Itofarm Online Shop in deutsch!

Der Itofarm Online Store ist jetzt neben englisch auch in deutsch vorhanden. Alle weiteren Infos zum Online Store gibt es hier.

All that Jazz

I really like Jazz but I never had played Jazz before. Though it seems rather unlikely to find a decent Jazz club in the spanish mountains, about 25km away from the seaside in a tiny village called Llosa de Camacho, well, that´s what actually happened.
Emilio´s Bar is a small bar in this village and every Friday night there´s Jazz played by Emilio´s Piano Trio (Dave, Peter & Dave) and it´s an unbelievably relaxed and entertaining athmosphere. A lot of guest musicians and singers join in and the audience is enjoying every performance, which is most of the times on a surprisingly high level.

Last Friday I joined as a guest-guitarist for the first time and we did some Jazz improvisations - a rather new world to me, which I liked very much. For our next evenings I will prepare some jazzy tunes. Here´s a little snapshot of last Friday´s jam:

Ingo Ito at Indiependence Music

Indiependence Music.net is a great platform for any independent musician or band to present songs and selling them to the audience. It´s free to join and you just pay some fees when you sell sth. (read more about this here).

It´s also nice to join just as a fan. You can listen to all types of music, rate it thus influencing the charts on IndiependenceMusic, mark your favourite songs/artists and so on....

Being a devoted listener to all kind of new music this is a great place for me to randomly stroll along, as all songs are played in full length and not just as 30 sec samples like in the i-tunes shop.

So anybody who is supporting independent music should go there and join (free membership) and rate some music.

Here are the direct links to my artist areas on IndiependenceMusic.net:

• Ingo Ito
• Zen Hanami
• Rain On Bamboo
• Bamboo Industry

Would be great to give my music some good ratings as this would put me onto the IndiependenceMusic charts and would draw more listeners and so on and so one.... ;-)

A short note on Tapas

As I´m offering regularly alternating free MP3 downloads on my website under the name "Tones as Tapas", I thought it a good idea to explain the meaning of Tapas to those of you, who don´t know what they are.

Tapas are little appetizers served at bars or restaurants. Here in Spain, Tapas are very popular either as something to accompany a drink at a bar (for example olives, nuts, cheese etc.) or for a complete meal with a great variety of combinations of meat (sausages, meat balls, ham, different skewers etc.), seafood (fish, squid (a speciality is "Pulpo Gallego" – squid from a special area at the Galician Atlantic coast, served warm in olive oil with garlic and red pepper – mmh... yummy!), clams (one of my favourites is "Mejillones Rellenos" – filled clams...delicious!) etc.), vegetables, salads, potatoes (patatas bravas – "hot" potatoes) and so on.

If you are really interested in Tapas there is more information here in english and here in german.

So, there you are. Music as an appetizer for (hopefully) coming back for more ;-) !

An interesting second meaning has the word tapas in Sanskrit. In the yogic tradition, tapas may be translated as "essential energy", referring to a focused effort leading towards bodily purification and spiritual enlightenment.

Ingo Ito at MySpace

Just a quick note, that I could now be found at MySpace as well. I implied a permanent link in the sidebar and here´s a direct link:
www.myspace.com/ingoito

First Light

So eventually my website is online and now it´s back to making music again!

Just finished Zen Hanami - Volume 1, which is ready for download in the new Shop at Itofarm.

I really like this album very much and it was a pleasure recording it. For the first time I worked with the Mobius looping software instead of my trusty Paradis Loop Delay and I was astonished about the speed of recording the basic loop tracks.

One major aim of the Zen Hanami series is to find a suitable framework, that makes it a good companion for people who search special music for their meditation, Yoga or Tai Chi. So I decided to level the length of all tracks to exactly 15 minutes, which is often a good time period for any practicing lessons.

I´m working now on a different release: "The Sombre Poet" – that´s the pure music version of the audio book Kokain. Re-arrangement is on its way and everything looks quite promising.