TAKE YOUR SEATS, HOLD ON TO YOUR HATS, THIS IS IT
Sunday June 2nd
Finally! We're recording our fourth live storytelling album, here in East Montpelier. Yes!
Vampire Princess: Stories of Humor & Suspense.Admission is free, by reservation only.
Quick action is strongly recommended. There are only three seats left for our 7:00 session as I write this, and maybe 20 seats for the 2:30 show. Sometimes there are last-minute dropouts, though, so feel free to contact us any time up to the day itself.Location: Four Corners Schoolhouse, East Montpelier.
Please don't show up without registering, We can't overbook the (lovely, small) space, and we need to know who's coming, and when everybody's gotten there, so all the car and arrival sounds are finished before we begin.Information, reservations, directions, questions, etc don't hesitate to call or write
802 223 9103 • tim@folktale.netAfter almost a year of preparation, previews, false & true alarms, public and private performances, this live album project is ready & raring to record. Our next two projects demand more of a studio approach, so if you like the idea of being "in the mix" on one of our products, here's your best chance for a long time to come.
We'll tour with the album this fall, Foliage and Halloween seasons through to the beginning of December.
ps-- A lot of you have already registered. Great! Of course a lot of you can't come, and I guess some of you don't want to. The rest of you, HEY! time to get your seats saved before they fill up with folks we don't want there nearly as much as you!
EVENTS
More as it comes in.
Wednesday May 22 --
Boyz & Girls Club dinner, Bethany Church, Montpelier-- White BearThursday May 23 --
Rumney School & Orchard Valley School -- short classroom visitsSaturday May 25 --
Waitsfield Farmer's Market (music)Sunday June 3 --
LIVE RECORDING VAMPIRE PRINCESS (see above)Wednesday June 5 --
Braintree School 10 AM -- Wolves!Friday June 7 --
Waterbury 250 Birthday Celebrations
6:30, Bandshell, Rusty Parker Memorial ParkBASIN HARBOR SHOWS
They've cut us down to four Tuesday nights this summer. (New booker.) Here they are:
July 9, July 16, Aug 6, Aug 13.
If you're one of our regular Basin Harbor attendees, and you're going to miss us, we'll miss you too. We liked our weekly schedule.
One big reason we put this newsletter out is to keep in touch with folks who like what we do. It's a funny old life we lead, we don't work alone obviously (telling stories when nobody's listening is a kind of insanity) but we don't have ongoing work relationships. So, this thing helps us avoid feeling isolated, and keeps is in some kind of contact with our own virtual "work friends."
Another reason, of course, is to let you know what we're up to, and to remind you of our shows and our recordings
Another reason is to create series of deadlines for me to write something about what interests me most. Sometimes it's a pet, or our garden, or even politics. But mostly it's
Something about Storytelling
random & I'm afraid barely coherent musings on
Making RecordingsThe Live Audience
We have learned not to try making our live albums by recording regular shows, where the audience (or somebody) is paying for the show.
When we record-- for example, in the sessions on June 2nd-- we are not primarily aiming to please the folks in the room with us. That is what we want, mind you, a happy audience is part of making a pleasing audio product. But main aim is to create an audio program-- CD, MP3, or whatever's coming next-- that's immediately engaging, and stands up well to repeated play.
In other words, while we will be performing for the "studio" audience, reaching out to them with all our might, our real goal is a permanent product that pleases its eventual owners. So, we'll stop a story to fix minor glitches that we would otherwise let pass by, we will pay less attention to the organic flow and more on keeping the individual pieces tight. Decisions about the order of things can wait until editing. Maybe there'll be some annoying pauses while we take care of technical issues. We'll probably wait till later to record the music separately. And so forth.
We really hope the recording audience will feel moved to be audibly responsive. (Though we won't have anybody there with (gasp!) (laugh!) signs.) We want folks relaxed and spontaneous. But they have to know enough, and be in agreement with our goals enough, to not (for example) repeatedly kick the chair in front of them, or crinkle their water bottles too much, or whine and fuss, or pass comments to each other during quiet moments, or repeatedly get up to use the bathroom-- minor problems at most in a live show, but a real issue when you're recording everything that happens in the room.
That's a lot to ask from a paying audience-- "don't make a sound! loosen up!" So we don't charge the folks who come to our tapings. Storytelling is always a collaborative event to some extent. We say the words, our audiences make the pictures in their heads. Recording ratchets up the collorative nature of the thing several notches. It's a group effort, to create something special.
We don't advertise in the papers and such, and we are guarded about giving exact times and locations until we know who really wants to come. We invite folks who have an interest in what we do, through this newsletter, our mailing lists, other people's email lists, a little local signage, performances, personal contact, visits to school clasrooms, messages to the the Vermont librarian list, etc.
"The involvement of the audience is almost palpable, making this a first purchase for schools and libraries." Booklist said this about our first live story CD, World Tales, back in 1997. That's our goal.
Microphones
Another big difference between our regular shows and our live recording sessions is the presence of a honking big microphone between us and the audience.
Most people doing professional folk performance use microphones everytime they perform. Recording a live album is simple for them: they can just take the signal off the mixing board, and edit a variety of shows, and the result is very similar to what folks are hearing (from speakers) at their live shows.
