http://fredoviola.com/blog en fredo@fredoviola.com Copyright 2009 2009-05-28T18:09:00-05:00 http://fredoviola.com/blog/the_art_pack/ http://fredoviola.com/blog/the_art_pack/#When:18:09:00Z My talented friends at the Art Pack made a piece about me, which includes footage shot at One Shot Not, the show I did feverish and sick!, an interview with Mauro Gioia, and a couple performances me and my musician friends did while we were in Paris.  I am really proud to have a piece done by these guys, as they are very very talented.  Take a look at the link, but make sure to check out their other stuff as well.  They recently won a contest to create a whole short narrative in I think 48 hours, soup to nuts.  The Art Pack 2009-05-28T18:09:00-05:00 http://fredoviola.com/blog/hooray_laus_win/ http://fredoviola.com/blog/hooray_laus_win/#When:00:49:00Z Just now found out that theturn.tv, won a Laus award for Interactivity!  This is great news!  Many thanks to Cristo Castille and José Hernandez of Aer Visual Studio as well as Guille Lopez.  They all did such an amazing job with the flash and coding (they truly are wizards!), as well as of course to Steph Thyrion who helped conceive the idea of the site itself.  Cristo just wrote to me and told me the site won three awards!  Silver in “Corporate Websites” Gold in “Interactive Innovation” it also won the Grand Laus, which is the highest award of the whole “Interactive” category I’m going to get cracking on some more videos to upload and take advantage of the wave of traffic that maybe will come!  Hooray!!!! 2009-05-20T00:49:00-05:00 http://fredoviola.com/blog/final_entry_to_the_trial_by_fire_and_fever/ http://fredoviola.com/blog/final_entry_to_the_trial_by_fire_and_fever/#When:14:48:00Z Okeedokes, so that was a long bit of time before the next blog post!  Sorry about that.  I have been working so hard on new videos.  First off, just to let you know, me, Autopilot and Scalde have prepared another international cluster video.  Come and take a look on either theturn.tv, youtube link or vimeo link. Anyway, ok, so where were we?  I’d performed without having more than an hour of really restless sleep on a tv show in Manchester.  I started to feel extremely run down and felt perhaps that a cold was coming on, tried to get to sleep very early, but never-the-less, woke up early the next morning with a very bad cold, and it was clutching at my throat!  This was the day that me and Ben were set to travel to Paris and perform on Manu Katché’s show One Shot Not.  So off we went.  I hadn’t tried singing yet and was actually not speaking as much as possible.  Ben, who is one of the most level-headed and sensitive persons I have ever met, was being very calming and affirmative.  The plane landing was incredibly painful though.  I felt that my head would explode.  Once we arrived at the studio a couple dapper French men met the car and explained that cameras would be following us around everywhere, that we should just follow them to the green room.  Ugh, I so wanted some privacy to see where my voice was.  We followed them off to the room, played with some percussion instruments for them, mugging a bit for the camera, and finally had a moment of privacy.  With the door shut I tried to sing and made the horrible discovery that I really had no voice.  My falsetto was completely gone and my regular singing voice was wildly inaccurate.  I just had very little control over pitch or intonation.  Suddenly who would knock and enter the room:  David Byrne.  That’s right, David Byrne.  He was playing on the show tonight as well.  He said, “Hi, I’m David.” Both Ben and I were bowled over.  At this point, my head was really throbbing and I felt quite feverish.  Soon one of the nice gentlemen from the show came and said it was time to meet Manu Katché and Avishai Cohen and see the studio.  Manu and Avishai would be accompanying us tonight and hadn’t heard the songs yet.  They are both totally brilliant musicians - it was an honor to have the opportunity to play with them.  We stepped out into the studio and it was an absolute dream come true.  Lights everywhere, about six oriental rugs with a separate drumset on each.  Amazing mixing console.  Just dreamy.  The cameras followed us out and I had to open my mouth and perform and it sounded like absolute CRAP!  I mean truly. I kept looking over at Ben, who would respond with the kindest look of encouragement, but I could see in his eyes that it was a bit pathetic!  I sounded like I couldn’t sing a note in key!  I started to cough, partially just to prove I was really sick, and explained to Manu and Avishai that I had awoken really really sick.  Manu was very kind and said I should just relax and try to heal the throat as best as possible before the show.  At this point I just felt so desperate and sad.  I called my singing teacher, William Riley, in NY.  He gave me the number of a great doc in France, Dr. Abitbol, and told him to mention that he sent me and use the words “career emergency”.  So off I went to the doc, who confirmed there was no damage.  I could sing without fear of causing damage. But it may not sound good.  Period.  