So like.. I don’t want to creep you out or anything.. but you might want to take a look at these videos… 

Sarah Plain Church Video Fun

Can you dig that?

Ok, how about one more.. .   .    .

 So, ok.. if you’re… hmm….

Ok, dig this right…  archetypes, which we could speak of as being the basic building blocks of religion.. or religion is like a system for relating to archetypal forces… they are basically the expression of biology onto consciousness.. to explain all this would take a long time.. point is, if we view this stuff from that perspective.. you find that its not really all that crazy…  or, some of what looks crazy on the surface might not be as crazy as it appears.. Indeed, its kinda interesting…

Still.. there’s a certain cultural force to this kind of religious thang that, umm..  can be a little creepy.. In large measure.. well we see this in cultural conservatives that fail to see moral / ethical spirit which.. say.. moved the cultural revolution surrounding hippie-dom..  

Archetypal psychology speaking.. when ever you focus on a morality sorta thing that is.. sorta narrow in its allowances.. that part of your totality that looses a chance to grow up as a result… becomes your shadow.. then what happens is it gets projected on those folks whom live outside of said restrictive moral order.. so we find our selves the darkness of our own shadow in said people..  and thus the creepiness of the religious culture we find Miss Palin living in…  

For more on this here archetypal psych shtick.. check out this entry / documentary.

So..  how about a little of Matt’s religion.. in my religion we rock out.. with a dyionesian spirit.. to break out of the inherited value system.. so that we might get a direct experience of said archetypal forces…

We’re just a little more hungry for God, I guess.. then they are up in Alaska, ha? 

[editors notes: this was written a few days back, at an earlier stage in the production.. since then things have changed pretty dramatically.. but the ideas contained here are still front and center.. as far as the music production / musical composition’s core organizational principles are concerned… The other note to note.. is this is but part 1..  stay tuned for the second half] 

Ok.. the last post I actually posted was what we call in the social media biz “supper duper” long… which is strategically a no-no.. but I felt that I needed it for a kind of aesthetic / philosophical / theoretical back drop for todays post.. which…. though I didn’t get around to saying all I’d have liked to in said post.. we are going to try and move our focus onto the actual work before me.. and the processes involved.

As I started to say in the last post.. I started off with a voice synthesizer.. a free one.. plugged lyrics into that.. it renders out to an MP3 (not totally ideal), from there I take the MP3 into Ableton Live and start running it through all manner of effects.. I do this individual for each line of lyrics.. rendering out a few variations for each line..

It’s at this point where the project goes on the back burner.. my attention devoted to other matters.. until I go out and buy ReCycle.. where I cut up the processed audio files into REX2 loops for use in Reason… which brings us to where I am today.

You can sequence a REX2 file… play any of the slices in the loop, at any time, in whatever order.. also the REX player in Reason, known as Dr:rex, is a bit of an instrument.. it has pitch bend, a modulation wheel.. you can automate any of its controls.. we have filters, oscillators, and modulators.

For this project, which is my first project along these lines.. I start off fairly simple.. I sit in the sequencer, sequencing the loop slices…

REX sequencing

Imagine.. if you will.. we have an audio file with various slices. In our sequencer we say what slice to play, and how loud to play that slice.. as well as when to play that slice. The slices.. if played in order.. for the right lengths.. would play the original audio file as it was.. assuming your project is set to the same tempo.. But in programming a sequence, we don’t actually have to play the slices in order or anything.

The effect is to “cut up” the audio file.. which.. in practice.. creates some pretty strange glitch-e kinda of effects.. sounds like digital equipment going nuts… sometimes you’re sure there’s something wrong with it, and you want to smack the computer.

This cut up / glitch-ification of the audio introduces a range of ambiguity.. we are abstracting from a source.. this having to with the meta cognitive experience of experience I talked about in that recent post.. Mind you our starting point is a voice synthesizer which sounds a bit like a speak and spell.. or I should say it has all the rich expressiveness of a speak and spell.. which is to say its not expressive at all.. it is digitized.. so.. whatever the lyrics are.. they are now abstracted into this digitized place.

Thematic Material

There is, of course, a link between the digital / mechanical and the pathological.. what’s the relationship of the machine to the humanity? What is the symbolic meaning of Darth Vader being more machine then human? Hitler… he would have told you that “he was the state,” the state of course is the machine.. such is the symbolism we are playing with.

