A collaboration of four from Michigan to help promote the art of Bruce Campbell

• Art and Words: Bruce Campbell
  www.BruceCampbellDesigns.com
• Music and Lyrics: Aaron Wolinski
  Sountrack: Begin from Sleeves U
  www.Spiralsound.com/sleeves
• Video Production: Bryan Thompson
  www.konakiko.com
• Photography: John Donabedian

Watch:  http://sn.im/kouroo

Pianist/composer Jeff Haas, the son of German Jewish immigrants, grew up in Detroit in a home rich with music in the Judaic and classical traditions. His father was a temple organist for a large reformed congregation and young Jeff developed a passion for Judaic music at a very early age, spending countless hours sitting beside his dad on the sanctuary organ bench.

Jeff Haas Website

Ron Getz, guitarist and composer, has studied at Berkeley College of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music. He has performed with a variety of jazz greats, including Arthur Blythe, Billy Hart, John Scofield, Steve Grossman, Bill Evans, Branford Marsalis and Marvin “Smitty” Smith (from the Jay Leno Tonight Show Band).

Ron currently performs at the Trillium Lounge at the Grand Traverse Resort Friday and Saturday nights (9:00pm to 1:20 am). Featured with Ron on Friday and Saturday nights are some of the area’s best singers and players performing dance and listening music ranging from Motown, Pop, Blues, Funk, Swing and Jazz.

He has also shared the stage with blues greats B.B. King, Koko Taylor, Matt “Guitar” Murphy, Jeff Healy, Johnnie Lang and Kenny Wayne Sheppard. He shared the bill with Edgar Winter, Leon Russell, Eric Burden, Electric Light Orchestra and Jefferson Starship.

His CD release Ego State has received critical acclaim in Jazz Times and Down Beat. He has recorded and produced numerous CD projects under his own name and with other artists in the jazz, blues, rock and pop genres.He has performed throughout the U.S. and Europe.

• Ron Getz Website

Tim Harding began playing guitar around age 16 got more serious as time progressed.  So here is some of what happened along the way!

Tones have been in my head since the beginning. How a guitar sounded through an amp, just straight in. Before I could get to that point I had to try a lot of combinations of pedals and amps and guitars to achieve THAT sound.

As I grew as a player and started to play professionally I leaned on a large pedal board for versatility yet kept in my rear view the guys who could get that sound without all the crap. This led me on the search to see what the tone gurus used and why.

Would it work for me?

I started tinkering with tube amps about 10 years ago, changing tubes, caps resistors and speakers to get the best tone I could. I currently use two amps that I have had a hand on and in. Funny thing happened along the way. It seemed that everything I plugged into sounded like me.

Everything but acoustic guitars.

I thought that the best sound one could get with an acoustic was to fill it full of water and smash it against a tree. (We will get back to the acoustics shortly.) I played in local bands for 15 years including Blue Shadow, Peacemaker, Witness, Book of James, Jude, Andy Six, The PBT project and most recently WHOCARES. Classic/southern rock and blues are my thread but acoustic kept slipping in bit by bit.

My love for the singing tone of an electric seemed to call the backing of the acoustic, and so it started. I picked up an acoustic about 8 years ago as I began a journey as a worship leader. The full tone and timbre of an acoustic called to my soul. I am crafter of work and a perfecter of none.

Each piece I write seems to change here and there on the live side. The electric tones seem to cry as the acoustic weaves a chordal outline of structure. Alternate tunings and life experiences make up the breadth of my work. Melodies are simple yet deceptive and excuses are swept to the side.

I look for my journey to continue. There is so much that took place in between these words it would be hard to explain.

Perhaps we should try to see more with our ears and hear more through our hearts,
which leaves the looking to the searchers.

David Marek and the film Somewhere West.

On May 25th of 2009, six others and myself piled into an RV and began a 28-day, 4,982-mile journey that would result in the production of my MFA thesis film, Somewhere West.

