Many Things Keep Happening
Metatron Studio World Tour 2024 Part Two: August 2024
Marina and I are on a whirlwind tour focused on music and art residencies. This is Metatron unleashed! Watch out world — our little content studio is cranking out projects, individually and collectively. Here is the travelogue from our time in France and Belgium this August 1–24. This one is going to be a LONG POST.
After a wonderful July stay in New England, Marina and I crossed the pond for the first of our international music and art residencies. We splurged for a few days in Champagne at an insane château with a moat — as one does. We knew we were going to be roughing it at the residency soon enough, so it was important to get a little pampering in first and shake off the jet lag.
On the Golden Road
Now it was time to head to the first residency.
The Performing Arts Forum (PAF) is located a bit north of Champagne. We had heard about PAF from our son Lucian. An old convent that was purchased by a Dutch fellow about twenty year ago now plays host to a steady stream of performance artists, writers, musicians and philosophers of all ages and backgrounds, mostly from Europe. Lucian had stayed there in the summer of 2022 and couldn’t recommend it highly enough.
We stayed at PAF for three weeks in which many thing kept happening: I finishing and released a record and threw a record release party; Marina built a participatory sculpture installation and had an art opening, I ran a drumming workshop; Marina put together a goddess walk workshop; and I held a recital in a chapel. During our final week we attended the first week of their annual University, a set program series of lectures and group sessions. It was a thrilling time. We met amazing people and have made some wonderful new friends.
PAF has seven pianos, several guitars, a bass, a drum set, a newly built recording studio, writers’ rooms and multiple performance and rehearsal venues, including several dance studios and a chapel. Obviously I was going to be a kid in a candy store here, so Marina and I made sure to set it up so that she would have a sizable project to sink her teeth into as well. We came in with a plan, and found a great studio space to base our work out of.
My original goal was to write a significant portion of The Golden Road, a new project I’m cooking up that centers around a personal alchemical journey in the form of a prog rock concept album. (That might sound a bit cringe — ok a lot cringe — and I’m already rethinking the prog rock part; more on this later.)
I had hoped that a stint in rural northern France would be great inspiration for The Golden Road, but I got more than I bargained for when I learned that the area we were staying in, The Ardennes, was the home turf of Clovis, the first king of the Franks, and the Merovingian Dynasty, the first rulers of France. These semi-mythical folks figure heavily into western magical lore, the topic area I am immersing in to create the new project (fun fact: dagobert@netcom.com was my first personal email address thirty years ago… IYKYK). Several hikes and day trips around the area reaffirmed the sheer Merovingian-ness of the place, we encountered magical creatures in the forest, and I was generally vibing heavily on the the environs — a place where Gregory of Tours, chronicler of the Franks, said “Many Things Keep Happening,” as brilliantly relayed in this episode of The Dark Ages Podcast:
So, vibe check complete, I was cranking on The Golden Road, taking feverish notes and working on several bits of the music, including the title song (which I think now is going to be a piano concerto… but again, watch this space; this record is definitely a work in progress).
But there was something keeping me from diving in fully: I had another record to finish first! While I had made great strides on finishing my new EP, The Great Resignation, it wasn’t yet done. I still needed to finish one song. It needed at least another guitar part and it had to be mixed and mastered.
I tracked the new electric guitar lead part to Web of Lies (it came out great) and then commenced to mixing and mastering. Now, for people like Marina and me who like to travel light and never check baggage, I had laden myself with a portable recording setup that includes a travel electric guitar, a mic, a tiny keyboard controller, a portable bluetooth speaker/guitar amp combo, good headphones, a digital interface, the requisite cables and my laptop. I ended up using every bit of that gear and even with all that, fortunately the newly built recording studio was in working order, because I really wanted to have good studio monitors to listen to the final mixes. Listening on laptop speakers, over the ear headphones, airpods, bluetooth speakers, and the cheap car stereo just wasn’t enough.
Final mixes in hand, I released The Great Resignation on streaming services on August 6th. So what was left to do? A RECORD RELEASE PARTY!! I played the entire EP on loop as Marina made cocktails, then I did a short talk and performed a few tracks live. In a cave. In an old convent. Freaking pinch me. I love sharing my music with new folks, and this was just such a special way to do it.
