they'll get it together, and I'll let you know if/when they do. I'm so sorry for any problems you've had. I recommend for now that you buy your music from Amazon or your local trusted store (if you have one) or whatever your favorite music outlet is (you can get my music just about anywhere, you know - Barnes & Noble, Borders, etc.)