samurai photographer becomes samurai guitarist, day one.

So today was the first rehearsal for Glenn Branca's "Hallucination City" and it is a completely different animal than it was the first time I played it 5 years ago (indeed, it's much different than our 2004 recording of it as well.)

Gone are the long passages of drone and whoosh, instead there's a lot of strange syncopation and some extremely finger-spraining high register parts. You can bet I will be stretching the fingers tonight!

The ensemble sounds good as a whole, I think tomorrow we will really hit our stride - we'd better, since the tape will be rolling.

Since I got one hour of sleep last night, I look forward to going to bed early (for me, at least) as soon as my headache is gone. I think once I am rested, I can really attack this piece with gusto, and maybe not even need to write notations on my score to tell me where the notes are on the neck of my guitar (because I am, as fellow Ensemble member Eric Hubel says, "guitarded", I need to cheat by taping chord names to my instrument.)

There's more women in the group this time, which made me feel great. Maybe the next time there will be 25 women instead of 10.