Trinary System:
Mixing is finally getting completed! Excited!
LP due out by June 2019 on Feeding Tube Records! Excited!
Cover art will be by Wayne Valdez. Excited!
Trinary System at Sonelab Studios, Meat for Tea, 2015. Photo: Austin Rutledge.
Alloy Orchestra winter gigs:
Feb.1: World Financial Center, NYC. Underworld.
Feb.22: Topeka, KS. Silent Film Festival. Metropolis.
Feb.28: Hartford, CT. Phantom of the Opera
Mar.3: Somerville Theater, Somerville, MA. Metropolis.
Mar. 19: New Jersey. Speedy.
Here’s an interesting interview w/Mr. Miller which starts with Mission of Burma then slants heavily to Alloy Orchestra.
Cheloveks kino-apparatom (1929) aka The Man With a Movie Camera Dziga Vertov
Kickstarter:
Miller’s first Kickstarter campaign is now up and running! It will be for his spring 2020 art installation at the Brattleboro Art Museum. The funds will be used for the following purposes:
1. To complete the film the Davis Square Symphony;
2. To create five different “Modified Vinyl” pieces to be hung on the wall and acquire five turntables w/headphones to be positioned in front of the pieces on the wall, to play them on;
The next two are for when he is artist in residence there:
3. To assist in acquiring gear for his updated Elemental Guitar work, which will feature two or three inexpensive lap steel guitars fixed together to become a sort of portable prepared piano. Most of this music will be created using his Dream Interpretation technique;
4. To create 2 records and purchase 2 Direct-Drive turntables for his composition “Music for String Quartet and 2 Turntables”, where the string quartet will interact with record noise and recordings of itself. Miller will operate the turn-tables in the performance.
Miller’s agent is working to get this installation traveling to other museums.
Initial Etching of Bach Fugue #16.
As a Composer:
Three compositions premiered at Tufts University on September 28, and were performed excellently by the Ludovico Ensemble. Here is Miller’s composition “Rocks Music for Solo Cello”. Small rocks thrown against a garage door were analyzed for the first section, while a rock in his backyard in Vermont was used to structure the main body. Of course there is a pun on the word “rocks” – this was written for cellist Benjamin Schwartz who is as big a fan of Mission of Burma and Minutemen as he is of Iannis Xenakis or John Cage.
Leo Eguchi, Cello (Ludovico Ensemble), at Distler Performance Hall at Tufts University
Surrealist Games:
Feb.14: Valentines’ Day. Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT.
It always brings me great joy to see groups of people, many who do not consider themselves artists or poets, create new work. With Surrealism in charge, anything is possible. It’s a great ice-breaker to boot, hence a Surrealist Valentine’s Day in Hartford.
Miller’s surrealist frottage drawing used for the cover of the Readercon 16 Booklet.
Anecdote:
My father, Robert Rush Miller, studied “fish that live in the desert” (he was an icthyologist/paleo-icthyologist), so a good chunk of my childhood summers were spent in that environment, wonderfully in the middle of nowhere (can you tell me where Jones Valley, Nevada is?). By 1969, our (my brothers Laurence and Benjamin and I) interest in creating music with guitars got the better of things. Here I am trying to find a new riff by a dried up wash with the old Silvertone acoustic.
Photo by Robert Rush Miller.