The lyrics have to do with the transcendent.. and the limits of our concepts of reality.. through which we interact with reality.. and the implications of this.. God.. if you look at how he behaved relative to Job, or for that matter in the old testament more generally.. would seem to be “a bit of a monster” or.. to put it another way.. human morality and God’s morality are not quite the same thing.. we could talk about awe in relationship to God in this sense.. and the relationship between man and machine.. perhaps the pathological with the.. kind of conventional human morality.. has certain parallels.. which has some implication on how we might relate to the lyrics.

All of this has to do with with the mind bending aspect of the lyrics.. has to do with.. “the dark side of the transcendent,” to put it a certain way.. but also we are dealing with the old “through death comes life” shtick.

Ambiguity and the Cognitive

In the blog entry to which this is a kind of sequel.. I shared a cut up film written by William Burroughs.. We are of course entering into the world of cut ups.. and we are talking about mysticism’s relationship to challenges in cognitive processes.. or I talked a bit about this in said post… So lets talk about this a little.

We have the range of the easy to understand to the.. incomprehensible.. the overly easy is boring.. the overly hard to understand is frustrating.. and so it is that we dance between the extremes..

So.. how do we do this? For starters.. if I were to speak to you a sentence.. but allowed 5 minutes to pass between each word.. would you, at the end of it, know what the hell I was saying? Probably not.. particularly if there was music all around, drawing our attention this way and that.

This idea.. and I don’t even know if it is still up at this point.. is a driving idea of the lyrics in the music linked to from this post. It’ll be up in a podcast soon enough.. In any event.. lets talk about the lyrics in this “MTFS revisited” track.

We are taking one line from the lyrics to the song I’m currently working on… and that was the basis for the lyrics in the MTFS revisited track. Your ability to recognize what is being said in the lyrics is played with in a number of ways.

Firstly.. we hear the lyrics more or less straight.. slightly manipulated, close to the start of the track.. there’s only one problem.. there’s a lot of frequency masking going on.. so the lyrics are not easily recognized at this point.. we most likely only recognize fragments of the lyrics.. if that.. if we even recognize the lyrics at all. (There was one person who commented that she didn’t even notice the singing till she had heard the track a few times!)

The whole way through the track.. it is never made clear what the lyrics are saying.. its always obscured.. or we are always only getting fragments.. until the very end.. when the lyrics show up like a period.

Now.. if you know the lyrics, and you listen, you know what is being said even when the lyrics are being obscured in one way or another.. and at this point the lyrics provide a kind of subtext / meaning to the music.

Ok.. so back to the current project

There is this idea that.. well what would happen to the MTFS Revisited.. if you heard the project I’m working on now? Another words.. if you got the rest of the song of which that is a line from? How would it change the meaning of that track.. and for that matter, how might that track change the meaning of this track?

As I play around with this question.. I think “hmm, perhaps I should make a whole album based of this idea.” Which leads us into the question of lyrics in a slightly different way.

The Issue of the Vocal / Lyric Performance Spectrum

A little earlier I spoke about what it means to have lyrics realized by a software synthesizer with all the expressive powers of a speak and spell.. Those limitations have some implications on the meaning.. and my cut up project with it, along with all the processing.. is at least in part a compensation for those limitations..

Well.. there are other options that I.. alluded to in the recent post.. about how it would cost me a few grand to get the tools necessary to fully explore this spectrum.. which is why the full project may spend some time on the back burner.. but lets explore the tools anyway:

Tools

• Cantor: This is a real, full fledged “vocal synthesizer” which is to say its made to allow you to produce vocals via a synthesizer.. It’s even capable of going so far as to “sound realistic.” Imagine that….. Its selling for around $300 these days.. less for an older version.
• Antares AVOX: This is your basic “vocal tool box;” a set of tools made expressly for processing vocals.. you can do your gender bending.. you can change.. basically… well.. make it sound as if it were someone else singing.. Its some very cool and very powerful tools.. we’re talking $500.
• Audio Ease All In One Bundle: For our purposes we are talking about SpeakerPhone.. SpeakerPhone is a kind of.. lets call it a sound design tool.. which is primarily focused on emulating different types of speakers.. everything from telephones to.. well speak and spell esk devices.. to guitar cabinets.. and onward.. via the magic that is dynamic convolution technology… the full bundle, of which SpeakerPhone is a part.. runs in at a cool $1200.

Out side of the above mentioned gear… there’s things like “good quality microphones” and what not. I’m thinking both studio microphones and field microphones..

And um, what Exactly is all this about?

