This is an infor­ma­tive feature on my favorite hot sauce, Sriracha (which is appar­ently everyone else’s favorite hot sauce, too). Earlier today I put together a pretty basic sausage/peppers/onions grinder and garnished it with some quick Japanese-style pickles and a squirt of Sriracha. I pronounced it “good”.

Lens is a new photo blog from the New York Times. I wasted a good half hour on here this morning when I should have been writing for this, design­ing this, or reducing that.

PS. New audio excerpts are up for Bathtub Shrine and Senior; take a listen.

Just got back from Los Angeles and Balti­more, where I expe­ri­enced life as a touring musician for the past week. The Big Gig with the LA Phil­har­monic went splen­didly; I wish I could post a record­ing of Nightjar up here because John and the Green Umbrella crew made it sound so good, but alas, the unions (or at least their lawyers) would demand my head. Not only were the musi­cians consum­mate profes­sion­als, as I had expected, but they really cared about making Payton’s and my music sound like real music. When I asked percus­sion­ist James Babor if he could try a differ­ent ratchet sound for the opening, there was imme­di­ately a multi­plic­ity of differ­ent ratchets seem­ingly conjured from midair, every­thing from Toy to Industrial.

John, Payton and I did a little Q&A with Helane Anderson, an artistic admin­is­tra­tor at the LA Phil, which you can listen to here: LA Phil Q&A with Helane Anderson There was also a bunch of press about the event: a preview article in the LA Times, and a review from Mark Swed (“strangely Darwin­ian” as my friend Andrew points out).

LA is truly the city of great hole-in-the-wall Asian food. Each day we feasted on Bánh Mì, fatty pork ramen, Shanghai-style soup dumplings… all things sadly unavail­able in New Haven, and even a bit obscure in New York. Inspired, I am right now letting a fresh batch of Nước Mắm infuse on the kitchen counter (which is in turn infusing the whole apartment). 

The morning of the show I made our friend Annie’s family drive us out to Santa Monica, to make a pilgrim­age to the Eames House. It’s more modest in scale and construc­tion than photos in glossy art books convey, and is exactly how Charles and Ray left it, complete with the charm­ingly grody old appli­ances and corrod­ing steel paneling. I was surprised at how close to the Pacific Coast Highway the whole thing is (a thor­ough­fare which, at that point, kind of repre­sents the worst of Southern Cali­for­nia). Nonethe­less, the Eames estate is one of the pleas­an­test places I have ever been. Even though it is unequiv­o­cally one big piece of “high art” (there’s a jarringly monu­men­tal “national historic landmark” plaque in the studio) there is not a trace of snobbery or preten­sion— it feels more like the nest of two divinely-inspired magpies.

To cap the week, I was supposed to share a concert with fellow composer-pianist Tudor Dominik at Strath­more down in Bethesda, MD. Only, about two weeks before the show, Dom injured his hand (skate­board­ing? that was the rumor) and couldn’t play, doctor’s orders. So I filled out my program with a little Rzewski and Ives, in addition to the Marshall, Andres, and Steve Gorbos (who was in atten­dance with his entourage!). The venue was a nice contrast from the huge, sleek Disney Hall— a large 19^th-century living room of a converted mansion, which couldn’t have held more than 100 seats. I actually prefer playing in such intimate spaces; strangely, I’m able to concen­trate better, even though the front row is nearly sitting in my lap. The lovely producer of the series, Georgina, greeted me how, hence­forth, everyone should greet me post-concert— with a bottle of water in one hand, and a glass of booze in the other.

Hannah Collins, one of my frequentest and most loyal of collab­o­ra­tors, asked me to wright her a piano-less cello piece about a month ago. So I went and wrote her a piece with Hammond organ. Ha! Sure showed her. Thanks to prodi­gious acquirer of outdated musical equip­ment Jack Vees, I got to play a real live Hammond B3 last week rather than a MIDI imita­tion. The piece is called Fast Flows the River and here is what it sounds like (You can hear the noise of the motor making the enormous speakers slowly rotate):

Timo Andres: Fast Flows the River

Hannah Collins, ‘cello; Timo Andres, Hammond B3

So I am now in my final week of school, ever. On Friday I’m flying to Los Angeles for the Big Concert, then to Baltimore/Washington, and finally back to New Have to graduate (round two). I’ve decided to leave New Haven behind and move to New York city, along with my new Master of Music degree and six years’ accu­mu­lated furnishings.