But Marina wasn’t just playing mixologist the whole time. She had her own massive project underway.
Memento
Marina’s ouvre is a melange of fantastical creatures and serious commentary on life, technology and politics, done in a brutal yet delicate medium of industrial wire mesh — more colloquially known as chicken wire.
For PAF, Marina wanted to do something out of the box. She has recently gotten really good at making human brains. But this project, Memento, would be more than just a well crafted cerebral sculpture — it was a participatory installation. In addition to building the central piece, Marina interviewed several PAF residents over the course of a week and had them write their answers to a series of questions on notepaper. She then incorporated the answers into the sculpture, creating a “neural net” of everyone’s responses.
But she went one step further: Marina fed all the answers into a ChatGPT language model and had it synthesize them into a unified philosophical manifesto: a point of view, a moment in time captured from the thoughts of artists, performers and philosophers sharing an amazing experience in the French countryside.
When it was time for the great reveal, we had a fab ART OPENING. This time, I was the caterer. It was a great hang on a Friday night and people really let their hair down. Marina’s project was very well received.
I’ll let Marina share her own thoughts about the group philosophy that emerged from Memento, PAF edition. But I thought it was quite enlightening. And I think she’s going to do this again in other parts of the world…
The two of us, as always, threw down. When we show up, we produce. And we weren’t done yet!
University
Every summer, the forum hosts PAF University, a series of lectures and workshops over a three-week period. Our stay there overlapped with the first week of University. Our numbers swelled from forty or so to over a hundred, and we moved from a fluid setup to something quite a bit more structured — though there was still a lot of room for spontaneity and collaboration.
Marina and I mostly attended other peoples’ sessions. I was thrilled to participate in a week-long writing workshop where a group of us wrote a whole short film script and even published and printed a book at the end of the week! Marina cut loose in a drama workshop, getting in touch with her performance side, which has already inspired a new piece which she will share with everyone soon enough.
But of course, idle hands being what they are, we also had to run a few sessions of our own! So…
Earlier in our stay there, I was asked by a few folks to teach them how to play drums after they had seen and heard me shred on the PAF drum set, jamming with other musicians. So I started holding private lessons. This gave Marina the brilliant idea that I should run a workshop for a larger group and viola! Drumming for Your Brain was born. I held the workshop twice, each time with a group of around eight enthusiastic would-be trap players. The point of the workshop wasn’t to teach people how to play a drum kit — though I think we may have minted one or two honest to god players because of it. The point was unlock new parts of your brain by getting your different limbs to cooperate, sometimes doing things together, other times doing things completely independently. It was a huge success and, time permitting, I might turn this into something someday.
For Marina’s part, she held a Goddess Walk workshop with several women, plus me. It wasn’t about our gender, it was about getting in touch with the goddess within and empowering ourselves. I loved it. And for me it also connects to The Golden Road in ways that I can’t share yet…
Finally — whew — I knew that I had to share one more thing with this crew of so many talented and special folks. I wanted them to know about Judgment Day, my original apocalypse musical. So I more or less spontaneously gave a recital in, where else, the chapel! I walked folks through the plot and the characters, shared some back story and my motivations for writing it, played several of the prerecorded tracks from the album, and performed a handful of the songs live. It was a… religious experience.
What an amazing three weeks! Thank you, PAF, for all the magic.
City of Lights
Sadly, our time at PAF had come to an end. We bid farewell to the countryside and headed to Paris for a few days. But we had a bit of an afterglow, as on that Sunday we went to see our new PAF friends’ tribute band, Stormtroopers in Stilettos (shoutout to Brian May fans everywhere) do a great Beatles tribute set at Supersonic, an awesome venue in the Bastille neighborhood.
Oh and we just happened to be joined by our web3 frens Max Pretends and Jeremy Boscolo because of course they were in town. What a treat!
It was a short four days, but we had the best time. Paris, je t’aime. Spoiler alert: we want to move there next year (if we can line everything up).
And that’s it. France was in the books. It was almost time to head to art residency number 2. But on the way we made one final stop in Brussels to see our pals Elena and David, go thrifting and eat too much.
Next stop: Greece 🇬🇷 but were we too fat for the beach after all those frietjes?