Strangely.. the way my current process is working.. the lyrics are rendered in a rather ambient form.. They are a strange element of an electronic sound art thing.. It’s hard to really explain this without hearing it.. The way the voice synth’s lines are both processed and then chopped up.. and sequenced.. make it so that the very act of.. “it” trying to speak a line.. is sorta fascinating to listen to.. To the point that.. we loose track of what’s actually being said.. It’s as if the vocals where some kind of “sound effect” or special thing sorta put there..

So.. this is an effect of how I’ve explored this crazy cut up ish process at this point.. the point is that.. you could very easily have “real singing” going on.. at the same time in a track.. without the two elements interfering with one another. I suppose to fully explain this we need to jump back to…

Ambiguity and the Cognative

In cutting stuff up.. one of the things I’m playing with is.. how do we process the words? We process the words differently then how we process pure sound.. how can cutting things up be expressive? What are the possibilities of working with lyrics in this way?

Methods of am-big-u-fying.

• Temporal orientation.. particularly spacing.. if we are speaking linearly. How long are the gaps between stuff?
• Temporal orientation.. order / sequencing: How things are placed in time relative to one another.. who we move through the slices..
• “The Mix:” In our virtual mix.. how front and center is an element.. how far away is it?

Latter: (lets get back to basic process already)

Performances, programing, and arranging

So far the process has a couple of steps.. Once you’ve loaded your REX file into Dr:REX.. you’re going to create little sequences out of it. This is your chance to “sculpt a vocal performance” in a rather glitch-ified way. The other sorta sequence I’ll make is a kind of rhythmic textural arrangement of the slices. I may, in the process, make variations of these….. I then arrange the sequences in relationship to one another on the time line…

So far, this is all I do.. I mean I do this for each clip.. till I get through all the clips.. I don’t even bother automating pitch bends, modulations, tuning, or whatever.. I do, however, listen to the stuff and think about what I might do in the next stage of things..

Next Steps

The next step is still something of an unknown to me… This is an exploratory adventure, and what I plan to do next is nothing more then ideas / presumptions.. Once we actually dig into it.. then we’ll really know.

The considerations

One of the problems I have is that the vocals happen inside a very limited frequency range.. and we really want to be careful about how other instrumentation will impact your ability to hear what’s being said. This kind of a thing is also an issue relative to the interest in the rhythmic textural arrangements.

The actual lyrics, and there meaning, is.. well its very deep.. and how the lyrics can presented / performed / arranged or executed, is going to effect how you take them in. Currently.. the way stuff is arranged is very much on the… well it makes it so we sorta experience one line at a time and loose the continuity of between the lines. So one assumes that we need variations in the performance and arrangement.. so that this way of making things more ambiguous will.. at some point in the production.. come into focus… so that the meanings of the lyrics have there proper impact.

To these ends.. I have a number of thoughts and ideas.. which is part of what makes it interesting to me. If, as I’ve suggested before.. the notion is to make a whole album out of these lyrics.. or that these lyrics would become the core of the album.. if we think of the album as one giant composition.. then it could be that we have different variations at different times over the course of the album.

This idea then.. could mean that the album is essentially a kind of instrumental album.. with ambient vocal textures.. to put it a certain way. This, as an idea, seems very interesting to me.. and makes sense, I think, as a possible first step in bringing lyrics to my music.

If you relate the idea of this.. to what I was getting to before.. about a “Vocal Lyric Spectrum,” its possible that you could have other elements that could provide “alternative organizing principles” for the album.. or that you could hear the album in different ways.. or from different perspectives. Not having all the tools I’d like.. a certain amount of this larger project is forced to be on the back burner.. at least for now..

so, back to the next steps

One of the interesting compositional challenges is the cut up issue of how we read the lyrics, so to speak.. I assume that one of the next steps is to start actually mixing the vocal performance. This will amount to putting effects on them.. and automating there arrangement in space.. It also might be altering parts pitches so that they work inside of an over all composition..

Hmm… I’m not even sure if this is my first post on the subject.. but a while ago I started talking about the project of bringing lyrics to my music. 

I’ve been writing lyrics, at least, since I was in high school.. but have never done too much to bring them into my music.. or at least never felt terribly successful about it. At the moment.. it seems the tools I need to properly bring lyrics to my work is in the neighborhood of a few grand.. depending on how you want to slice it.. no puns intended.

One solution came out of an issue of electronic musician monthly.. which involved using a free open source voice synthesizer.. so I used it.. threw into it some lyrics.. rendered out the audio files.. processed the hell out of them.. started playing with them in Ableton Live.. and eventually just sorta left it on the back burner for a while. But then last weekend I bought a copy of ReCycle.. and started playing with them inside of a ReCycle / Reason kind of context.. 

