The Beauties of Sleep
July 17, 2008
I slept a half an hour or so last night-- up till 8am, slept for a bit, then up and running again. It's that wonderful, devious devil of guarana: sneaks into my blood stream and decides, yes Olga, you must write music, and now, the dawn be damned!
...honestly? I don't mind.
Here's the minute version of Great Escape-- the whole song is written in my head already, but I like the idea of these truncated poems before the finished story appears:
Olga Nunes - Great Escape
Lots of stories to tell-- I danced with 2000 people in Trafalgar Square and am now a Guinness World Record Breaker. I also got a sad phone call telling me that my bees have been swallowed by my own granddaughter. (Though I'm told that, hopefully, the Olga bees may be reborn come next winter. I'll take that as a good omen.)
And, lastly, lastly, thanks to all of you who voted! Feather will be up, all finished and shiny, for your hot little hands. (And maybe, if I'm lucky, with a few extra surprises to go with it.) I'm going to Dublin next week to frolic and sing and generally soak up the music off the streets of Ireland, which will be wonderful. (And maybe enough to distract me from the sadness of a thousand tiny bees changing their names...)
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Sneaky Minutes
July 7, 2008
I took last week off from writing songs-- and then I cheated and wrote a song anyway. I'm not sure where to put this yet; I probably have to make a new section under Music for all the one-minute songs. But, until then! Here's the minute song for today! (I'll be putting up a full song by the end of this week, too.)Different Mistakes
Posted by Olga at 11:04 PM | Post A Comment (1) | TrackBack (0)
The Thirteen Minute Album
July 2, 2008
June is over! And with it, the Minute Minute Songs. The entire collection-- I'd say it's a thirteen minute album, but it clocks in at about eighteen minutes and 70 seconds -- can be listened to over at here, or alternately, you can download the entire not-really-but-almost-thirteen-minute-album here.I have learned so much from doing this-- staying up most nights till 6am, making so many mistakes, and having to roll with it. The little collection of songs has a lot of bits that are the equivalent of pencil sketches: eraser marks here, a note there about how to color it up a bit.
So what's the next step in the world?
Here's what I'm doing. I'm going to keep making Minute Minute songs, but now they will be part of the Minute Minute Incubator. It's where little baby songs crawl around, see if they're ready to stand on their little two feet. If they are, well, lucky them: I make them into full-grown real songs, just like they were visited by the blue fairy.
But I need some input: I've set up a poll. Let me know what your favorite songs are, from most to least, and every week I'll take one from the top of the list and turn it into a full-length song.
You can go vote here!
Posted by Olga at 3:30 PM | Post A Comment (0)
The Place Of Dreams And What We Find There
Elaine sent me over this video, which is just fantastic. I won't spoil it for you, but it's got Bono and Roy Orbison, and a lovely, lovely story between the two.
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I Want An Army Of Gramophones
June 27, 2008
Hurrah! I have eleven of thirteen total wee baby songs done at Minute Minute Month! When June's over I'm going to put up a poll to figure out which songs should become real live flesh-and-blood-longer-than-a-minute songs-- so if you want to help me American-Idol-style vote for who gets to stay and who gets booted from the little song stage, pretty please sign up for my mailing list:
(Or add me on MySpace, or Facebook, I'll be posting there too.)
You can also hear the beginnings of a little ghost musical that I pitched in vocals for, over at Two Minutes. So, terribly, terribly fun. I have this vision that there will be a bunch of these, and then artists will make paintings based on it, and there will be an art show with gramophones on little tables, each playing a different song. (I mean, did you even realize how cheap gramophones are??)
Posted by Olga at 8:30 AM | Post A Comment (0)
When Ghosts Play Piano
June 26, 2008
I was recording the Wednesday Minute song late, late last night. Moving little bits of notes around, I clicked on one of the tracks and a chill went up my spine."....Elaine?" I typed to her on AIM. I can always rely on her to be my partner-in-insomniatic-crime. "My computer has just started playing music. That I didn't write."
She teased me. "It's learning."
Then I sent her over the track my computer was playing, of its own accord. "Olga?" She said. " Get out of the room. It wants to eat you."
You probably think we were overreacting, right? Turn off the lights. Put on your headphones. And play this: Ghost Track 1.
Now there's no hidden mystery checkbox in Garageband that says when you click on an instrument that it will play creepy death march music. I know. I checked. But then I clicked on another track, while writing my song, and the computer ghost started writing counter-melodies: Ghost Track 2.
And it kept getting weirder: Ghost Track 3.
There's got to be a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, right? Right?
Ghost Track 4.
After about thirty minutes of this, I found the perfectly reasonable, logical, sensible reason as to why my computer was playing ghost-written music.
My piano had started playing itself.
Across the room, my little piano keyboard had set itself off into "demo mode"-- you know, every keyboard has one. The button that suddenly starts playing a cheesy generic drumbeat that you can play along to. And my piano had turned itself on, and was playing silently in the corner, until I clicked on a track: suddenly my piano was playing through my laptop, angry haunted music through whatever instrument I had selected. So the valuable lesson I learned last night, boys and girls, is that a drum beat interpreted by an Indonesian gamelan sounds like the end of the world.
Give a listen to my very not-haunted-I-promise Minute Song from last night: Tent City.
Posted by Olga at 12:52 PM | Post A Comment (0)
Two Things
June 23, 2008
The lovely Uriel Durán has put up a feed for this blog on Livejournal. If you have a Livejournal account, you can add the feed here.Secondly, the also extraordinarily lovely Belinda Casas has made a video for one of the Minute Minute songs, Feather. (It's got video she took of me while I was visiting her house in Los Angeles.) You can see it here, hurray:
(And one last thing, which doesn't count as an item list , not really: I'm still working on Monday's Minute Minute song. It will be up very very soon!)
Posted by Olga at 10:03 PM | Post A Comment (0)
