Nonconnah

Mary Beth and I took a bit of a walk in the old forest yesterday afternoon. Got to walk by the dog park and see the fruits of my mulching work, woo. A little later I had a first practice with the big version of Nonconnah (well, first practice for me with any version of Nonconnah). It was the usual setup with Zachary playing his guitar and Denny playing percussion, Dominic was playing his modular and Kate was playing violin and Joshua was playing um, I forget the name but it's like a cello with more strings, and I played my Prophet (funny story 'cuz I'd intended that to be an auxiliary instrument with my main instrument being my guitar through my modular, but I get there and the modular is intermittently cutting out power-wise (so I probably hooked up one of the power cables wrong, ugh) and then my big muff wasn't making any sound (probably a dying battery) so none of my main instrument was working right so my auxiliary became my only instrument). Pretty cool we just fell into jamming for a long while. Though I don't think the string players were too into it (coming from a more orchestral background, I don't think they're too into or used to or understand free-form, unstructured music). They stopped everyone kinda towards the end and were sort of like this isn't going anywhere. They said they liked parts early on, but... Then they mentioned a thing I was doing at one point when I had the arpeggiator going so we did a "short" ten minute thing at the end with the arpeggiator as the backbone and I think they liked that better. I could see them going either way, losing interest and falling out of it or sticking around if they do think there's enough structure to latch onto. Jack would have been there on bass but he had a work emergency (something to do with construction on the new ServiceMaster building). Kelley was there and I guess she'd play guitar but she was busy getting ready for the show the next night (that's tonight). We practiced at her place: Beach House (it's a little derelict house in a sort of middle-of-nowhere industrial zone just south of downtown). It's the first time I'd been there. Well, we'll see how this works in the future.