Ball of Wax Audio Quarterly +1 cover song

Ball of Wax has a new blog/website, and therein is posted my cover of “Lithium” by Nirvana.  It looks like Ball of Wax has decided to be all generous and include past Volumes as free downloads from their blog… wow!  You can purchase the most recent compilation, and I have a feeling I may have a song included on the next one, we shall see.

http://ballofwax.org/2011/01/check-out-this-song-christina-antipa-lithium/

Coming Soon… Dirty & Wrong : Songs Left Behind

This compilation of orphaned tracks spans a decade, and will be out this year, in 2011.  It is being put out as a “limited edition” cd, so there will be 50 cds total.  There will also be digital downloads, but the entire album will not be available digitally, just selected tracks.  Get ready for emotions.

<3,

Christina

Trip Recap

Here is the video I made from landscape footage from the tour.  It was very, very windy outside.  I recommend viewing it full-screen, because it makes it feel like you are walking around outside.

The trip was amazing.

Tomorrow I leave for Europe.  I will no longer be able to blog regularly, but I may try to put up a picture or two, once or twice while I am overseas.

Christina

Last Show In Brooklyn

You know how important it is to end strong?

Sometimes it is also important to throw that notion to the wind and end weakly.

I have a love of completion, so I am doing a blog entry for my last show, which was in NY… and I have been keeping a very positive theme for this blog, so I am only going to talk about things that were positive.  For anyone who knows me, you will probably be acknowledging how weird that is.

Positive Point A: I got to see a few of my wonderful friends.

Positive Point B: I got to hear Dave Heumann, songwriter for the Baltimore band Arbouretum play.  If you’ve never listened to them/him, I highly recommend it.  Dave is the reason I trained all the way up from CT to do that last show.  He is primarily a guitarist, but had somehow bruised a bone in his hand while playing, and so he randomly reworked his songs on keyboard for the show, and it was still completely hypnotic.

Positive Point C: I got to use the drink ticket I had hoarded from the week before, despite the venues assertion that I would not normally be allowed to do so.  If you are wondering why that is such a positive point, let me tell you how expensive food and drink is in NY: very.

Positive Point D: I was introduced to Arbourea, a husband and wife folk duo with an unexpectedly ethereal and ambient, semi-distorted electric sound.  They were lovely.

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I am working on putting some footage from the trip to music, and it’s looking pretty interesting.  It’s usually very windy footage.  I will post that tonight or tomorrow, along with a conclusion/summary of the trip.

At the moment I am tying up loose ends and getting ready for the many many hours of travel on the bus and the train and the airplane, before I arrive in France.

Connecticut With Lys Guillorn

I am lucky.  First, I got to go on this tour and see all sorts of interesting places.  Then, I get to hear a bunch of music and meet a bunch of awesome, barely discovered musicians.  Diamonds in the rough, to use a horribly overused cliche.

I’ve been in Connecticut for a couple days now, staying with my brother and company, saving up energy to start the second half of the tour in Europe.  When I arrived here, I got a chance to play at a place called The Buttonwood Tree in Middletown, Connecticut, with Lys Guillorn (pronounced “liss”).  She is really, really good.  If you are reading this, you should definitely go experience her tunes somewhere.  She has the English language wrapped around her little finger, and she rules her instrument—she is a great guitarist.  No American Idol antics, you know, people singing and not playing anything so they can make a bunch of faces and wear jeans with patterns bleached onto them.  She is a real musician.

Northeast Kingdom in Brooklyn

I got lost on the network of bridges that weave in convoluted sinewy hell-patterns over the Hudson River.  I had to pay the toll at least five times.  I still don’t know where I was.  I had no idea which direction was North and which direction was South, and my iPhone, who had been a faithful friend for the duration of this tour, seemed to have suddenly turned against me.

After pulling over and getting complete nonsense, way overly detailed directions, which included a scribbly looking diagram and multitudinous arrows scratched on the back of a receipt like some indecipherable ancient language, I managed to find my way.

Just kidding.  I didn’t find my way then.

Only after several heated exchanges with people working in tollbooths, did I finally stumble across a super-irritable, condescending, short guy with a thick NY accent who managed to give me directions simple enough to follow, while talking down to me in a way that was… I don’t know how to describe it… just…wow…totally unprecedented.

I played at bar and restaurant called Northeast Kingdom with an all-girl acoustic band called Rescue Bird, who do a regular act there.  They had an accordion, autoharp, keyboard organs, cello, weird percussive instruments, an opera singer, multiple vocals, bells, and an unlimited supply of cuteness and pep.

We sat on log chairs in the cavernous downstairs listening room—it was quite cozy.

State College, PA

After driving past a lot of pastoral scenery—old, giant barns, green fields, forests—I arrived at my destination in Pennsylvania.  I was an hour early so I walked around until it was dark, stretching my legs.  There were tiny gray bunny rabbits everywhere.

Later that night I played in the living room of a giant house (it was actually 2 houses) which housed well upward of 10 people, I couldn’t tell how many exactly.  The size of the dwelling is probably the inspiration for the name, “Houseasaurus”.  Everyone was so, so nice there, really genuine people, and it was a really great show… I didn’t know anything about the area when I showed up, but I would definitely go back again.

I was very excited that finally someone requested Free Bird, so I could play the Lynyrd Skynyrd cover I had prepared…