Tag: Festizio

Chopin, Piazzolla, The Temper Trap / The most beautiful music in my life right now

Posted on by Keane Li

First of all, our new studio album is scheduled to be released at our Café Du Nord show on October 17. Get more details here and find out how you can get a free copy.

Secondly, I just returned from Cincinnati for our drummer’s wedding. I had a blast and ate plenty of Skyline. You can view my full collection of photos here.

✈

For me, music has always been a form of expression. Like a language, it articulates the feelings I’d like to express. It’s always been, above all, a supplement to the experience of everyday life. Music as entertainment is fine enough, but I’m realizing it exists more in my life as a soundtrack than as the feature.

Sometimes I just need a reminder of why I love it so much.

Chopin‘s Nocturne Op. 72 No. 1 – I’m currently learning this on the piano

“Oblivion” by àstor Piazzolla, the Argentinean composer and bandoneón player

And for all you new-music kids out there, a great song by The Temper Trap from Melbourne

Welcome to my new blog :)

Posted on by Keane Li


via DeadFrank

Hi,

A few days ago, both my personal and band blogs were hit by malware and are thus not viewable until the overlords at Google deem them clean. I took this opportunity to move my blog into a unique domain.

You can see that it’s a little more personalized. I removed the original title, “inFESTIZIO,” on account that people were apparently mistaking it for my band name. I also included randomized photos from my life in the above banner, giving a view from my perspective of the world.

I’ll eventually get all my old posts back up when we clean out our other domain. Until then, you can find me on Twitter, and you can follow my band, Festizio, at our ReverbNation page (sign up for our mailing list to get a free copy of our upcoming album!).

Thanks again for everything,

Keane

Coldplay – "The Scientist (Acoustic)" / Back to the start

Posted on by Keane Li


Coldplay | MySpace | Twitter

In revisiting a particular instance in the timeline of your life, chances are your impression of that moment changes with memories of all that you’ve experienced since. There are pockets in life that seem so perfect at the time. And when you remember them, it’s nice to keep them in the context that they were originally in, to keep them independent in themselves…

I was putting on my shoes, about to head out for a run, when I hesitated for a second and looked up from where I was kneeling down. I observed how lived-in my apartment had grown. I imagined what it would be like for someone to see it for the first time, and if they could tell how long I’ve lived there. I recalled what it looked like and how I felt when I first moved in. I contrasted this image by phasing in the contents that fill it now.

To my left: a cluttered closet adjacent to a bathroom with a single towel hanging on a rod. To my right: a refrigerator with random items on its door. A photobooth strip from the Yelp Holiday Party at the Westin St. Francis. My Performer review of Treasure Island Music Festival 2008. A picture of a dinosaur with short arms trying to reach into a fridge, exclaiming, “My hands are too short!” Straight ahead: the ATR Master Tape we used for recording our second album at Tiny Telephone last month.

A big hurdle in my life has been getting over always thinking about the future and to really absorb what’s happening to me at the current moment. I’m not sure if it’s nihilistic or hopeful, but the fact that we all end up in the same place (physically, at least) is reason enough to stop repeatedly asking myself,

Where am I going?

Where am I going?

Where am I going?

But rather to inquire, where am I now?

Revisiting Old Festizio Recordings

Posted on by Keane Li


Festizio | MySpace | Facebook | Twitter

In going through my old files, I uncovered a few unreleased Festizio demos for songs we never really used for various reasons. Usually we’ll drop a song if we feel it’s either not up to par or if it doesn’t fit well with our overall sound. However, I think the three songs below have enough merit to, at the very least, revisit on this very happy Friday.

The two photos were taken during one of our earlier shows at Ireland’s 32, a really great Irish (duh) pub in San Francisco. Even after having played at bigger and fancier venues, that night still brought in the most cash for us, as they gave us a portion of the bar tab and, let’s face it, our friends are drinkers.

Keep in mind that these songs are old and are no longer good representations of our current sound. You can check our actual studio work at the links above.

1.) Festizio – “I’ll Never Do It Again”
We recorded this song in our rehearsal studio. At the time, it was one of our better songs but it later fell into our “maybe” pile. Personally, I felt it was a bit too whiny.

2.) Festizio – “Out Of My Life”
Another song we recorded in our rehearsal studio. I wrote this during my big blues rock phase. The shift in style was too much of a jump from the rest of our set so we only ever performed it a handful of times.

3.) Festizio – “Time” (acoustic demo)
I wrote this song when I was still in college. I’m not exactly sure when it was recorded. Someone once told me it reminded them of John Lennon and I took that as a compliment. Please forgive the poor audio quality.

If you’d like to learn more about the thought process behind song composition, I highly recommend this recent Music Think Tank article by Brian Hazard entitled, “The Death of the Bridge.”

Kurt Cobain died sixteen years ago and we’re still talking about him

Posted on by Keane Li

Nirvana | MySpace

Before our show at Red Devil Lounge last night, I had been watching music performance videos to sort of get me into “the mood,” which is, I think, the equivalent of watching porn before having sex. Though who does that, I don’t know. Anyway, I ran into a Rolling Stone article on Kurt Cobain, discussing the sixteenth anniversary of when the rock icon committed suicide. The article commemorates his life with an amazing photo collection and some updates on his legacy, including his inclusion in Rock Band and the planned biopic on his life, Heavier Than Heaven. Here was a guy, loved and hated musically, that stood for something beyond music, injecting something more meaningful than sex and booze into rock culture. And as destructive as he was, he was/is pretty damn inspirational.

As a musician, I think it helps to constantly reevaluate why you create music. I think great music comes through if it stands for something, if you’re motivated by something more than simply creating melodies for the sake of creating melodies. That’s what separates an artist from a hobbyist, I guess. Artists create largely because they have to. Like the need to drink water or breathe air, their medium is an ingrained form of expression that, whether they want it to or not, needs to come out. Not allowing it to would be akin to never speaking for a kid that can’t shut up.

Nirvana’s performance at Reading, regarded as their greatest, is available on an NME award-nominated DVD. I’m seriously considering finally picking this up.