From Video
EXCLUSIVE! A cappella vocal composition score and recording included!
Antikörper Session (3 live videos)
These are three videos recently sent to Antikörper Sessions, a Byte FM radio show in Germany. Mark Kowarsch from Antikörper has been extremely patient waiting for these to come through for the past couple years. This is basically a one-take video session Multibird did at the end of a rehearsal recently at our house show spot, Meddlesome Lab.
The performers are:
Seth Faergolzia
Shaun Jones
Emily DiPaola
Luke Cornwell
WATCH ALL THREE VIDEOS (playlist)
or individually:
MONSTER ON THE RADIO (by Seth)
DEVIL IN THE WASHTUB (by Forest Creature)
FROG POND (by Shaun)
If you’d like these live audio files you can find them here:
re-production of an older song
I suppose I’ll tell you a little bit about the history of this album. It goes way back to my NYC days when I was putting on my musical, Fun Wearing Underwear. My roommate, Rose, was dating this guy Shayne who lived in C-Squat and used to play in the punk band Choking Victim. Rose was in my musical along with a ton of other friends from Purchase College and brought Shayne out to a show. He loved it and started coming regularly to the shows which were happening every weekend at Surf Reality, a truly unique and amazingly free theater where really anything was possible. After becoming closer with Shayne and meeting his friend Josh, I decided to accept his offer to move into C-Squat (aka See Skwat) and live the squatter lifestyle. It was great and horrible. I wouldn’t trade the experience away, but I’ve moved from that lifestyle for my mental and physical health. The squat has since become a co-op and some of my old friends still live there, but it is definitely changing.
Anyway, I met Josh Gura in those years and was always fascinated by how weird and wonderful his mind and his art were. I’m still amazed and awe inspired by his work. I wish I was in a position to make him famous because I really think he’s got incredible skills and an ingenious mind.
After my daughter was born in 2007, I moved up to Rochester from Ithaca and became less present in the NYC scene. Josh reached out to me not too long after and said he wanted to collaborate on an album together. He only had a short time to work with me, but he brought his studio up to my apartment in Rochester and we worked day and night producing these tracks. I was insistent that I not play to a click track, so we did painstaking beat-mapping, which is a difficult process involving looking at wave forms to place where each beat hits. Not easy. This is why you’ll hear the rhythm of this album waver and move, slower and faster at points. I hope you’ll enjoy this new production of this old song and take the time to listen to the full album, maybe even download it from bandcamp! The full album can be found HERE.
Certain People lyrics:
Certain people have certain smiles
some are awkwardly like a frown
with creases in cracks go on for miles
carry the water all further down
sometimes people show love strangely
like when we own each other
holding love inside of a cage deranged
withers and weathers a nursing mother
leafs are pages
the pages are leaving
a sage is receiving a leaflet
with pictures and captions
muses are destined
to humbly stumble
tumbling dumbly
fall into the lap of the all mind
d’al bange has taken your hand
d’al bange is stroking your head
everywhere in every town
people are dressing in what they’ve made
with their own hands
others they gather
tar and feather the naked clowns
get their reward
retire and fade away
on their own land
sometimes equal doesn’t explain things
innocent mother
held inside the cage of a rage deranged man
withers and weathers a nursing daughter
leafs are pages
the pages are leaving
a sage is receiving a leaflet
with pictures and captions
muses are destined
to humbly stumble
tumbling dumbly
fall into the lap of the all mind
d’al bange has taken your hand
d’al bange is stroking your head
put it down in a safe place
out of sight out of mind
weary head, enter the safe place
out of sight out of mind
!!! Puppet Movie – Scene 2 !!!
Hello Beautiful People!
I’m feeling really well today, firstly because it’s Halloween, but also because I’ve finally finished the second chapter in my PUPPET OPERA MOVIE!!!
