The Bonnefoy Curves - One Too Many
This is an "album" of recordings I made over the Summer of 2002 in Lake City, Michigan. (One exception, "Greg's Blues", was recorded in Spring 2005). Everything here is quite rudimentary, including the equipment and software used to capture the performances. (It has also been pointed out to me that I could really use a metronome to help me keep time!) All of the performances are my own.
The story of the name of my "band" is this: I got really into playing street hockey in my late-teens and early-20s. I had an ice hockey stick with a wooden blade that wore out faster playing on pavement than it would have on ice (most street hockey sticks have plastic blades). I found a replacement wooden blade in a bargain bin at a long-since closed sporting goods store. Many hockey sticks/blades have a Player Name stamped on them, suggesting that this is the style of stick or curve of blade said player uses: e.g. Lemieux, Gretsky, or Yzerman. My bargain blade had a curve that I quite liked, and was stamped with the name BONNEFOY. And no, I have never figured out who Bonnefoy was. There is no player listed in the NHL/WHA Directory with that surname. So it remains a mystery...
"E Minor Seven (Down By the River)"
The Bonnefoy Curves - Old Northwest
This is an "album" of recordings I made in Binghamton, New York over the course of 2019 and into early 2020. A handful of the tracks began as "homework" for a Sound Engineering course I audited in Fall 2018 at SUNY-Broome, taught by Bob Greaves (Twitter @greaves_bob). The class meetings were at lunch time twice a week so I was able to fit it around my work schedule. The cover of "Dead Flowers" was actually my semester project for that course. I had better equipment and software this time around, but I was still recording in bedrooms and living rooms at two different houses (we moved in Summer 2019). Many of the instruments were the same as my first "album", but they (like me) are now almost 20 years older.
Most of these are not really songs, but rather fragments that could be parts of songs if I had the ambition to work on them some more. Many of these fragments feature nonstandard modal scales. The standard diatonic major scale that we hear in a lot of Western music is called the Ionian Mode. In various places here you'll hear Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian modes. If you detect occasional Middle Eastern, African, or Asian flavors in these tracks, the use of these modal scales is why. Beyond practicing as a sound engineer and practicing my musicianship, a lot of the motivation for recording these is to help me apply things I have learned from studying Music Theory. Some of the motivation is to play dumb stuff like a mash-up of the Law & Order theme with a chord progression inspired by Dire Straits. I also have an enduring love of Bossa Nova music, especially stuff by Tom Jobim and João Gilberto, so there's some of that mixed in, too. The rest I blame on Keith Richards, my parents, and the Bad Sign I was Born Under.
"Rio Abajo (Down by the River Redux)"