He gave me some meds that would help, but basically I would be singing with a bit of a crippled voice. OK, to make a very long story a tiny bit shorter, Matthias Labarbe, the marketing director based in France, gave me a kind of Rocky Balboa speech before the show that was very very important.  He said the songs were good.  The voice, maybe not so good tonight, but there’s also the heart and the love that is put into the music.  He promised me that if I gave enough of that the audience would respond favorably. Somehow this freed me up completely.  Even as I listened to the totally amazing Avashai Cohen who performed just before me, I didn’t feel bitter, frustrated or even scared.  I just felt lucky.  Very grateful to have this opportunity.  Truly.  It was a wonderful audience, a fantastic group of musicians.  I had Ben Evans playing with me.  I’ll just do the best I can.  And I did.  And it sounded pretty crap!  But during The Turn I got a really nice response from the audience, so learned a big lesson there! Anyway, I think it might have been two days later that Ben and I met with Scalde for a single day of practice.  Scalde is another one of my favorite musicians who I met on myspace a year or so ago.  He has a very angelic voice and plays so many eclectic instruments, so it was just really really fun practicing with him, although he too arrived sick!  We played a live TV show called Ce Soir Ou Jamais, which I felt went horribly.  Not so much the musicians, but me… I froze up.  Got so nervous.  It’s just an odd situation when the audience doesn’t know you or know what to make of you.  It’s even stranger to have to stand silently behind a curtain, waiting for the silent cue from the stage manager to start playing.  That was the absolute emotional low point of the whole trip, although I have since seen the show and it actually sounded pretty good.  But a couple days later we played a Blogotheque Soiree de poche!  This was actually a show that from the start I very worried about, because they required 30 minutes and we had only had 3 days between us to prepare.  But once we got to the apartment where it was being held and met the kind owner and all the folks involved, the excitement and warmth just helped us to have a really fun show.  Plus, I had the idea of staging a little circular video with the audience, and with that fun goal in mind it just set a really creative tone.  I have promised to upload this video since a week after the performance, and obviously it has been much longer than that!  To all you folks who were there at the show and waiting, so sorry!  The video portion has been complete for some time.  I am just awaiting a final mix from the show’s producers and it will be uploaded to my website. Which reminds me… another fun afternoon was spent at the fabulous apartment of Isabelle Chelley.  It’s sort of a strange mix of dark, magic theatre antiques and some very colorful kitch!  I love it.  She has a really bizarre collection of dolls which I took some photographs of.  Also I shot a circular video here, and I will be uploading that even sooner than the Blogotheque one, as it’s nearly done. OK, so I guess the Blogotheque show went really well.  We had such a good time, and played for about 45 minutes.  I had no problems communicating with the audience.  In fact, I quite surprised myself and really enjoyed it.  So now we had just a whole bunch of internet performances scheduled and our first big show, opening for Peter von Poehl at La Cigale!  The internet performances went pretty well.  My favorite is one we shot in the stairwell at the Because office.  I learned a big lesson about singing when mic’d with a lapelle mic - do NOT over pronunciate!  And make sure to sing in pitch!!!!! hahah. But finally the night of La Cigale arrived.  What an incredibly gorgeous theatre.  Me and the Pilots were so happy walking around there.  We did our sound check and it really sounded amazing to hear so much sound bouncing back at us. Off we went to the green room to await the show.  Jane from the UK office arrived and said hello.  I did an interview for AFP.  All this was good because it kept me distracted.  And I had learned, over the course of the trip, that it’s best just to pretend nothing new is happening, stay connected to the music, to the songs, to the vocal technique.  Ignore all the scary thoughts. Finally our time came and we were led out to a packed crowd of nearly 1000 people.  Folks started to applaud, and thus began a really really fun night!  Again, I surprised myself fully by really enjoying speaking with the audience.  The Pilots all played so well.  We looked at each other throughout the performance and I could tell everyone was very happy. So ended quite a rigorous trip.  I have to thank first I Am Your Autopilot and Scalde.  Ben, Graeme, Jasper and Sylvain are all great musicians and working with them has been and continues to be a real pleasure.  Also, Matthias Labarbe was especially wonderful.  He brought such a warmth and kept everything moving forward at breakneck speed. Anyway, really there are so many details (for instance, one of the Pilots was a horrible SNORER and that caused lots of trouble for the Pilot who had to share a room with him!!!) I have left out these details because already this blog is TOO LONG!!! Anyway, if you have a chance, do check out the Robinson Crusoe cluster.  