My first little go at this is talked about here and here. The first “here” having, at least for a short time, a bit of audio that shows this first experiment. In that project I was playing with one of the lines to the songs I wrote as of that much older post.. some of the renderings out of the processed voice synth.

This brings us to the issue of musical linguistic adventures. 

Musical Linguistic Adventures 

Sometime ago I read a book of… well lectures given by Leonard Bernstein at Harvard.. which was…. largely on the subject of linguistics in music. There’s a series of ideas.. I believe Noam Chomsky is the guy responsible.. about an organic basis of language.. that its hard wired in our brains.. You see this in.. the names of “mommy” or “daddy,” that there’s melodic parallels in the words across languages.. as well as for water.. and it seems that childhood taunt songs.. and all the rest of it.. are pretty universal.. And on some level.. when we hear music, we do hear it the same..  Here’s a bit of Bernstein from those lectures:

Ok, so how about we now venture forth into an interview with Noam Chomsky, talking about lingusitics?

Danger Will Robinson, this one could be getting long… 

I want to break in here and bring up a couple of things..

1. There’s been huge break throughs in brain imagining since the time of this interview.. so now many of these investigations are a lot more feasible… so such things are, no doubt, being explored now.
2. The nature of the nature versus nurture thing.. a modern understanding of the subject is that its not really nature versus nurture but nurture via nature.. which is to say that our genetic make up defines to what degree nurture influences our development.
3. This issue with Kant.. the limitations of language.. did you catch Bernstein sorta talking about music speaking the unspeakable? I’ll try and get more deeply into this latter as.. this is really the heart of what I want this entry to be getting to.. and has everything to do with my aims.. but.. well.. I wont say much more about it other then to try and hold this in your mind as we venture further into this interview:

Ok, a few things I want to get to here…

1. I could defend Freud psychoanalysis here.. but it’s a little too complicated.. in that it would take us away from our main thread.. of what’s already looking like a long blog entry.. I will, towards the end.. talk about this stuff in Jungian terms.. which will go along way in answering this.. however I will go so far as to say that in the history of psychology.. there’s a trend where in people are very good about talking about there own stuff.. and not so good in there criticism of others in the field.
2. My impression is that Heidegger does a pretty good job of dismantling the sorta metaphysical presumptions that are at the foundations of cognitive psychology. Heidegger’s interest in language, I think, makes him of special interest to this subject.. but.. we’ll skip on over that for now.
3. I think the Kant stuff is pretty central in Jung’s psychology.. in a certain way.

So I had a rough time finding part 5.. but here we go.. 

Ok… so now we’ve gone a bit deeper into Chomsky and linguistics.. and the larger implications..

So to curve back into music.. and a kind of linguistic basis of it.. what I’m trying to point out is.. language.. verbal language.. has a musicality… timber, pitch.. repetition.. all the principles of musical composition are present in verbal language.. and so there’s a connection here.. 

Ok.. so how about a fun little user generated video.. playing with the Bernstein lectures? 

Sorta highlights the musicality of language, doesn’t it?

Ok, onto the psychedelic:

Linguistics, Neuroscience, Jungian Psychology, and the Psychedelics

I think it makes sense to start out here with a little Tom Wolfe.. In part because he wrote the Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test, in part because his notion of “New Journalism” in part influences how I think about new media, and in part because he’s dealing with many of the subjects we are on in this entry… 

There are two other parts to this interview.. which we can’t embed here.. can be found on the National Review website here, and then here. For the full take on this stuff you really want to view these videos.. 

There are huge areas in which I disagree with Tom Wolfe.. as it relates to this topic, but for our purposes lets jump into something I can’t find any videos on… which is his views on psychedelics, which he borrows from modern brain research.

As nearly as I can tell.. the theory works something like this.. under the influence of psychedelic drugs.. the brain is unable to attribute causality in the usual way.. and having a nature of always trying to attribute causal connections.. starts making them where..  from an empirical point of view.. there are no such connections to be made…

Err.. let me put this in plainer english.. psychedelics causes you to attribute cause and effects relationships to things where there are no such relationships.. from a factual point of view. Going this far, I do not disagree.. but Wolfe goes so far as to say “this proves you don’t get enlightenment from psychedelics,” in the “ultimatereality” sense.. that this mythology has grown up around psychedelics is.. really attribute able to this principles.. and to the brain’s functioning working on a very slow kind of less functional sorta way, while under the influence of psychedelics.

