eyes cast down profile picture

eyes cast down

About Me


So this is what he has come to… the music of eyes cast down is distilled from a lifetime’s sundry artistic and creative reflexes.
Youthful performance anxieties involved high school theatre (drama and musical), sketch comedy (Monty Python) and a stint as a rock drummer (playing a bunch of great Rush songs).
Two decades of literary ambitions didn't finish much, apart from two plays (self-published) and a three-year intensity of free-form, image-saturated, stream-of-consciousness poems (some published) - all in the early 1990s.
Moving into something resembling responsible adulthood and family life still allowed time for an acoustic guitar/vocal trio, and eventually the Siren sang: the call to composition became clear.
A watershed event was the 1997 workshop Music for the Masses, presented by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. It was a chance to consult with a composer (Martin van de Ven) and have an original short piece recorded by TSO musicians. GM still has the cassette of his 3-minute Trio Galactique.
The other watershed event was tripping over the world of serious ambience, just after the millennium turned. Steve Roach - whose website is an entry portal to that rich musical universe - was the first discovery.
It didn’t take long for this new-fangled ambient sound to become the focus of GM’s compositional fury, although an informal, largely acoustic guitar-based project – working with a few friends – still gets its share of attention.
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My Interests

Music:

Member Since: 8/21/2007
Band Members: GM: Electric Guitars & EBow, Synths & Samples
Influences: Will Ackerman, Tori Amos, Darren Aronofsky, Peter Brook, Robert Bruce, Orson Scott Card, Arthur C. Clarke, Camille Claudel, Leonardo da Vinci, Robertson Davies, Dead Can Dance, Claude Debussy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, early Genesis, Lisa Gerrard, Andy Goldsworthy, Michael Haneke, Michael Hedges, Gustav Holst, Victor Hugo, David Hykes & the Harmonic Choir, Henrik Ibsen, Witi Ihimaera, Eugène Ionesco, Jack or Jive, Yasunari Kawabata, Michael Manring, Loreena McKennitt, Yukio Mishima, Claude Monet, Modest Mussorgsky, Christopher Nolan, Carl Orff, Arvo Pärt, Harry Partch, Jeff Pearce, Neil Peart, Sergei Prokofiev, Sergei Rachmaninov, John Renbourn, Robert Rich, Steve Roach, Erik Rohmer, Sequentia, Peter Shaffer, William Shakespeare, Sam Shepard, Tingstad & Rumbel, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jan Vermeer, vidnaObmana, Frank Lloyd Wright, Banana Yoshimoto, Franco Zeffirelli
Sounds Like:
Record Label: own
Type of Label: Indie

My Blog

New Music

I've added new clips from two pieces: Expanse of Heart was recorded last year, with a nice vocal performance from a friend's daughter. Rebuild From Memory is a brand new guitarscape. Unlike First Day ...
Posted by on Tue, 24 Mar 2009 08:28:00 GMT

A Wedding Soundtrack

My beloved and I were married this summer, and Ive wanted to share it in some way without doing the usual photo-overload, arent-we-wonderful thing. (OK, Ive posted one photo! Sheesh.) The music was...
Posted by on Fri, 20 Feb 2009 07:09:00 GMT

From the Vault

Hi friends, finally I have some more music to share. New guitarscapes are in progress, but in the meantime I dug these four keyboard pieces out of the vault and hope you find them of interest.  These ...
Posted by on Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:51:00 GMT

Where's That Guy Been?

It's been awhile& with life's many responsibilities, music is a part-time occupation, much more so in recent months.I got married last July, and it was a pretty musical event. The next blog will go in...
Posted by on Fri, 30 Jan 2009 08:30:00 GMT

CD Review - Kakugo by Jack or Jive

Jack or Jive return with Kakugo, released by their longtime friends at Prikosnovenie, their first release since 2006's 3-CD box set Issin, which closed the circle of their first 18 years. That set fea...
Posted by on Tue, 08 Apr 2008 06:57:00 GMT

Mishima (Divinations - 5 of 5)

We end this cycle the way we began, with a fascinating but tortured personality. From my first reading of John Nathan's biography of Yukio Mishima, the legendary Japanese writer haunted me for years. ...
Posted by on Fri, 07 Mar 2008 09:09:00 GMT

Introducing... Om Theatre

Some friends of mine have formed Om Theatre, which will perform short plays, indoors and outdoors. The goal is to entertain and enlighten, hopefully at the same time. They asked me to be the music guy...
Posted by on Fri, 29 Feb 2008 08:42:00 GMT

Twilight Child (Divinations - 4 of 5)

A depressing piece, this one, but I thought one of the better ones. Another female character study. To me the most telling aspect is that she could be of any age.Twilight ChildAnother glittering ...
Posted by on Fri, 29 Feb 2008 08:49:00 GMT

Quasimodos Bones (Divinations - 3 of 5)

Where was I? Musing on impermanance... I wonder if this piece will survive me. Victor Hugo probably had no such doubt about his legendary hunchback character. That novel's final image birthed and ...
Posted by on Wed, 20 Feb 2008 13:08:00 GMT

Surface Tension (Divinations - 2 of 5)

This piece was the next one written after Camille Claudel, and the thematic connections are unmistakeable. I was reading books like The Beauty Myth as my daughter approached her third birthd...
Posted by on Wed, 13 Feb 2008 08:58:00 GMT