Hi, all! This is going out to both the comma and comma-announce lists,
as well as a few other people. (While we have exactly the same number of 
subscribers on each, only about half the addresses overlap.) Sorry for
any redundancy and any redundancy.


I. Velvet Lounge Performance Followup and MP3s

The performance at the Emergent Music Festival at the Velvet Lounge on
April 7 went quite well, if we may say so ourselves. We ended up going 
on very late (about midnight) but still had a good group of attentive and
appreciative audients.

It was an intriguing collection of acts that evening: the Hipfux C-30
Collective opened with a live mix of recordings made by five mixologists 
for the event (including Douglas Wolf's processing of Comma
samples). Couloir followed with pleasantly energetic jazz/rock, sort of
in a Pat Metheny/Phil Manzanera vein, then a brief performance by DJ Sal 
Amoniac (who held a microphone to a vinyl record and scratched at it
with a hacksaw, getting a wider and more interesting array of sounds
than might be expected), and, finally, us.

MP3s made from minidisk recordings of the gig (including Word
Processing, Wall of Gulls, Houses Long and Thin Along the Road, and an
instrumental/vocal improv) are now online at
http://www.metatronpress.com/mp3/ for your listening enjoyment.


II. Next performance: 04/24/1999: EarthSounding

We're quite excited about our next performance. Norman Lowrey, creator
of amazing Sounding Masks will be joining Comma, organist Ronald Stolk,
and the Choir of St. Stephen & the Incarnation in a 
surround-sound environmental work of music theater and audience participation. 
EarthSounding celebrates sound, spirituality and Earth Day. 

The performance is at St. Stephen & the Incarnation Episcopal Church, 
1525 Newton St NW (corner of 16th and Newton) in Washington, DC, at 4 PM 
on Saturday, April 24. The show is free and open to the public 
($5 donation suggested).

In addition to Norman Lowrey's "Spirit Talk: conversations with the 
Singing Masks", EarthSounding will include Thomas Bickley's 
"Veni Creator Spiritus" for three choirs and sopranino recorder, 
Joseph Zitt's "Welcome, Elijah" for improvisors with atmospheric sound, 
and improvisations for voices, instruments and electronics. 

You can find further information, links, etc, at 
http://www.artswire.org/tbickley/earths.html


III. The Comma Online Demix Project

Attention, digital mixologists!

We're building a growing body of Comma recordings, live and studio, at 
http://www.metatronpress.com/mp3/

You are invited to download and listen to these MP3 files, and, if you
wish, to create (re)(de)mixes from the materials. Send them to us
via FTP at ftp://ftp.metatronpress.com/incoming 

We'll post the best of these (probably almost anything we get :-]) at
http://www.metatronpress.com/mp3/demix/

Submitted materials become the property of Metatron Press, but we'll 
try to make sure that you are properly credited wherever your demix 
appears. (That's "try to", since files have a way of slipping out of
people's grasp and reappearing.)

Some more ground rules:
    - The source materials must be compositions or improvisations by
Comma or its members. (For copyright reasons, etc, it's safer not to use 
our recordings of works by other composers. But as it stands now,
everything on the mp3 page is usable for this.)
    - The submitted files must be in MP3 format (though this may change
if something better and usable cross-platform comes along).
    - The mixes may be up to 10 minutes long.

There's no deadline on this, so get rolling. We're eager to see what
happens!