I’m returning to France on June 22nd to play at Café de la Dance, so hopefully I will see some of you there!  2009-05-16T14:48:00-05:00 http://fredoviola.com/blog/uk_release/ http://fredoviola.com/blog/uk_release/#When:12:11:00Z I just got word from my label that my album has finally been released in the UK!  Hooray!  So anyone who likes my music and lives anywhere in the UK, I hope you will consider buying it! It’s a double disc set:  one with the album’s music, the other a dvd with eight of my videos.  2009-05-05T12:11:00-05:00 http://fredoviola.com/blog/next_chapter_coming_right_up/ http://fredoviola.com/blog/next_chapter_coming_right_up/#When:17:14:00Z Hello there, So just wanted to let you all know the next little chapter of my trip will be written about very soon.  I’m just trying to finish a circular video shot while I was in France and I want the blog to coincide with that.  In the meantime… I can announce my next live performance!  It’s June 22nd, 7:30PM at Café de la Dance in Paris!  Hooray!  So please, if you are around Paris at that time, come and hear us!  It’s going to be me singing with the instrumental/vocal support of I Am Your Autopilot and Scalde.  If you are interested in seeing what we sound like live, there’s a clip from a performance we did in a hallway in France you can see here: #122 - Fredo Viola - Robinson CrusoeUploaded by lecargo 2009-05-04T17:14:00-05:00 http://fredoviola.com/blog/wood_smoke_the_third_circular_video/ http://fredoviola.com/blog/wood_smoke_the_third_circular_video/#When:20:35:01Z I just uploaded my third circular video, which I made to play against the edited voice improvisation entitled Wood Smoke.  The imagery was inspired by the arrival of summer.  There’s a smell of heated wood from the forest and all the trees are in bloom.  Anyway, It’s the large dark green circle found at theturn.tv.  I hope you enjoy it! 2009-04-28T20:35:01-05:00 http://fredoviola.com/blog/the_wonderful_writings_of_my_mom/ http://fredoviola.com/blog/the_wonderful_writings_of_my_mom/#When:11:31:00Z My mother, Diana Serbe, has just started a little website devoted to her fiction writing.  This makes me so happy, as she’s really talented!  I invite you all to do some good reading! 2009-04-27T11:31:00-05:00 http://fredoviola.com/blog/a_brief_interruption/ http://fredoviola.com/blog/a_brief_interruption/#When:11:09:01Z Just want to mention that I have a couple new improvised pieces on exhibition at luvsound.org, a really awesome netlabel run by good friend and musician hecanjog.  The song is called Wood Smoke, and it’s an edit down from 12 minutes to 3!  I really like this one, it’s peaceful and feels a bit summery.  The second is my new video Crater Lake, which is an unedited 14 minute journey.  It gets kind of intense if you give yourself to it.  Anyway, great thanks to hecanjog for including me on his wonderful site! They have a great many wonderful artists released in the past.  Make sure to check some of the previous releases out. 2009-04-27T11:09:01-05:00 http://fredoviola.com/blog/entry_number_two_of_my_trial_by_fire/ http://fredoviola.com/blog/entry_number_two_of_my_trial_by_fire/#When:19:10:01Z But first, I have added three new rectangular videos in the last month to theturn.tv site. Red States international cluster - this is one we did live with Autopilot shooting their voices in Manchester, Scalde shooting his in Lyon and me shooting mine in Woodstock.  Then I have uploaded two improvisations - Crater Lake and an Untitled one.  Both are relatively trippy.  Crater Lake gets extremely disturbing musically and it’s very long, so be warned!  Soon I will add these videos to this site as well. OK, so where were we?  I had just arrived in Manchester, met Jasper Wilkinson for the first time (forgot to mention that, he’s the only Autopilot member I hadn’t met, and he’s loverly!) We’d spent a grueling, but highly satisfying two days practicing several new arrangements of songs and now it was off to London to perform… The UK… somehow I’m not quite feeling the love there yet.  I’m hoping for it.  Obviously most of my favorite pop music has come from there.  So I went off with two of the members of I Am Your Autopilot hoping for the best. First we played a radio show called Q.  It was pretty strange.  Not as scary as I thought it would be (yes this was a first!) Actually the only thing I would say is it takes some getting used to singing in a seriously dead quiet room!  While there I shot a little circular souvenir video, and here’s an image from it: While in London the schedule was quite tight.  I had a full day of what I thought would be interviews but ended up being little performances for different websites!  Because of the misunderstanding I didn’t have any musicians there to support me, so I ended up just doing it similar to how I used to in the hallway on 14th street.  And all in all it went well. Now, I had been told that Jasper, with whom I was meant to share a room while in London, was a noisy snorer.  