This is HUGE! It has taken quite some time to reach this point. This piece of sight and sound somehow feels like it was meant for this time, this climate, our political, social and everchanging lives as humans of earth. Wow. Have you been paying attention? Things are charged and wild. I’ve been finding messages in the lyrics written 14 years ago during a completely different life I was leading in Ithaca, NY. Times have changed, but the problems remain the same, now as in the distant past, but the weapons are more dangerous, the population is out of control, and the stakes seem to be getting close to all or nothing…
DOWN TO BUSINESS: This was quite a process. As many of you know, I wrote the music for this 14 years ago using a stream of consciousness method wherein I sat with guitar and voice, recording into a cassette the ideas I had that day, stitching each beginning to the previous ending. Each day, when I returned to my writing, I would listen first to the end of the previous day then build off that. After I had done this long enough to fill 23 full pages of paper with lyrics (about 6 months), I took the tapes and reviewed them over and over, learning the whole thing as I went.
After learning it, I began scoring it for four parts, meant to be played in choirs, groups of instruments.
After scoring it, I started recording many people in my home studio (Whenland) and making the soundtrack.
After finishing a soundtrack piece, I take the audio and put it into my video software. I take the synopsis written using lyrics from the music and I make storyboards. From the storyboards I come up with the directions for my puppets and film them. Then I sift through the film and put it in my computer, edit it, move it, colorize it and smooth it over. That is what I’m handing you today.
I have a feeling once I get to the end of this I’ll want to go back and spruce up the beginning, but I’m going to make it first in these small clips for you, then I will put them all together and fix, reshape things. Anyway, I know people like to hear about the process…
This section is about the meeting of the Beast. He was awakened in the last chapter and now the three brothers are coming to see if they can keep the Beast from turning totally sour and messing up the world. Enjoy!!!
with love and thanks,
Seth
New Song! Purple Peaceful People
Hello lovely people! I’m hoping you are all quite well. I’ve been hard at work on a few things, the main thing is the synopsis for my film, which you all know about. I should be sending you Act 1 sometime next week and Act 2 by the end of the month. Then my plan is to get the actual second scene of the movie to you before I leave for a European Tour August 14th (See accompanying photo or go here to see where I’lll be).
In addition to that, I’ve started a handful of songs. All this writing of the movie synopsis has opened the floodgate and a bunch of tunes seem to be popping out! haha. It’s great. I’ve decided since I’ve developed this whole long set of soft songs that I’ll start writing some up tempo tunes. That is what I’m sending you today! I wrote this song a week ago and have had it stuck in my head and have been developing parts for my band.
So what I’m sending you today is a scratch track. If you don’t know what that is, basically it’s a sketch for musicians to work from. I have scored out the music for flute, trumpet, trombone, tuba, electric guitar and bass. Then I took the weird synthesized audio from that and added a couple guitars and a few voices so that my band can have an idea of where I want this tune to go. I have a really good feeling about this upcoming cluster of songs. This one feels great to me playing solo, so with a band it’ll really rock hard.
Here’s the score if you’d like to take a look or play along…
Here’s the audio of just the score:
… and here’s the audio of the scratch recording including my parts:
That’s it for now!! Much love from overly hot Rochester!! Let’s live our lives to the fullest!!
hugs,
Seth
MY MOVIE! FIRST WEBISODE IS LIVE!!
Let’s see what comes of this leap of faith!!! Weeeeeeeee!!!!!
Act Two – Full Musical Score and Audio plus Video version
Blazisox zinkmau!!! The time has culminated, bubbling forth a smokey boiling liquid in the black kettle upon the fiery hearth within. Hours and hours and hours of toil to complete this mammoth of a second act to my 13 year project in puppet opera, 23 Psaegz.
I’ve spent almost every waking / free hour, pouring my soul into this computer, this composition program, in hopes that one day we might read through this massive work and bring it to life. I give this music to you, my Patreons, to have a first listen. I will continue to own the copyright, hehe, but I give it to your ears, and if you read music, then I give it for your fingers… and your voices, to sing or play on your own along with this digital version first ideas sketch recording and score.
