pacificlectic : concert reviews & eclectic music news

In 2003, a side-project release of Michael Einziger‘s totally caught me off guard and shot past many familiar names in my musical interests to become my favorite CD of 2003. That CD was Time-Lapse Consortium‘s Live at the Roxy Theatre 1/24/2003:

FYI, Michael Einziger is the guitarist for rock band Incubus (the fuzzy guy below).

That Time-Lapse Consortium CD still feels fresh and exciting to me. It totally caught me by surprise.

Anyway, just today, a bulletin was posted on the Incubus MySpace page, which led me to this endvacuum.com note from Mike:

simply stated, end.>vacuum is a jagged collection of orchestral music i have been writing for the past year. a horrendously turbulent, and at times serene, aural interpretation of complex patterns and geometric shapes that assemble themselves firmly into my consciousness. a 40 minute-long insomnia-induced orchestral anxiety- attack. (sounds like heaven, right?)

under normal circumstances, i play guitar in a band called incubus. but last year i was forced to stop playing for several months due to a wrist injury that required surgery, as well as a time-intensive recovery. without the option of picking up a guitar, it was during that idle time that i began to write music for the orchestra, which became like a musical game of ‘tetris’ for me. a huge challenge on both cerebral and intellectual levels. I don’t know if it’s any good, either.

rather than record this music and release it as an album, i thought it would be much more risky and fun to for the maiden voyage of ‘end.>vacuum’ to happen as a live, unedited performance in front of my family, friends, and fans. with all mishaps intact.

the music will be performed in nine movements, by a group of musicians i am calling ‘the graviton modern ensemble‘. it will be a mixture of professional philharmonic players and friends. throughout the piece, i will play a variety of different instruments (sans guitar) alongside my brother, benjamin einziger, and my good friend blake mills. suzie katayama will be conducting.

to make this event even more heavenly, the first part of the program will consist of a lecture by my friend and esteemed british physicist, dr. brian cox. he is a world-renowned scientist who acts as a science correspondent for the BBC, and is currently conducting monumental research at the large hadron collider at CERN. the large hadron collider is a particle accelerator, and is the most powerful/ complex/expensive machine ever built by humans (google it). his talk will be a discussion on particle-physics and the mind-bending potential for major discoveries at CERN in the near future.

all this could make for an amazing evening at UCLA, or it could be a train-wreck. we’ll all decide that together.

So, yeah… a new non-rock, compositional piece from Michael Einziger. I’m stoked. I don’t know if it’ll be in the same vein as Time-Lapse. I doubt it, but I don’t really care. I’m sure it’ll be some interesting music.

The skinny:
Michael Einziger’s END.>VACUUM
A Realization in Nine Movements
August 23, 2008 at UCLA’s Royce Hall
endvacuum.com

~Dan – np: Isis – In the Absence of Truth