The first of my 'solitary week' (kids in camp, husband in NYC) is ending with more testing of the gigantic Holy Grail N.2 with Frédéric Bevilacqua who is also family-less this week as his wife and daughter left for vacation in Switzerland ahead of him. We are both pulling long hours even going on this weekend. As I am an obsessive who likes to practice scales (yes, bizarre isn't it), it really doesn't bother me to play the same things 40 times and test the robustness. I am rather comfortable in my 'guinea-pig-hood' :) The interesting consequence is that I do get so bored, and in order to test the robustness of the computer detection, I come into the 'testing' portion of the phrase from something else like improvisation, quite radical at times, and exit to more improvisation, thus, in fact composing on the fly. And having to document what I'm doing I have to write them down. The rate it's going this can become a piece of its own :) An interesting way to come up with compositional materials and I recommend you try!
I do also have some human contacts away from IRCAM :) A colleague from Juilliard who is in town giving a composition seminar came to visit so we had a lovely lunch together, then in the evening I met with a person for the first time, whom I got to be a good friend virtually on Facebook! It is interesting that this was the first time we met face to face but we knew about each other already a lot and felt we were close enough to talk just about anything. It reminded me that me and my husband, when we first started to date, communicated long-distance between Paris and New York via email several times a day, and by the time we actually started our relationship, we already knew a lot about each other. A new mode of human relationship with internet!
We went out for dinner together in St. Michel and I had the most, most.... delicious Soupe à l'oignon. The area is flooded with young people and tourist, I must say it is not my favorite place to go as a neighborhood (and I hope it's not because I'm too old :) I never like crowded place--growing up in Tokyo and the crowd I feel I already paid my dues) but the restaurant... it was somewhere we just walked into. We first found a place on the guidebook but we got a strange 'tourist' vibe and didn't go in. The second one we sat next to two men, who tried to strike up a conversation and then took out a box of cigarette. So we said, "so you choose cigarette over female neighbor? Tant pis pour vous!" and left. Then we wondered into a small place with something saying "savoyard" (things of Savoie) a little out of the way on a very small street, so we sat there. Oh. My. Goodness. The Soupe à l'oignon. Then my friend had Fondue au chocolat for desert, which I also tasted. Pure Heaven. I was by the time, in a mood for something lighter, so I ordered a delicious citron sorbet with Vodka. A 'professional Parisian waiter' flirted with us; he actually spoke good Japanese :) Here we go, a typical Parisian weekend...Oh and I'm desperately trying to finish mastering one remaining track that's hanging in front of me... the new album depends on this one getting done. UPDATE: it's done, just waiting from NYC for approval :)
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