Holy crap I am having a blast hanging out in Oxford.
I so enjoy these adorable people that I have decided to purchase a bundle of carrier cages and take them all back with me to Eastern Europe where they can spend their days crawling about my hovel like little kitty cats. Every morning I will awake and they will mew and nuzzle my leg and I will scratch all their little ears and pet their heads and give them bowls with vittles which they will lap up adorably before bussing off to catch their daily quota of mice. And in the evening we will all gather round once more and I will rub their little tummies and they will be my warm blanket of purring fur. And some days we will all trek across the hills of the village together, me and my army of cute little Oxford kitty creatures, and village by village we will conquer the lands and subjugate the peasants until finally all of the Balkans lays at our feet and we rule all the lands hither and yon. And I will give each of them a fiefdom, but then they will no longer live with me and have evening belly rubs so I will have to build a pleasure palace of Verseille where they will all want to be all the time, purring and nuzzling, but then of course no one will be overseeing the fiefdoms so the peasants will revolt and the uprising will arrive at our pleasure palace and the peasants will storm it, torches and pitchforks in hand to burn us all in bloody effigy and as they enter our castle they will find me defiantly scratching the ears of my little Oxford creatures, their blankets of fur giving me warmth and I will burn and die scritching… Scritching their little ears with my last tortured, burning breath. Because that is indeed how I roll.
But I digress.
i have much to share with you. I wish to tell you all of The Mechnisms and their musical stories of steampunkish mythology and tobacco spitting epics, but that will wait until tomorrow. Tragedy tomorrow. Comedy tonight.
There is a writing circle here I was delighted to attend. And an infernal plan was hatched. You know how in between operas I like to make those fairy tale albums? Well, the next such album will be in that vein, but it may not be fairy tales and it will not be written by myself although I will do the music. No, the writing circle will use a story prompt on a subject yet to be decided (and which I will not choose as I must respond to the prompt just like everyone else, but which i assure you will be suitably fantastical and insane) and they will write a series of small story snippets of the type of length I can use to make 2 to 6 minute songs. They will take the best of the stories they write and send them to me and I will put them to music. As with the Faery Tales some will remain spoken narratives and some will be lyricalized and sung as proper songs. It is possible singers other than myself will be used, I may return here to record extraneous vocalists, but that is not set in stone. Maybe, maybe not depending on a number of factors. We’ll see.
In any case that is the next project, probably after the Atompunk Opera. I expect it to be completed late summer, beginning of fall by the latest. Should you doubt its inevitably awesomeness, stay tuned here for sneak peaks, spoilers and samplers.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have GOT to get some tea in me. I have a long day of performing disgusting and humiliating acts of gratification in the bathroom of the bus station so that i can eat later today. Until tomorrow my little furries…