Seeking to avoid a sleepless night, I asked my friend Lucas Howe who was also visiting London on work if there was any space on a couch where he was staying.  Lucas was staying at his friend Rory’s flat and said I was welcome to come and take the second room. The place was so swank!  Here’s a shot of Lucas in Rory’s flat, followed by one of us in a cab testing out my new camera. Anyway, it was lovely to see Lucas, but I noticed he was just coming down with a horrible cold.  I’m actually a bit of a hypochondriac and worried instantly that I would get sick. Still Lucas and I had a grand old time.  In fact, the last radio gig I did there, which was LIVE (yes, another first) I invited Lucas to come and play some hand percussion.  This was a bit crafty of me, because while it was fun to have Lucas on the radio with me, it also strengthened me to know somebody was more nervous there than me!  Anyway, that was the John Kennedy show, and the interview and performances went well!  We were all so excited when we left, and it was quite late, around 1AM.  We had to pick up all the equipment from Jasper’s room, move it back to Rory’s where we would be leaving at 5AM the next morning. This left us about 3 hours to sleep.  Ever tried sleeping when you have to get up in 3 hours?  Impossible.  I had about an hour of restless rest that morning before we hit the road to do another first:  perform 5 songs on a TV show in Manchester.  Despite being absolutely bushed and truly running on fumes the show went pretty derned well.  Especially the first three songs.  But directly after the show I suddenly felt like I was getting sick.  The next morning Ben and I were meant to go to Paris ahead of Graeme and Jasper to do a special show called One Shot Not, with very amazing drummer Manu Katché.  So it was super important that I didn’t awake sick.  I hit the hay early that night, and the outcome I will save for the next installment.  (But keep in mind, I’m calling this my trial by fire, so you can imagine what happens next!!!!!) Till next time! 2009-04-25T19:10:01-05:00 http://fredoviola.com/blog/like_wind_or_water/ http://fredoviola.com/blog/like_wind_or_water/#When:19:54:00Z A month ago I took a two week trip to the UK and France to do some promotional performances.  That may be a very normal part of every musicians’ life, doing various kinds of performing, but for me it has been anything but normal.  Actually, I have been petrified, absolutely terrified, about even the idea of performing.  I knew I had to do it, so I have been practicing steadily, but… I suppose when the fear is great enough, really nothing can prepare you.  You just have to do it and hope things work out.  So I did.  I met up with the great band I Am Your Autopilot and started rehearsing with them in their home town of Manchester, England. The first two days First of all, Manchester is lovely.  The people are so friendly.  I mean, jokey too, of course.  In fact, on the airplane ride over I was seated next to a rather heavily inebriated Mancunian who suggested that for this red eye he was going to get me drunk as a skunk.  Of course that was out of the question for me as the following two days would be filled with very intense rehearsing.  No way I was going to go into that hung over.  He was a kind guy and decided that he would instead just drink my portion of alcohol, and proceeded to play me whole albums by some of Manchester’s most famous musical treasures.  For hours.  It was nice, but… I needed to sleep!  Well, anyway, the next day I met with I Am Your Autopilot, who are Ben Evans, Graeme Brooker and Jasper Wilkinson.  These guys are all great musicians, but also extremely nice guys.  And what I discovered, after freaking out about having to prepare 7 songs in 2 days, is how fun it is to play music with musicians.  Again, this seems like a really basic truth for most musicians, one that perhaps is even taken for granted.  But for me, I’ve been a headphones musician, working alone, constructing my music like… well, I guess a bit like an alchemist (or at least a pharmacist!) It was extremely inspiring to discover another spirit to music.  And it was very moving to hear my songs played by somebody else! While I was there I stayed at Ben’s house with his lovely, friendly family.  Ben has a lovely wife named Rebecca and two children, Noah and Charlie - Charlie is a really talented bass player.  So it was really a warm environment to come into.  We ended up rehearsing for 7 hours each day and prepared 5 songs… Red States, The Turn, Robinson Crusoe, The Original Man and Friendship Is… The place where we rehearsed was super cool looking too!  At the top is an image within the actual studio, and below that is a shot of Graeme (on right) and Jasper.  And just below that a shot me Ben, Rebecca with Lee, who is another artist I have known only through the internet! Finally on the bottom you can see a shot of the outside of the studio which was fascinatingly bland.  I’ll post the next chapter of my trip next week with more picts.  Next up:  a trip to London with some live radio performances and a visit with my New York friend Lucas… 2009-04-14T19:54:00-05:00