It will certainly develop over time, and I do not feel 100% done with it, but only playing it with others will bring forth changes at this point. I’ve made it as true to my original idea as I could, with these digital constraints. I’m loving it.
The audio is of a computer simulation of the future event with live band, but it does not have my guitar parts included, so may sound a bit sparse at times. It also has a very sketchy voice recording along with it, where I kinda just wanted to get the vocal cues in there for the musicians to get an idea of what was happening.
Tomorrow I will will post a video of the score with music playing simultaneously. They are rendering as we speak. It’s a very long process since this act is about 33 minutes!! There are three acts in all. The third act is (thankfully) shorter, only about 15 minutes. I previously released Act 1 a couple months back. You can find it if you scroll through my posts here.
I’m shooting to complete Act 3 by the end of December! That way I can move on into the next phase of this project in 2018…
We are here in the future, and weirdly, it feels very futuristic! We are actually doing a lot of the things people predicted we would do. I predict that we, as a species, will reach a greater state of enlightenment, while, at the same time, we will find ourselves slipping perpetually backward into ignorant bliss. Bless! Thanks for checking this out.
FULL SCORE AND INDIVIDUAL PARTS HERE
… and if you’re interested in reading along while the music plays, here’s a video version!!
LOOP PAINTING #6
Wow, I’ve passed the halfway mark with this Loop Painting project! This time I did a bit of advance work before the live performance. So what I did was to shoot video while looping with headphones and painting a simple background in my studio. After that, I performed at Kashong Creek in Geneva, NY and completed the painting. You’ll notice in the video that when the scenery changes also the audio quality changes, that is because I recorded the looping while doing both parts and had the audio coincide. I hope this creates a bit more connection to the actual events as they occurred.
Heres the SHORT AUDIO and the LONG VERSION for you to download.
My next two paintings are from the Rochester Fringe Festival. Those ones turned out really nice, and they keep getting bigger!!! The full art opening is December 1st at Photo City Improv here in Rochester.
This month you should expect from me a Soft Songs Series video and hopefully part 2 to the 23 Psaegz rock opera score. I’m working hard toward a great many goals. You are helping to make all this happen, so I must thank you repeatedly! THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!
This is incredibly exciting!! Two months of work, and the new video is done!
Helly delly friendly peoples! Super ‘citement from the duperdiddly worm!
I’ve finished the video I’ve put my heart and soul into for the past two months straight!
First I made the song in 2014, then recorded it in 2015, then toured with it in 2016, and now I’ve finished the video. Wow! I must really like this song! It’s a pretty weird hip-hop loop song, and it’s the first time since I really started learning video editing that I’ve just let loose and been creative with a video. The other videos I’ve put on here felt creative, don’t get me wrong, but this was the first time I got really deep into it and tried to make a singular work of art out of the video.
It’s sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo good! (I had to type each one of those ‘o’s out individually, by the way. I work so hard for you!!) I’m pretty certain I’ve clocked at least a hundred hours work on just the video alone. The song, well, that’s likely even more at this point.
I let my imagination run loose by first learning about storyboarding then making a storyboard while listening to the tune. From there I set up the green screen studio in my garage (I’m lucky to have this great garage in my backyard!), and I started shooting. Everything always takes way longer than I think it’s going to because I strive for better versions of myself constantly (which, incidentally, is sort of what this song is about).
So I like a lot of the footage I took, improved camera work, more understanding of the camera settings. I gained understanding in greenscreen and keying. I learned a ton about editing video, layers, frame rate. Made costumes. Laura Lee Jones made a puppet which I pinned to a greenscreen suit in order to have my head on its little body!! So fun! I even got a haircut!!!
Please watch it. Please like it on youtube. Please do not share the video link (yet), but if you can, pass this Patreon page along to 5 people who you think will care enough to subscribe. I’m shooting to get the number of subscribers up to about 200, then I can perpetuate it and even maybe be able to hire some helpers so the process gets quicker and better, the art gets more focus, and my more grand ideas can become realized!!
