PETER GABRIEL TOUR 2007

Summer 2007: Peter Gabriel is back on the road this summer. Thank you to those of you who have emailed about the tour. Yes, Peter's new tour set is predominantly the same material we recorded and toured with Peter in the 1970s and 1980s when Tony Levin, Jerry Marotta and I were the core of Peter's band. Peter has chosen to have only Tony rejoin him for this return to his past. I was emailed by the production people at Real World who had a lot of questions about what instruments I had used and how I created the synthesizer patches and parts. Any of you who have seen the Tony Levin Band on the road since 2000 know that I have recreated many of my signature Moog sounds in newer digital instruments

The last I heard from Real World they were attempting to sample my parts to use in the show from the Peter Gabriel albums studio tapes done all those years ago. If that's the case, I guess in some remote sense, I will be on the road for this tour. Seems like way too much work, though.

XM SATELLITE RADIO MERGER NEWS

XM Satellite Radio News: I've received a lot of questions about the proposed XM and Sirius Satellite Radio merger. The short answer is that I don't have any additional information. There are a lot of legal and regulatory hurdles, not to mention the technical ones, in combining two separate satellite services. For the moment, my sound logos (or "sounders") -- the over 100 that I created and recorded at the Synergy Studio, and the many more that famous and talented artists have recorded of my little 7-note theme for XM's on-air use continue to be the sonic identifier of the XM programming channels. Read more in Lee Abram's blog.

For those of you who are Sirius subscribers, or those who haven't subscribed to XM yet, here are some mp3 examples for you listen to. click here...

SYNERGY EMAIL PROBLEMS

Email: And speaking of email, the incoming spam and spam filtering for this Synergy site have become almost unworkable. I manage to rescue some of the email trapped in the filters when I discover them, but sometimes they're auto-purged before I find them. With a dozen or two legit emails overwhelmed by several hundred pieces of spam every day, it's becoming difficult to manage. My apologies for any emails that have become irretrievably lost. Eventually we're going to set up a forms based way of communicating. It's a little more restrictive, but it means that you can send messages to a controlled mailbox that will recognize them as valid, and in a place that the spammers can't find. Thanks for your patience.

NEKTAR UPDATES 2007

UPDATE JANUARY 2007: Still no contact from the band or management. I'm starting to think that it's unlikely that I'll be involved after all. The Nektar tour has been rescheduled for February through April 2007, but I have Tony Levin and other commitments so I won't be doing that either. Thanks to all of you who have asked.

UPDATE MID-FEBRUARY 2007: The Nektar winter tour is off (again). I'm so far out of the loop that I find out most information from the band website and by reading the fan forums. However, recent emails and phone calls from present and former band members indicate that the Book of Days album recording is moving toward completion and future touring plans are being put in place. Once again, the Nektar website is where official announcements can be found. I have a soft spot for the first major band that I toured with 31 years ago. I want everything to work out for them.

UPDATE MID-JUNE 2007: Uh Oh. The official Nektar seems to be gone. Try www.royealbrighton.com. I hear Roye's trying to finish the new album, but I don't have any information about how that's going. Look's like there might be some touring, though.

TONY LEVIN BAND--BAJA PROG FESTIVAL 2007

The Tony Levin Band played at the Baja Prog festival in Baja California, Mexico in March. That finished up our touring for a while. There might be some more shows later in 2007, but nothing has been scheduled yet.

Prior to Mexico and one appearance at NAMM, the band had been off the road since our West Coast US tour leg in October, 2006 which followed a busy spring and summer of touring the eastern US, Europe (Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland and Germany), eastern Canada and one show in Mexico City. All this followed our late 2005 dates in Italy, Switzerland, Hungary and Russia. Click on the "Resonator" CD cover to visit pages on Tony's site about the latest album.

I've been swamped with other projects including construction of new studio space at home so I'm leaving it to Tony and the other guys in the band to publish our pictures form the last tour leg online. Click here for a link to Tony's site; and here for Pete Levin's pictures.

NEKTAR NEWS 2006

Nektar News : the new album "Book of Days" is being recorded during the summer of 2006. I've been invited to contribute to the arrangements (and it's even posted on the Nektar website). As soon as there's more information and I know more about it myself, I'll post my own observations.

UPDATE NOVEMBER 2006: It's pretty simple; I don't have any information. To date I have not contributed to the new album. I'm still waiting to hear about that. I was asked to do the tour, but it conflicted with some of my other obligations including the Tony Levin Band dates so I had to decline. Now I understand the tour has been postponed until 2007. The best source of information is the official Nektar website.

IN MEMORY OF JOHN SIMONTON

Another significant member of the electronic music community , John Simonton, Jr., founder of PAiA Electronics died on November 25, 2005. John was a good friend and someone who shared my background in the nuts and bolts of hardware and software design from which musical creativity could be coaxed. John's obituary on the PAiA site is here. Marvin Jone's, one of PAiA's lead designers and first editor of Polyphony/Electronic Musician magazine's remembrances are found here. A few of my pictures and comments are on a separate page.