Gideon Freudmann
CelloBop
July 1st is the the official release date for my new album, Flying Cars!
But for, you, my dear dedicated readers (and some of you have been reading these missives for decades!) I am pleased to announce you can get your very own physical copy of the CD right now at my website shop
I dove into this album when the pandemic began. Having no gigs was a big loss but the opportunity to leave my gear set up at home meant I could work on recording more consistently and creatively. Many of the new tunes hard to re-create live but I'm figuring it out. Now when you come to show you can scream out Cow Buoy and I can play it. Plus, haven't you always wanted an excuse to scream Cow Buoy?
This project helped me through the the initial hysteria, dismay and isolation of the pandemic, it gave me focus to up my game (writing, playing and engineering) and goshdarnit I think it's really good.
And I want you to hear it!
Nowadays its hard to to know what something sounds like if you don't know what it looks like. That statement is patently false, but hey, videos can be entertaining. Mark Roessler created this particularly fun video for the title track - which is set to premiere at this Thursday, June 9th!
Check out the video, share it, feed the algorithm, and buy the album!
Other notable contributors to this album are: Mark Powers - drums and percussion Ralph Huntley - piano and keyboard Brian Oberlin - mandolin John Askew - mixing Robbie Cribbs - mastering
Each one of these people is immensely talented and I am grateful for their contributions.
CD: If you want to be a mensch you can buy the Flying Cars CD at my website shop - replete with artwork and fabulous liner notes - plus all the joy that come with having a new thing, a round thing with music embedded in it.
Stream: You can stream the music streaming here, there and everywhere - including at bandcamp
So have at it, listen to Flying Cars and dig your trip daddy-o.
I've been using pedals for years - delay, loop, etc - and I've been working more recently with 2 pedalboards, incorporating more parallel loops plus other effects, weaving a more complex sonic fabric - and all in glorious stereo with different sounds happening in each channel. This is a big part of what I was developing on this album, and learning to play the tunes live is keeping my brain well engaged.
As an aside, the opening sound on Flying Cars sounds (to me) like a Jetsons-esque flying car and the bass line that follows is reminiscent of the band The Cars. And this concludes today's glimpse into my psyche.
One more entry about the new CD because - it's a NEW CD. I'm pumped! Albums have liner notes - the good ones do anyway. In addition to credits, it's an opportunity to give the listener a little something more to savor and perhaps gain a little insight. This was penned by my exceptionally literary poetic friend and former student, Djelal Kadi, mid pandemic 2021:
I never cease to be amazed by the peculiar lessons of this cello's language that proves more eloquent than my now labored attempts to string a sentence together having gone still going for days without speaking with anyone. It says strange things this cello to wit Orpheus must have been drunk when he invented the octave with seven notes and started repeating himself with a slightly more shrill tone. And though he played the lyre he must have been yearning for the cello rising up as he did by falling down the finger board in his inebriated reverie. And he must have been possessed of prophetic prescience in foreseeing the flow of time he called tempo as the stream of a river the river that would carry his severed head still singing after the drunken maenads tore his body to pieces and strewed it about in repeating patterns they called rhythm. They answered the replicant echoes of their whooping and called it counterpoint. They whispered in conspiratorial tones and named them harmonics. My cello says to listen to Gideon and play around with the scales slur and tie climb down to go up and up to go lower cross strings and violate freely their Euclidean parallels press the bow on more than one string at a time and call it double stops even though there is no stopping but go straight across with the bow even though it's called a bow but is straight nonetheless. And so with all its resonant contradictions the cello seems to manage to escape the fate of soliloquy and of sonic solitude. Which tells me that perhaps I should endeavor to sound off like my cello become the reverberating sound box that solitude hallows out and not worry about the paradox of a sound-filled silence and the oxymorons of mute loquacity. So back to my scales now without getting snagged by the perplexities of why we begin ascending rather than descending as if we are perpetually re-enacting a fate that has us always starting to scale up out of a hole only to return to where started.
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