The lyrics:
Rubbing It In – © ⓟ 2014 Seth Faergolzia ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Human in a bottle and I’m rubbin’ it up to pour a cup
I wanna take a pull and drink myself up, I pour a cup
Aw yeah, I’m rubbin’ it in!
When I put a joke in, into the mental ether
I yolk the folk up and they giggle with their dental teeth
Rental cars for miles and miles
Emptying the pockets of the souls defiled
I’m ripping up the money
I’m ripping up the money
I’m ripping up the money even though my joke was funny
It made your eyes all runny and it tightened up your tummy
But I just can’t keep running like this
This isn’t bliss; it’s like I missed the point when I rolled into the joint
To cover up the pain I could never seem to tame
But this is the time when my mind isn’t blind
And I’m finding out the kind of man I can be when I shine
I’m fine, and I’m an artist of the utmost
I roast all my past selves in an oven made of love
They cook to perfection, warm and tender, no need to defend ‘em
I gobble ‘em up and wash ‘em down with a goblet of my blood
This is self love of the highest order
This ain’t no ordinary sorb, sorb
Absorb all my past selves
Absorb all my past selves
Rubbin’ it in
Human in a bottle and I’m rubbin’ it up to pour a cup
I wanna take a pull and drink myself up, I pour a cup
Aw yeah, I’m rubbin’ it in!
Listen to this:
you might have missed out so open up your ears and take the words out of your mouth
Aw yeah, rubbin’ it in
When I was a little kid of 7 found a gun in an abandoned building, just out to have some fun
Were things any different them or have they stayed the same
Gobble up my past selves, then I change the name and I said
Aw yeah I’m rubbin’ it in, aw yeah I’m rubbin’ it in.
If I take a picture of the who I was then
And then again take picture of the me at age 10
Aw yeah, I gobbled it up
Look a couple years into the future and then
Compare to the picture of the me that was 10, and you can tell
Aw yeah, I gobbled it up
Human in a bottle and I’m rubbin’ it up to pour a cup
I wanna take a pull and drink myself up, I pour a cup
Aw yeah, I’m rubbin’ it in!
Think about it:
Think about this:
Won’t say it loud, that’d be annoying
Somehow made this song that I sing and that’s a thing
Aw yeah, I’m rubbin’ it in
Every memory, every thought you think
Can get lost or put into the mental sink and I said
Aw yeah, I’m rubbin’ it in
I’m gazing down from up above
Etherally looking at my brain with love and I said
Aw yeah, I’m rubbin it in
I reach inside with memory
Valuable, each and every piece and I said
Aw yeah, I’m rubbin’ it in
Aw yeah, I’m rubbin’ it in.
———————————————————
Thanks a ton, my friends! That’s what you are… my friends! Because you give of yourself to help this dream come to form… and because you care enough to support who I am, my weird self, you allow me to be not only vulnerable without fear, but you also allow me to be my strongest version!
much love,
Seth
You get an old one from the vaults, exclusively.
Gun Pointed At You
That’s the title of this old tune from my distant past, from the days of living in NYC at See Squat. It’s strange how clearly these lyrics hold to our present world. I guess it’s always been the way it is, we perhaps have these waves of hope and the the destructo richies grab their piles of money and throw them at us in the form of weapons.
some nice bits of throat singing in this
some interesting melodic choices as well
i’m proud of this song
i hope you can hear it well! it’s a low quality file, but sounds decent still, in it’s way, as a captured history, deteriorating just as any form of time capture.
it was recorded at my good friend and Dufus bandmate Mark Ospovat’s studio Emandee in Brooklyn. Mark recorded some of my very first recordings in 1994, I believe. I’ll have to try to dig some of those out.
the lyrics are on the soundcloud.
Would you guys like me to present more of the long time history songs? I’ve got quite a number of them that have never been digitized. It’s a bit of work, and I’m not sure if people want to hear that stuff. So what do you think? Post in the comments below please! I’d like you to put in your 2 cents!
would you like me to work on playing this song then performing it on high quality video with perhaps better recording? thoughts?
hugs and friendship,
Seth