Stephen Cohen recently completed a Centrum Creative Residency. He sent us an email about his experience.
The Tree People, Stephen, Jeff, and Rich, participated in a Creative Residency at Centrum for a week in September of 2008. These Centrum Creative Artist Residencies, which attract artists from all over the world, are perfect for artists to create in a quiet, inspirational setting. Nothing is required or expected from the artists at these residencies, so artists have the opportunity to concentrate on nothing else but their art.
We stayed in a wonderful 3 bedroom house on the beautiful Olympic Peninsula and did nothing but play music all week. After 4 days of rehearsing, refining, and arranging new pieces, we went into Synergy Studio, a studio on the Centrum grounds, with engineer Neville Pearsall, for two days and recorded a good part (8 pieces) of the music that will be on our our third and new Tree People album. (We will record a few more pieces of music and mix the final results at Dead Aunt Thelma’s Studio in Portland later this year, and then send the completed product to Guerssen Records of Spain, who will release it later in 2009). On the last night of our residency we went into Port Townsend and did an evening performance for a nice listening audience at the Upstage, a really nice venue.
We would like to thank Lisa and the rest of the staff at Centrum for helping to make this fantastic residency possible.
The residency provided the 3 of us with time and space to create, think, rehearse and record. We were inspired and energized by this residency and it had lasting value. This residency will always be remembered by our Tree People trio!
You can see my new post, with photos, about the experience on my Tree People blog: