Setting a Path for Irritable Hedgehog

This post is the second in (what I hope will become) a long series of posts telling the stories behind my albums. The complete series archive can be found here: The Stories of Irritable Hedgehog.

There must have been a point where David McIntire asked me if I wanted to start a record label with him, but for the life of me I can’t remember that taking place. I can recall several conversations we had concerning the logistics of our endeavor, but the initial question eludes me. I’m still debating what to make of that. 🙂

There are many aspects of starting a label that I could write about, but we continue to reevaluate many of those choices. Instead, at the risk of writing a less narrative-driven post, I’d like to focus on just a few decisions we made that have become essential to Irritable Hedgehog’s identity. My next post will get back to more stories with my quest to become a human metronome.

Irritable Hedgehog Logo
David’s daughter, Eileen, drew our awesome logo

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Discovering An Hour for Piano

This post is the first in (what I hope will become) a long series of posts telling the stories behind my albums. The complete series archive can be found here: The Stories of Irritable Hedgehog.

On March 4 of this year, Irritable Hedgehog Music released my tenth album, Adrian Knight: Obsessions. It’s been less than six years since my first album came out, but hopefully you’ll indulge me a bit of retrospection after crossing this milestone. Over the course of the next several months, I hope to tell the stories behind each of these albums—from the joy of discovering and selecting repertoire to the errors and messiness of production. My hope is that this will help you hear these albums as more than cold, fixed products, because to me they represent so much more.

So without further ado, let’s begin with my first album, Tom Johnson: An Hour for Piano.

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Entrepreneurship, Success, and the Illusion of Narrative

 or How Felicia Day Taught Me That I Was Wrong About Claire Chase

In August of last year, I wrote a series of four essays for NewMusicBox. The first post was (provocatively) titled, “You’re and Artist, Not an Entrepreneur,” and the series spun out from there. Writing those essays absolutely consumed me. If I wasn’t writing or editing, I was mining sources, reading opinions, watching talks, and mulling arguments. Seven thousand words later, I was finished, and I haven’t written a word on that or another other subject until now.

Despite the numerous conversations that spun out from those essays, I had no desire to re-enter the fray. I was content to sit on the sidelines and see how things played out (if I payed attention at all). Then a book came along that challenged my thinking and forced me to reconsider much of what I had written. It was the newly published memoir by Felicia Day, You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost).

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Ramblings, etc.

My attempt to return to semi-regularly blogging is below, but if you are interested in some of my previous writing…

Here is a pdf of my dissertation, “The Interaction of Linear and Vertical Time in Minimalist and Postminimalist Piano Music,” a bit of which was turned into an article for the CeReNeM Journal, “Temporality as an Analytical Approach to Minimalist Music: Tom Johnson’s An Hour for Piano.”

I’ve also done some writing for I Care If You Listen and NewMusicBox.