The 134-minute film chronicles the last days of Ian, a terminally ill young man who decides to forgo any further treatment and instead heads out onto the road in search of solitude and a beautiful place to die.  And yet, against his best efforts, Ian becomes the center of a makeshift family of broken characters who help him to open his heart, find peace and finally reach his special place.

As a road film, Somewhere West is expressly interested in landscape and visits locations such as Northern Michigan’s Grand Sable Sand Dunes and Porcupine Mountains, the Badlands and Black Hills of South Dakota, Wyoming’s Devil’s Tower and Yellowstone National Park, as well as the Great Salt Lake and Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah.

Because of the unique nature of this project, I designed a very unusual production method that allowed the execution of this tremendously ambitious project with a cast and crew of nine people in 31 days for a very modest $18,500.  The overriding intent of the production was collaboration, which meant the cast and crew worked as an ensemble, responding, improvising and adapting to the constantly changing landscape and ever shifting weather.  I chose to shoot the project on the Sony EX-1, in 1080p HD video with a Letus 35mm lens adapter for their aesthetic look, workflow and mobility.

Further, Ian’s condition allowed us to experiment with different optical effects that help to visually and metaphorically explore his physical and spiritual condition.  The postproduction utilizes an editing method that I have developed and call “Dissociative Montage.”

This method assumes five elements to narrative cinema, which are sound, image, time, space, and a narrative stream.  Unlike the predominantly used Continuity Editing, my method attempts to dissociate these five elements while constantly maintaining the narrative stream.  This allows for a much deeper exploration of dialectics and opens possibilities into what I consider a more poetic narrative cinema.

About David K Marek:

David Marek lived in northern Michigan for 25 years, attending Northwestern Michigan College, where he received the English Student of the Year Award in 1995 on his way to gaining an Associates of Arts Degree in English.

He published 5 short stories in the school magazine and was invited to read in the Young Michigan Writers Series in Traverse City, Michigan.  David’s passion for storytelling and landscape led him to Boulder and eventually the University of Colorado, where he enrolled in the fall of 1999.

In 2004 he graduated with a dual BA in Creative Writing and Film Critical Studies and a BFA in Film Production.  Along the way David’s films twice received the Goldfarb Award, as well as the Grillo and Coggen/Gougler Awards from the University of Colorado.  David’s undergraduate thesis film, Snow Petals, received a First Place at the Crested Butte Reelfest (2004) and was an official selection at AllFest (’04), Boulder Fringe Festival (’05), Durango Independent Film Festival (’06), East Lansing Film Festival (’06) and Eugene Film Festival (’06).

David is presently a graduate student at the University of Colorado, where he is teaching two classes, Beginning Filmmaking (a class that shoots and edits in Super-8 exclusively) and Introduction to Cinematography (a class that focuses on shooting and editing 16mm film).  Since entering graduate school David’s film “Sleeping River” has been an official selection at the Muskegon Film Festival (’09), the Long Island International Film Expo (’09) and the Queens International Film Festival.   David is presently working on his ambitious thesis project, “Somewhere West,” which received the very prestigious Gambill Family Endowment and the J.R. Hopes Grant.

David K Marek Artist Statement:

Filmmaking is a process of renewal, faith and awakening for me.  If I knew I could make a film exactly as I had envisioned it, or knew how I would get from beginning to end, I likely wouldn’t spend the energy.

For me, the joy of filmmaking is in being confronted by and learning to accept the unknown.  When I admit that I cannot control the sun, the quality of its light, the cloud that appears and passes, the wind rattling grass unexpectedly, then I become quiet and in the listening, find my place and vision and with the utmost gratitude, attempt to fix my awe in time with light.

I go into the world with ideas and intentions and I come home with images and sounds, not that I’ve created or found, but that have announced themselves to my attention and in our meeting, there is a revelation of spirit, which I cannot claim as my own.

