Hi and Welcome to J Lee Arts and Music, Dateline 2/5/26 An interesting couple weeks have gone by. Mostly about super nerding out on guitar and writing some brand new songs. Been getting all sorts of broken gear fixed and guitars brought back from the brink of unplayablity. My ’65 Jaguar got a new bridge and I haven’t been able to put it down since. Got this new thing going  playing out of two amps, one a tube accordion amp from the 1940’s turned up to 11 soaked in overdrive, phasor and delay. The theory is to create more Z space with a nearfield and a distant amp (for your listening pleasure (and mine)). Our new studio is coming along exceedingly well. We are about halfway unpacked. The studio area is set up for practice. We plan on building a keyboard/synth wizard circle, ala Steve from Robot Speak, a live room records/mixer setup with hardwired ambient miking for adding effects to drums and more thought into live vocal effects controlled from the stage. Also planning a control room for “for real” recording sessions. Starry Skemes played a couple fun shows over the last month, one at the Make Out Room. We played two sets, one we call our cafe set which has a bunch of slower mellow stuff and the second was our more fierce set with more uptempo bombast. The show was recorded by our archivist Tom Scharff and you can listen to it here. We also played the Bay Area When show at the Pretty Gritty Gallery which was a very fun multi generational night. Great art, avant garde noise haircuts. Lots of characters came out of the woodwork for that. Warm Spell also played the Make Out Room. We were joined by Ben Rogers on cello. Also documented by Tom Scharff. Listen here. What else you may not have asked? Got back into the art space and started a new mobile for the upcoming J Lee Mobile Unit show at ATA coming up in April. Still figuring out the overall visual concept or choices. Music is in development using an all analog modular with MIDI to CV controllers for more of a cine soundtrack process, so hopefully I can write some actual reproduce-able compositions. Finally, went out painting today with my friend and lifelong painter Will Yackulic. We hiked up to the ridge of the North Berkeley Hills. Great day out. Had not painted landscapes in a couple months so it was refreshing and Will passed on some legit art tips and theory as well as great stories and philosophising. As always this piece was done ala prima in one go no studio touch ups in the moment.Berkeley Hills 16 x 20 Acrylic