I was wonder­ing a few days ago why I’m not feeling any regret, or prema­ture nostal­gia, as I go about various final­i­ties— concerts, classes, pruning my favorite flow­er­ing shrubs— the answer, I think, is that being in grad school has, somewhat unex­pect­edly, provided a pretty smooth tran­si­tion from student to Real Person. I’m not really sure what I expected going in, but this seems like the best possible result. I wonder how I’ll feel about the previous senti­ment this time next year, after what’s sure to be a healthy dose of New York struggle.

Snuck into the second half of Rufus Wain­wright’s New Haven show a few days ago. Just him alone on stage, singing and playing the piano/guitar, but still I was entranced. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone more comfort­able with the role of “performer”. Perhaps he is a little chatty for my tastes, but it seemed to make the girls swoon (somebody please explain this phenom­e­non to me).

I espe­cially like this new song, “Zebulon”, about a would-be conquest from middle school; instead of going into a nice chorus where you’d expect, it just sits on a repeated, unre­solved chord for awhile and starts a new verse. Good for him for not trying to resolve said chord in the end.

Just wanted to remind you that Bathtub Shrine, a brand-new orches­tra piece, will be premièred tomorrow (Saturday, April 18) at Woolsey Hall by the Yale Symphony at 8 pm. Tickets are $10 ($2 student).

After many hours in the studio, I’ve cobbled together a nice clean version of Shy and Mighty, which Dave Kaplan and I recorded back in February. Listen to some full tracks here. Special thanks go to Gene Kimball and Jason Robins at the Fred Plaut record­ing studio for all their instruc­tion and patience.

I got better-than-front-row seats to last night’s Lisa Moore/Karen Bentley Pollick concert at Klavier­haus (page turning). The high­light for me was getting to hear them play Sam Adams’s Aves Nostradamus, one of the most madden­ing and nerve-wracking pieces I’ve ever had the pleasure of working on (back in December). That’s why it was so much fun to sit back and listen to other people go to town. It’s a terrif­i­cally exciting and spastic piece which uses lots of extended piano and violin tech­niques without ever seeming gimmicky or strained (this Fazioli piano took a lot of abuse from Lisa; it looked to be about 13 feet long and I’m told it costs $200,000).

Sam doesn’t have a website or even a MySpace (!) so there’s no way I can point you to a record­ing; Sam, get yourself a domain. You’ll have to do better than www.samadams.com, though.

NEWS FLASH/UPDATE: Sam actually does have a website.

I was happy to see Alex Ross shout-out Prokofiev’s sixth symphony yester­day. I was obsessed with that piece when I was in high school, and like Alex, I’ve never heard it played live.

I kind of stopped listen­ing to Prokofiev as much when I started college; this was a conscious decision on my part, because his music had been such a recog­niz­able influ­ence on me, and I wanted to diver­sify. How I wrote music in my early teens was like this: choose a piece by Prokofiev, steal the form, then just fill in my own music! Easy. I have an old piece that is the same as the first movement of his sixth piano sonata, pretty much down to the bar.

Back to op. 111. This piece totally under­mines the simplis­tic idea of Prokofiev as the “happy Soviet”, the self-portrait he so oblig­ingly paints in the fifth symphony. It out-Shostakoviches Dmitri. The first movement is a kind of slowed-down taran­tella in e‑flat minor, one of the darkest (and most diffi­cult) keys. The middle movement is a sprawl­ing mili­taris­tic mess that I can’t make head of tail of. And the last movement starts out as a sunny, jaunty rondo with more marching soldiers, but in the end, which Alex writes about&#8212 I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s wonder­fully tragic and creepy. The last chord is a trade­mark Prokofiev cackle, but in this case it just makes you shudder.

I’ll write about the seventh symphony some other time. That piece is like the Russian great-grand­mother I never knew.