Well everything we’ve been talking about thus far leads up to my argument as to why Tom Wolfe is wrong… to say nothing of some of the psychologies / schools of thought he’s regarding in such high esteem.

How Psychedelic enlightenment works

Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious could be, kinda sorta, boiled down to… “its an expression of instinct.” Religion is an expression of instinct.. its more complex then that.. but its good enough for now..  And let us not forget here.. that in talking about linguistics.. from Chomsky to Wolfe.. we are talking about mental faculties.. not blank slates.. We are.. in fact, talking about instincts, are we not? Instincts by another name?

All right.. so if we are attributing cause and effect relationships to things that do not factually have cause and effect relationships to them.. on what bases are we making them? Well.. on the basis of the structure of the faculty / instinct…..  We are moving from objective truth to subjective truth.. from object to subject.. from the external material world to the internal psychological world.. and so the truths we discover are true in a “psychological sense.” In essence.. what I’m arguing is that psychedelics bring about a “meta cognitive experience.”

So.. if mystical / religious / ultimate reality.. is an expression of instinct.. and a meta cognitive experience is one that’s essential an experience of cognition its self…  that it brings us into contact with “the experience of experience,” to put it a certain way..  and if we understand that.. subjective truth is a kind of truth.. and that we are now moving beyond the Kantian limitations.. well, now we are in the world of what Jung calls “the transcendent instinct.”

It speaking about.. that which is unnameable… that which is beyond our Kantian categories..  we are in fact talking about God.. for God, by definition, is a symbol of the mystery which holds up the world of the known.. it is the ultimate context of the world of the known.. which, as it turns out.. is the subject of both my most recent release.. and the music I’m working on now.

Aesthetic Implications

So in essence what we are saying.. if we complicate the attribution of causal relationships.. we will create something like a mystical experience? So with this.. lets move onto a short film.. that explores the concept of the cut up.. something we find in the work of William Burroughs.. where we see our linguistic faculties making these connections.. in the world of film grammar.. as well as on the literary level.

We of course see these kinds of ideas in dada and surrealism.. so how about a little film made with Marcel Duchamp.. Man Ray adding something here.. and of course a John Cage Score (what could be more perfect?)

How this relates on a process level to my work

On a kind of core foundational level to my thinking and process is this idea of aesthetic experience is a cognitive event.. having something to do with how we perceive and process experience. In earlier stages of my artistic and musical development my work was very often a kind of critique of this process.. It was very much dealing with the problems of Immanuel Kant and the transcendent.. and very similar, in someways, to what Chomsky is talking about..

In any event.. my work was in someway about this process.. and played with the process.. if we are now saying that mystical experience has something to with the challenges to cognition.. you can see how this could be central to my work.

Some of it is as simple as how you recognize patterns.. classic IQ test stuff, right? If you work in web usability you’ll no doubt recognize an early problem with game theory as a tool for understanding human behavior.. which is to say we don’t operate from a rational perspective so much as we muddle around with incomplete information..

What I say in relationship to patterns is that…  you have two distinct things going on “the pattern its self” and “the pattern recognition.” In any pattern, lets call them patterns of cause and effect.. there are infinite possible ways of understanding the pattern.. of seeing patterns in it: if you see a series of numbers, and are asked “what’s the next number going to be” your job is to understand organizing principles of the pattern before you.. and you will start out with the most simplistic possibilities.. going out to more complex ones.. what I’m saying is that.. in the deep end of complexity..  you have that infinite possibility, that we never see, because of how we approach the problem…. kind of how we are wired.

So.. if our process is impaired.. we are going to go into the deep end of that complexity.. or to put it another way.. that’s what mystical experience is…

Without digging much further into this stuff.. I would just say there’s a range in my work.. of simple to complex patterns.. to even chance and chaos.. and effort to make a continuity between the extremes.. I mean its interesting that if you look at serial atonalism… It can seem as if we need a mathematical PHD in order to appreciate the organization.. and somehow the results are very similar to that of John Cage.. who’s music is the product of chance.. 

Here’s a clip of Leonard Bernstein talking, among other things.. about the beauty of ambiguity in music.. where we see chromaticism (which is basically what serial atonalism is all about) inside of a diatonic framework… He talks about music theory which.. if you’re not already aquatinted with.. might likely be a little above your head.. but basically we are talking about organizational principles in music.. which has to do with harmony and counter point.. which is pitch relationships.. which have to do with the physics of sound.. and perhaps psycho acoustics fits in here somewhere as well.

