Hey folks,

I took some time off, as I mentioned in my last post. It’s been good for me, and I’m gearing up to get back in the swing of things here in the coming week.

Much of the past two weeks was spent getting in touch with my creative identity. Creatively, I feel like I’m at either a threshold or crossroads, where I feel like I’ve nailed the technical aspects but I’m struggling a little, figuring out where to go with this knowledge. I had a great period of creativity this summer and fall but nothing I’m doing lately is satisfying me all that much. Maybe you know the feeling? It’s really frustrating. I’m putting energy into other projects now, and I’m spending whatever downtime I have experimenting with new musical ideas. My creative blocks typically don’t last too long, so I’m sure I’ll break out with something new and exciting sometime soon.

I found a refuge in reading and listening these last two weeks. One video was particularly inspiring. It really helped me get through the brief creative dark spot. So here it is:

Read the rest of this entry »

1. Day job
2. Record label, developing online store and content database
3. Composing
4. Recording
5. Equipment maintenance
6. Networking
7. Research
8. Blog
9. Time for myself
10. Time with the people I love

I call it the curse of the late bloomer: Economic, financial, and personal circumstances kept me from exploring my creative potential for far too long and I often feel like I’m playing catch-up to realize all of the creative impulses I’ve deferred over the years. Add onto that an already full plate of self actualization (also deferred due to said circumstances) and a career in an unrelated field, which began to really take flight three years ago, and it’s a recipe for either constant anxiety or some kind of weird casserole that only my mom could invent.

I’m drinking wine right now. I love to drink but I normally put it off until the later hours, when I’ve completed my fourteen hour shift as an overachiever. I actually cooked myself a decent meal instead of getting takeout. All of my notebooks are closed, and the only reason I used a pen tonight is because Comcast and PG&E want some of my hard-earned soy-cheddar.

As much as it pains me to leave so many promising projects on the shelf for one whole week, I must do so to maintain (restore?) my sanity.

See you in a few days.

I want to thank everyone who read my previous post, re: Experimental Music and the Ego. The link was passed around the Web (Facebook in particular) and it elicited a number of responses, a few of which were added here as comments.

I plan on writing a followup post, put together from various comments and my reactions, but until then please take a look at the comments on the previous article. The responses were quite apt and I think they add a lot of value to the discussion.

Thanks!

I’m doing research on material for this blog and for my personal creative endeavors and I’m having quite a difficult time finding blogs and other online media covering experimental music.

Why is this?

I don’t think it’s for a lack of current works; it seems like there are plenty of young people out there trying new things with sound and music itself as a concept. Magazines The Wire and Signal To Noise prove there’s enough interest to garner advertising dollars in this niche. Pop acts like Animal Collective and Ariel Pink prove there’s at least some curiosity among the trendy, urban, fashionable crowd. Why then hasn’t the current generation seized on the fruits of seeds sown so long ago?

I could speculate, but doing so would open the gates of cynicism and egocentric shortsightedness. To be fair, experimental music in the Post War era never much got attention beyond academia, some dedicated music enthusiasts, and the fringes of pop culture, so it’s likely not a generational issue. Granted, the current generation has greater access to both the means of production and instant, worldwide communication than any generation before, but our culture and society overall haven’t necessarily adapted to take full advantage of this, or to let it affect its tastes or its general cultural awareness. Whether we ever will is another discussion.

There’s something deeper here. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how people perceive music and I keep coming back to arguments that John Cage made about how people typically perceive music, and more importantly, how one decides if something is, or isn’t, “music”. I’ve had many conversations with strangers about the music I’m making and it usually takes a bit of explaining before I see in them some kind of recognition or understanding of what I’m trying to achieve. I’m using my experience as an example because it’s what I know best. In my case, after the first question of “What kind of music do you make?”, there’s usually something like “So you make ambient music?” or “Oh, you make noise music”. Both are way off, but how can I succinctly describe to someone something that is so core to the experience of sound as an art form in a way that’s easy to understand?

Most people are not stupid. Most people will understand an argument for concrete and/or pure sound as music; I’m pretty sure of that. But what’s not happening on a wider scale is a sort of “wait and see” approach to music, where the listener disables her critical voice for the duration of the program and actually listens to what’s being presented to her before making her mind on what she’s heard. It’s sort of like when a stranger approaches you on the street and says “Excuse me, Sir”: you don’t know what this person is going to say, and if you’re not weary of strangers, you’re probably going to listen to what they have to say before you make your judgment and give a response. Why then isn’t this the same for music? Preconceived notions of what “music” is? This can become a circular argument – and again I’ll try not to speculate further on why this is – but I want to share some observations I’ve made on people’s reactions to unfamiliar musical styles.

