Towards an Ongoingness
Dear friends,
Thank you for your support of the David Darling and Hans Christian album Ocean Dreaming Ocean.
We received a nice review from BT Fasmer, editor of Newagemusic.guide, which can be found on our website here.
This album represents the beginning of a next chapter in collaborations for what has been a very David Darling centric journey.
The description of David’s music below by Kate Munger touches on the qualities in David we have held so dear.
“David Darling played the cello the way Georgia O’Keefe painted mountains; decisive, delicate and dedicated to his truth. He could play joy and grief at the same time, the way they occur in life.”
Transcendent beauty is a wonderful way to describe our next release, a work with harpist and singer Therese Schroeder- Sheker. Blessings of the Road has a timeless feel and like some of our projects has been years in the making. Most of the recordings on this album were made at the Cistercian monastery of St. Benedict's in Snowmass, Colorado in 1988. David recorded on two of the tracks with Therese, including the title track “Blessings Of The Road.” An insightful interview with Therese from the Paul Kaufman documentary can be found here. And her website is found here.
Clíodhna Ní Aodáin has created a string orchestra arrangement of “Minor Blue” from the album 8 String Religion, which she will be conducting in Switzerland during August.
This is a screenshot from the 1st rehearsal. I hope we can share this with you in the Fall.
Clíodhna is in deep right now with her Cellos For Trees project which you can read about on her website.
This month’s featured video is from a studio session with David and the author Ginny Jordan. Ginny wrote the piece following her trip to the Arctic with the “Chasing Ice” film crew and we recorded it with David in 2012. The music for the reading became the piece “Illumination” on the album Gratitude.
I recently posted this clipping from the 1st KGNU program guide published 45 years ago. I see it now as portending a course correction in my life.
Having a tape recorder and the support of the radio station, I could interview almost anyone of interest to me. My interest at the time was in the mind/body dynamic, ecology, our interconnectedness, and the language of emotions. Paul Winter was touring with the Consort in support of the album Common Ground, and he graciously accepted my invitation to the radio station. We had a great connection, and he invited me to record the evening’s performance. His sound engineer was Les Kahn, who was concurrently working with David on a studio project of David’s music. The concert itself was unlike anything I had heard before, and I arranged for Les and David to meet me at the radio station after the show. We went live on the air with David’s musical improvisations and discussions about the work they were doing together. Something inside of me got lit up that night. Maybe it was always there, but somehow that group of musicians on stage with the sounds of wolves, whales, and eagles was just what I needed. The enduring friendships and collaborations that have followed have informed my life in ways I could not have imagined at the time.
That KGNU article was published 45 years ago. Within a few months after it appeared, I with my wife Judy and dear friends Peggy Post and Andrea Schulman Cope began the production company that became Wind Over the Earth Records and that has now evolved into Curve Blue LLC.
Our first release in 1982 was the album River Notes with David and the author Barry Lopez. The way they listened to each other and the sounds they were making was spellbinding for me.
In the nearly 40 years that followed, I brought David into almost every project I worked on.
I find myself still trying to do that today, both in holding on and letting go. It’s an improv. This new chapter is both personally challenging and musically exciting. (“Same as it ever was.”) Stay tuned...
Love,
Mickey