Holiday Shows I'm Playing, plus a free MP3 to celebrate Chicago being 1 degree today

I have two holiday-themed gigs coming up that may be of interest to you if, like me, have an aversion to saccharine, candy-cane Christmas carols and prefer campy, serious, hipstery, or obliquely-related seasonal tunes.

Under the campy and also serious columns, I'm playing with the Chicago Gay Men's Chorus once again. In addition to the tongue-in-cheek antics you know and love from CGMC, the chorus is also doing some musically more sophisticated pieces (a rendition of Deck the Halls in a 7/8 time signature, for instance). Shows are Friday at 8pm, Saturday at 3pm and 8pm at the Athenaeum (on Southport). The link above will get you tickets.

Under the hipstery and obliquely-related category, I'm doing a little holiday shindig at Wild Pug on Tuesday, December 15th with a few other Unpugged alumni: Stephen Leonard, Manny Capozzi, and Rachel Katzman. I'll be doing a bunch of covers and collaborations that aren't your typical set of songs about Christmas but do in some way relate to December or Christmas or seasonal affective disorder. (Yay!) Plus, it's free, and I've come to love the Pug like my own home, if they didn't kick me out at 2. (Dammit!) Music starts at 9pm.

Bonus: I may even pull together a Christmas song that I wrote a couple years ago for a contest that Sufjan Stevens held. I've never actually played it live because I'm not sure how to stack the loops on this one, but you can download it here if you need a new song about how discordant it is to hear cheery goofy Christmas songs while the world gets dark and cold and wet and miserable, which is appropos of today's weather.

New Poster! New MP3! New Furniture!

I'm going to the suburbs today to enjoy/suffer the Baudrillardian self-assembly-fest that is IKEA. In the spirit of new furniture I have tons of new stuff for you:

• New Show Poster from Josh Shalek, who designed The Crater EP's cover. Here's the conversation I had with Josh last night:
  "Josh, should we coordinate our blog posts about my show at Martyrs' on Monday and your poster that advertises that show?"
  "I don't know, I'm pretty busy counting my money and eating truffles."
  
  Josh can provide for you, if you're very lucky, show posters, CD art, and filthy, dirty lies.
  
  
  
  
• New MP3 - Download and Share At Will
  Since the Martyrs' show will feature a lot of new music, you should at least have some of it ahead of time to study and deconstruct. Here's an acoustic home demo I did of one of the newbies, "Resurrection Ship," which is loosely based off of Battlestar Galactica because I am a huge, huge dork. You can hear the folktronified/looped version on Monday.
  
  Resurrection Ship (Acoustic) - Ian Wilson
  

Stereogum Has New Final Fantasy MP3s

It's been a while since we've had a new album from Owen Pallett (a.k.a. Final Fantasy), but there's finally some new downloadable FF MP3s via Stereogum. While this isn't normally one of those MP3licious blogs, I do tend to write about or reference Final Fantasy a lot here, so hopefully, my dear readers, you have locked step with my musical tastes and are craving these new MP3s as much as I am. Will someone please loan the CSO to this boy for his next Chicago show? Can someone from Team Chicago get on that?

New MP3 for Sufjan's Xmas Contest

The song I submitted for Sufjan Stevens' Christmas song exchange is done. I thought I'd share it with all of you now that we're in that weird, liminal Holiday Time that exists between Thanksgiving and New Year's. Thanks to some of your feedback, I stuck to my themes of seasonal hateration for the most part, which has been easy, considering the perpetual gray sky Chicago is now under.

I still think I was able to evoke a particular side of the season, though. I grew up listening to George Winston's December, a solo piano album which has some of the most cold and stark sonic landscapes capable from a single piano (notwithstanding the unfortunate inclusion of Pachelbel's Canon on the track list). This song is denser than Winston's arrangements but it keeps with the idea of the piano mimicking the sound of bells.

This is also the first song I've completed using my new home studio setup here in Chicago. I'm still fairly new to home recording, so if you have any technical tips, feel free to share them.

You can download the MP3 using the link below, or, if you're in a rush, click the play button. (I just learned how to embed MP3s on the blog, because I am that much of a computer genius. Ha.)

"A Minor Key No One Still Writes Carols In" [download mp3]