I just recently launched a website for the band, Tereu Tereu. Built on WordPress, it features a clean, simple design and allows them to maintain all the content themselves.

Visit the new site and check out their music at TereuTereu.com

I just posted some photos of Rocky’s Revival’s video shoot from December on Flickr. Ryan and Eric are putting together a music video for them and these photos are a sneak peak of the lighting and setup for the upcoming video.

Patrol Magazine is featuring a story about Andy Zipf’s new, soon to conclude mini-tour, Pfriends on Pfilm. It is a pretty amazing conglomeration of beautiful and stunningly good music by Andy (with Pete Lim) and some amazing VJ-ing and motion graphics by Brad Wolf from SOTA. The story features some of my photography from the SOTA Studio show a couple of Friday’s ago and also has a paragraph about my friends, Tereu Tereu.

I’ll be posting some more photos from this shoot on Flickr, soon. Stay tuned.

Check It out: Patrol Magazine: Pfriends on Pfilm

I recently posted some photos from a show at the Third Floor in Fredericksburg of Exit Clov and Jukebox the Ghost, some great bands from DC. Adam really knows what bands to book to have some great shows in Fredericksburg.

View the Gallery Here

I went out on a limb today and bought a djembe drum. I guess this wasn’t totally a suprise. I’ve been drumming on my body for a while now at the nameless church Sunday night gatherings, I’ve becoming the resident drummer, not by virtue of skill, or experience, but rather of just my compelling need to beat myself with my hands during songs of worship. Tonight I got a chance to use the new dejimbe drum and actually be in a …band? Am I a musician now? I thought it all stopped in 8th grade?

I’ve been heavily listening to what I refer to as musician’s music for many years now. Usually that includes tons-o-jazz, jam oriented rock, prog-rock, etc. Plus tons of other music. It is strange take the depth of my listening and move it into playing a piece of carved wood and hide that I just picked up, and to really here some music come out of it. Granted my beats waver in and out of the time signature, and I probably sounded like a crack addict with the way that I was playing, but it was real. I felt so comfortable and expressive behind this drum, it was like painting. It was totally like painting. Amazing.

I got the drum from a very cool place in Fredericksburg, called Eyeclopes studios. The owner Ken Crampton is heavily involved in the drumming lifestyle, hosting regular drum circles, lessons, and runs www.everybodydrum.com. He’s bulding a new place, and I highly recommend checking it out when it is open.

Check out some shots that Ryan took of me drumming.

I like John Mayer. I really like John Mayer. I saw him first opening up for (of all people) They Might Be Giants at the dancin in the district festival in Nashville in 2001, shortly before the release of his “Room for Squares” album. Despite his excellent guitar skills with some sweet jazz licks that where textured by vocals mimicking his blues strings, scatting in harmony, I still discounted him as “a nowheresville DMB wanna be college dropout.” I dug on the music, but kept that frown, wrong side down as if to illustrate my musical snobbery and as an annoying time waster between me seeing TMBG.

Now after few years of healing, I am in a musical 12 step program. Hi, I am Ian and I’m a music snob. I spent years avoiding Top 40 charts in lieu of the sounds of jazz and rock that alienated me from many people around me. I even admit that there were times where I liked some musician or song, but I let myself not enjoy it, because it meant that I had to say that I enjoyed something that the “enemy” liked. The enemy being someone who liked something that was not cool, or something that I didn’t think was cool.

I admit that there were times that I felt uncomfortable or threatened by someone who liked an artist that I found amazing, and I would begin a pathway of relational destruction that included me listing all the things that I knew about the band, just to isolate my snobbery from another’s childish interest in this amazing group.

I admit that I took too much pride in having a music collection that almost everyone that I knew could not enjoy with me.

I’m recovering. And maybe John Mayer is a step in the right direction. This did not happen overnight. I admitted that I liked “Why Georgia?”, sometime in 2002 or 2003. I read comment by the amazing guitarist Ric Hordinski that sarcastically and sincerely described him as “A suprisingly good guitar player.” I saw him on Chapelle show playing the ballad of Jed Clampitt with the drummer from the Roots and Dave Chapelle. For a show that is pretty much an exclusively hip-hop outlet, the idea of him being there was intriguing. I saw him on VH1 with Paul Simon, that really made me respect him musically and as a song writer. I’ve seen a few interviews that show him as very intelligent, bitingly sarcastic and funny, albeit dry. I started listening to his albums and really enjoying them. And the other day I downloaded the John Mayer Trio album and have played it about 4 times. He is really good and I really like him.

Musical snobbery is a disease that can be treated. I recommend trying different kinds of music at all times. I recomment “suffering-through” to the end of each song and album. I recommend listening to more more and gossiping about it less. I recommend challenging your music listening in all the ways that you can: take risks, download songs from iTunes that you wouldn’t normally, go to the library ingest their music collection, borrow an album from a friend even if you don’t aggree with their musical choices. Above all, I recommend remembering why you began to love music in the first place. How can you take that childlike love and infuse it with your developed sensibilities and knowledge and really love music?