Peter Schumann, Mr. Bread and Puppet, believes passionately that microphones are inherently fascist. While that's a bit further than we're willing to go, we can see his point. In any case, we are unusual among modern professional spoken-word artists in that we prefer to work without any form of amplification.
We're glad we developed in that way. Due to the almost universal use of amplification, and the demands made by that equipment, one hears a dwindling number of stock styles of spoken performance, and they have become so familiar they're hard to notice at all. (Murmuring public radio announcer/folk musician, AM disc jockey, dry or angry or wacky comedian, screaming punk, smarmy TV preacher, etc.) Audiences, without understanding why, find it refreshing when they encounter highly developed perfomance styles that have nothing to do with any of that.
Our heads and hands and bodies are free to move without the constraint of stationary or hand-held microphone. Our voices don't sound bounced-up, we have access to a much wider dynamic range. People listen better. There's a real physical connection, sound waves originating from inside our lungs and throat travel through the air until they touch the inside of our listener's ears.
# # #
I surely don't need discuss the terrible effect amplification has had on popular music, the war in every bar between the guy who turns up the volume and screamed conversations in the crowd.
# # #
Once in a long while, we'll need to turn on amplification in the middle of a show. Maybe a loud blower suddenly has kicked in, or people sitting near the roaring coolers in the back can't hear us, or all of a sudden there's a noisy crowd.
When that happens, we notice a big change in the quality of attention. People stop leaning forward, they slump back and their eyes glaze over a little bit. Suddenly, there's something between us and the audience; the sound waves get sucked into the mic, twiddled into electrical impulses which are then zapped around through wires, and then changed back, and pushed out in arrogantly degraded form from the sides. It's more like the radio's on, it's not so clear that we're all there together, there's a bit of alienation, a bit more suspicion.
# # #
Mind you, when you need microphones, you really need them. When we're on a big stage our headset mics give us the freedom we need, and we talk without yelling. (That's what Mark Twain used to call his lecture performances, "yelling.") We love the big mics of live radio, we close our eyes as we cuddle up to the magic ear, putting all our thought and energy into vocal production aimed at a hypothetical vast unseen virtual yet real audience of pure listeners.
For awhile, we considered recording live radio broadcasts as a way to make our CDs, and it could happen some day. But it's good to have the crowd there on the CD with us, it lets our eventual listeners feel like they're in the room.
# # #
We're very hard to record in live performance. We work at some distance from the microphone, which can open up to an unpleasantly echoey "live theater recording" sonic quality. We want the room on the record, we want to hear the audience. We have a huge dynamic range, going quickly from a murmur to a bellow, very hard to get right without distortion. Our recording engineer this time is Antonio Oliart, the guy who does most of the live recording at WGBH, from orchestras to "wait, wait, don't tell me." We're in good hands, he recorded "World Tales" and "Wolves."
Eastern Coyote Recordings
This will be the seventh album recorded on our label, "Eastern Coyote." That name doesn't always go over well.
# # #
A woman who raises sheep in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom didn't like the name at all, her face fell into a sudden scowl as she said, "What, is that supposed to be a joke?" I understood after a moment: it was like a NYC mother encountering a baby-toy brand called "sewer rat," or "bedbug."
No, I told her, we weren't punks, we didn't mean to be threatening.
A woman hired us for a festival outside Seattle, then suddenly wasn't sure. She wanted to know what the Coyote thing was all about. She had taken flak from NW coast tribes about white people adopting a mystical Indian persona to perform sacred Native American material concerning the ambiguous trickster god Coyote. These people didn't have the right attitude, she was told, and more to the point, they didn't have the right, period.
No, I told her, we aren't setting up as any kind of gurus, we make no pretense to anything. We're just modern folks telling old stories to our modern contemporaries, as folk storytellers always have been, everywhere.
# # #
The name isn't random, though. On some level we do regard the Eastern Coyote as a kind of secular totem animal.
For one thing, like us, Coyotes are not from here, originally. They moved in from the south and west to fill a vacant ecological niche left when the northern timberwolves went extinct. And they have done very well in that niche, thank you, showing a commendable ability to balance wildness and predation with proximity to human habitation.
Just so, the old-time practice of telling marchen style folktales had disappeared from the Green Mountains long before we showed up, leaving barely a trace. But there was enough of a niche still standing vacant that with a little mutual adaptation we've been able to live in it productively for 30 years.
# # #
30 years ago, the the recording industry was a giant of commerce and culture. Now it's in steep decline, with the companies at the top of the chain seemingly headed toward extinction. But our little label --tiny, artisanal, opportunistic, and just barely profitable enough to keep going-- seems likely to keep chugging along as long as we're alive and active.
# # #
Some folks are passionately fond of the Eastern Coyote; they cannot understand how anybody wouldn't love an animal (especially one in the dog family) so beautiful and well adapted. Other people regard all coyotes as vermin, and would cheerfully wipe them off the face of the earth. Of course, most people are indifferent, and don't think about them at all.
It doesn't matter to the coyotes. They are at home in our woods and they are here to stay.
As, we hope, are we.
802 223 9103 • tim@folktale.net • PO Box 522 Montpelier VT 05601
