I play the guitar and try to keep enough of them around the house so there’s never one too far away. I also have two travel guitars that partially disassemble so I can easily carry them on a plane (pictured to the right).

Here are some things I’ve recorded:

• Mr. Williams on Waikiki
  Mr Williams on Waikiki. This is my Hawaii-inspired arrangement of an intro to the theme to Star Wars, by John Williams. The title, of course, pays homage to John Williams, the composer who brought us the original Star Wars theme, as well as to Philip Glass, who wrote “Einstein on the Beach.”

• This is Deep
  This is Deep. I wrote and performed this piece partly as a joke. It is obscure by design, making fun of people such as Bob Dylan who create lyrics so obtuse that it is almost impossible to figure out what he is saying. My inspiration for this is from the great movie “Walk Hard” where the main character writes a Dylan-esque song which makes no sense at all. When someone questions the song, someone with no more understanding of the song than anyone else, says, “You guys are crazy. This is really deep”.  (Scroll to the bottom of this page for the lyrics.)

• Dead Programs
  Dead Programs. This is a parody of the song “Dead Puppies,” recorded for a promotional video for a tutorial on heterogeneous programming. The message of this song is that you must use an open standard-based programming language if you want your programs to live on even after changing to hardware from a different vendor. Otherwise, you will end up with dead programs.

• Mad World, Roland Orzabal
  Mad World. Most people known this as “the song” from the film Donnie Darko.

• Metamorphosis, Philip Glass
  Metamophosis. This is another, perhaps more iconic Philip Glass piece.

• Ripple, Grateful Dead
  Ripple. This is an old Grateful Dead tune.

• Water Song, Jorma Kaukonen
  Water Song. This is a great piece by Jorma Kaukonen.

• A Fugue, Tim Mattson
  A Fugue. And finally, here’s a fugue that I wrote.

• Embryonic Journey
  Embryonic Journey. Composed by Jorma Kaukonen

• In Christ There is not East or West
  In Christ there is not east or West. Composed by John Oxenham (1908) and arranged by John Fahe.

Now I’m working on some of the pieces from Einstein on the Beach, also by Philip Glass.

 

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Lyrics to “This is Deep” 

Tortured Sand Contaminated
Slaves to whims of overlords
Warped into un-natural contortions

Packed into a sterile womb
Hive-minds working in our tomb
Pushing orbs of charge to resolution

Stretching Math beyond obscure
To tell you what you want to hear
So you can hide from the man behind the curtain

And we see
Your tragic commons
And for your doom
We blame you all