One of the most difficult things I’ve encountered as a musician is that when I’m presenting my music to someone, often times the listener’s first reaction is to speak. Why, I’m not sure, but again I’d like to not be too cynical here. This actively defeats the purpose of listening to new music for two reasons: 1) They’ve already formed an opinion in just the first few seconds, and of course 2) They’re speaking and not listening. Secondly, after presenting my music, I’ve heard things like “The melody/riff/gesture didn’t go anywhere”, “There’s no melody”, “I expected a beat”, or “It never resolved itself” (strange, but I’ve heard it). Granted, I can’t make music that pleases everyone (or even a few people, sometimes!), but to me this speaks of what’s ostensibly some kind of commonly-held belief of what music is or should be. Tragically, to me, it seems like most listeners demand that new music meets the criteria of works they’ve already heard and have practically canonized.

I say that it’s tragic for listeners to expect new music to easily measure up against their sum total personal understanding of music because this effectively blocks any potential for surprise and growth. One thing I’ve said many times is: “Fear is anxiety over the unknown.” To take a philosophical turn here for just a moment, fear is something that manifests itself in human behavior in a number of ways, and a typical response to fear is to assess the situation, compare it to our own personal experience, and to categorize what’s happening at the moment accordingly. When we venture into unknown territory we’re on keen alert and we’ll quickly compare whatever stimuli we encounter to what we already know. Evolution proves that this is useful for our survival but in other avenues of life – specifically in the arts – it’s dangerous and detrimental to our growth as thinking, feeling beings. Why not take something at its face value instead of comparing it to what we already know? Why not take the artist’s expression in its purest form – her art – and accept it for what it is? Why must we assess, second-guess, and otherwise deconstruct the meaning of a piece instead of valuing it as a unique experience? I know that all of this seems incredibly idealistic but I see it as a practical approach to developing a personal understanding of art.

This argument / rant, nearly a manifesto without real demands, has been rolling around in my brain for a long time. I recognize that I take a very personal approach to music which projects my ideals onto the form as a whole. I fully acknowledge that not everyone sees the value of art in itself, and that most people have their own priorities in life that are much different from my own. Call this a plea for greater understanding, or call it a late-night rambling blog post, but either way, I accept that I’ve met an impasse and I’m dedicated to overcoming it.

Some time ago, I got my hands on a copy of the Conet Project set, and since then I’ve been quite obsessed with shortwave radio, or at least the idea of getting a shortwave radio and using it as a novel, ever-changing sound source.

Specifically, I’ve been wanting to find a vacuum tube-based radio because of the interesting sounds produced while tuning between stations. It’s a familiar sound from 1950s era science fiction movies, and a similar effect can be heard beginning around 0:35 in this little recording I made back in July:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(Direct Link)

This sound was created by sending a very high frequency, somewhere between 500 and 600kHz on my Hewlett-Packard tube oscillator, to a cassette recorder. Signals at such frequencies corrupt the recorder’s bias signal and cause interesting distortions.

Right, shortwave radio. I occasionally search eBay and Craigslist for shortwave radios but it’s difficult to find a tube radio in good condition that also has a line out, or to find a solid state radio with a line out for that matter. When I do find one I like, though, I’m usually tight on cash and put the idea off. I’ll have to remember to look when I have an extra fifty bucks.

In the meantime, I enjoy finding videos on YouTube which feature some of the more unusual sounds and signals being sent through the air. A common finding are what are called “Numbers Stations“, which transmit information – ostensibly spy information or reconnaissance findings – encoded in arbitrary alphanumeric codes and often prepended by a chime, gong, or tune. Here’s one of the better examples from YouTube:

Other than that, there’s a few other things which pique my curiosity. I really like this next video. Who knows what’s generating this sound, or how, and for what purpose, but I enjoy it simply for what it is:

Some things give me very clear ideas for future audio pieces:

Anyway. I’ll search again for radios when I have some cash to blow. I can see myself recording what I find onto cassettes and just playing them as interesting background noise around the apartment.