by Greg M | Apr 30, 2020 | The Creative Life, Working That Studio
I can hardly believe it. Composition of my “ECM Album” project is completed, in an amazing 29 days. If I had dared to guesstimate how long it might take to write this, I would have said months. But that was before our current pandemic-enforced, work-at-home isolation....
by Greg M | Apr 16, 2020 | Album Reviews
Big Gratitude to Ron Schepper at Textura.org for his nice review of my lost pieces album We Once Were Lost. A highlight: The deepest dive arrives first in the form of “Abyssal,” a nearly half-hour epic of creeping ebb-and-flow Moorcroft developed from a 2005...
by Greg M | Apr 10, 2020 | Adventures in Living, The Creative Life, Working That Studio
My colleague Mark Seelig quotes a musician friend of his, regarding troubled times: “We have to make better music.” I couldn’t agree more, as I set out in my blog post The Artist’s Role in Culture. This planet is in the teeth of the worst pandemic since 1918,...
by Greg M | Mar 3, 2020 | Intrinsic Beauty, The Creative Life
“The closest analogy to how I experience both the act of painting and a finished work of art is music. While I am painting I feel like music is streaming through me on to the paper. It is difficult to say whether I am playing the music or the instrument being played....
by Greg M | Feb 1, 2020 | Releases
My 8th album, In the Eyes of Infinite Light, a duo with Mathias Grassow, is available now at my Bandcamp page. Its genesis was entirely unexpected – one of those wonderful turns of fortune. Mathias Grassow is a long-established artist with a huge catalog of over...
by Greg M | Jan 14, 2020 | Releases
Powering up the studio in early December 2019, on a whim I opened my folder of Odd Pieces – as one does. I’ve sketched out and filed away lots of project ideas over the years, to be revisited “someday”. A recent nagging desire to sort through – and deal...
by Greg M | Dec 31, 2019 | The Creative Life, Working That Studio
After a fairly quiet year and a half, activity in The Keep has really picked up in the last few months. I think it’s only coincidental that the timing matched my change of heart about participating in the marketplace… but, of course, I could be wrong… Guest...
by Greg M | Oct 26, 2019 | The Creative Life
At the end of 2018, I announced that I was ending online availability of my solo work, partly to protect it against theft, and partly because I believed that I was playing into a global/financial cultural mentality which is antithetical to creative work. The Music...
by Greg M | Oct 21, 2019 | Releases, Working That Studio
A new collaboration piece of mine has just been released, marking my first appearance on the very cool Projekt label. Marco Billi records under the artist name jarguna. I discovered Marco’s music when my friend Nathan Youngblood appeared on his album Trapped, Vol. 1....
by Greg M | Sep 15, 2019 | Adventures in Living
Our third Boundary Waters wilderness camping trip, in July and August, was more of an adventure than the prior two, mainly because we went in with a much more ambitious itinerary which didn’t quite work out. The plan was a circuit of eight lakes in the northeast BW...