Welcome to Spiral Sound

A spiral is typically a planar curve (that is, flat), like the groove on a record or the arms of a spiral galaxy. A helix, on the other hand, is a three-dimensional coil that runs along the surface of a cylinder, like a screw.

There are many instances where in colloquial usage spiral is used as a synonym for helix, notably spiral staircase and spiral binding of books.

Mathematically this is incorrect but the terms are increasing in common usage.

A two-dimensional spiral may be described most easily using polar coordinates, where the radius r is a continuous monotonic function of angle θ. The circle would be regarded as a degenerate case (the function not being strictly monotonic, but rather constant).

A Fibonacci spiral created by drawing arcs connecting the opposite corners of squares in the Fibonacci tiling; this one uses squares of sizes 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and 34

In geometry, a golden spiral is a logarithmic spiral whose growth factor b is related to φ, the golden ratio.[1] Specifically, a golden spiral gets wider (or further from its origin) by a factor of φ for every quarter turn it makes.

The spiral plays a certain role in symbolism, and appears in megalithic art, notably in the Newgrange tomb or in many Galician petroglyphs such as the one in Mogor. See also triple spiral.

While scholars are still debating the subject, there is a growing acceptance that the simple spiral, when found in Chinese art, is an early symbol for the sun. Roof tiles dating back to the Tang Dynasty with this symbol have been found west of the ancient city of Chang’an (modern-day Xian).

The spiral is the most ancient symbol found on every civilized continent. Due to its appearance at burial sites across the globe, the spiral most likely represented the “life-death-rebirth” cycle. Similarly, the spiral symbolized the sun, as ancient people thought the sun was born each morning, died each night, and was reborn the next morning.

Spirals are also a symbol of hypnosis, stemming from the cliché of people and cartoon characters being hypnotized by staring into a spinning spiral (One example being Kaa in Disney’s The Jungle Book). They are also used as a symbol of dizziness, where the eyes of a cartoon character, especially in anime and manga, will turn into spirals to show they are dizzy or dazed. The spiral is also a prominent symbol in the anime Gurren Lagann, where it symbolizes the double helix structure of DNA, representing biological evolution, and the spiral structure of a galaxy, representing universal evolution.

The study of spirals in nature have a long history, Christopher Wren observed that many shells form a logarithmic spiral. Jan Swammerdam observed the common mathematical characteristics of a wide range of shells from Helix to Spirula and Henry Nottidge Moseley described the mathematics of univalve shells. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form gives extensive treatment to these spirals. He describes how shells are formed by rotating a closed curve around a fixed axis, the shape of the curve remains fixed but its size grows in a geometric progression. In some shell such as Nautilus and ammonites the generating curve revolves in a plane pirpendicular to the axis and the shell will form a planer discoid shape. In others it follows a skew path forming a helico-spiral pattern.

Spirals in plants and animals are frequently described as whorls.

A model for the pattern of florets in the head of a sunflower was proposed by H Vogel. This has the form

\theta = n \times 137.5^{\circ}, r = c \sqrt{n}

where n is the index number of the floret and c is a constant scaling factor, and is a form of Fermat’s spiral. The angle 137.5° is related to the golden ratio and gives a close packing of florets.[2]

The spiral also represents infinance, or ‘infinity.’ Starting at a single point, and revolving outwardly until the end of the universe. Because of this, some civilizations believe that the Spiral is a pathway to the afterlife.

1. Tip of Your Tongue
2. One on One
3. Evaporate
4. Strange Ways
5. Frenzy
6. Wait and See
7. Meteorite
8. Afterglow
9. Begin

1. Little World
2. Passing the Hat
3. One Finger Salute
4. Hive Mind
5. The Next Step
6. Eaten by the Gods
7. Vehicles
8. Plastic Eyes
9. Shout at the Sun
10. All

Freel completes the trilogy started by Twitchy and SleevesU.