Ok, now I wanted to dig in deeper into the process of what I’m doing right now in my sound work.. the project I’m on right now.. but it seems that the underlying theory and ideas.. have taken up all our space.. so I’ll have to get to that next time.. what I want to leave on is.. a little more on how this stuff relates to the philosophy of religion..

Philosophy of religion and other connections 

In the history of Christian theology there is this kind of.. well an idea that is perhaps not as well known as it should be.. which is to say the Bible is God’s second book… the creation his first. If we look at the philosophy of science at, around, perhaps before.. the American Civil war.. there is this idea that creation.. or the universe we live in.. is custom made to our minds.. sciences exploration of the universe is in fact an exploration of God.. There is also these ideas of natural and.. I want to say divine.. revelation.. The law we find Moses bringing down, the commandments, is said to be imprinted on the inside of our skin.. or to put it another way.. it is expressed in our biology.. which of course accords well with Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious… and these ideas of there being faculties, as Chomsky is saying.. that are built right into our biology. If we look to eastern philosophy and religion.. God is often thought of in a rather unipersonal sorta way.. God is a kind of personification of the forces of the universe.. and.. if we look at the various strands of Buddhism and Zen.. where the inward mystery of our beings is explored in great depth.. how we “really are,” which is something different then who we usually identify our selves with as.. is in fact… the universe.. as the mystic saying goes “I and the maker are one.”I wont go any deeper into this here..,.. but I hope you can see how this is interesting to contemplate in light of the ideas presented in this post. 

Well I’m still very much under the weather.. but wanted to blog something.. mainly just for the purposes of blogging something… but its hard when I’m feeling this weak. Blogging for me is often about focusing on something so tightly that eventually you have this kind of breakthrough moment.. where something interesting pops through.. or at least that’s how I’m conceptualizing it.. in practice it might be different from that but…

My head is full of madness as I right.. so much stuff flying around that I want to share.. stuff from podcamp, pre podcamp, even post podcamp.. seems I’ve been so busy meeting people, learning things, having random adventures..  just with little to no time to out put much of anything.

Ok.. lets focus Matt.. .how about..

Matt Gets a new iPhone?

This is my first cell phone.. first one I’ve owned..  never mind a smart phone….

If you’re a social media type.. having a smart phone of some sort is a real game changer.. or that’s what I’m learning… Just being able to email from where ever.. twitter from where ever.. always being connected.. it really changes your perception. And its brought my to think about life streaming again.

Life Streaming

Terminology is.. fuzzy.. but basically life streaming is like.. you’re living.. and the stream just goes on.. like having a web cam attached to your forehead as you ago about your daily living..  I’m not much of a consumer of this sorta media.. I sorta wonder why the hell I’d want to follow around someone’s forehead as they live there lives.. but, that’s not to say I don’t see amazing possibilities here.

Social Media / New Media.. you must understand.. in this world there’s a whole lot of stuff that’s like.. predefined boxes… “this is a podcast,” “this is a blog,” “this is a wikki,” these are known quantities..  but what’s real is not something that’s confined to a box.. boxes are conceptual frameworks that allow us to be lazy.. or perhaps efficient.. a method of cognitive compression, if you will.. or “optimization” as we say in the biz…

But you’d do well to hold your horses… because one of the most awesome things about social media / new media is that it is anything but a known quantity. If you seek to be a practitioner of any merit.. my advice to you is to look for the potential in the landscape.. where who you is, and where it is, somehow overlaps: go there, do that thing.

I used to dream of doing life streams when I was a little kid… No, seriously, I did!

A few latter:

Life streaming presents a number interesting aesthetic issues… by aesthetic I mean “philosophy of art.” Broadly I’d say you have the line between realism and formalism.. realism being that which brings us closest to.. shall we call it “empirical reality?” Formalism is.. something that is the opposite of that.. calling our attention to the medium its self.. it is a sorta different sorta reality that it brings us to.. perhaps a surreal reality? Surreal reality might be linked to subjective reality.. the object as a pose to the subject.. “real reality” is after all both subject and object.. both subjective and objective.. Life streaming gets rid of time compression.. and thus brings us closer to objective reality.. in interesting ways.

In my own work there is always a dialog between realism and formalism.. I generally prefer formalism.. the truths I want to express are often best expressed in what one might consider surreal manners..

In any event.. while all of this sorta philosophical mumbo jumbo has its place in a critical analysis of the matter.. and while I think we ought to be thinking of such things.. it’s a long way from this to the pragmatic analysis..

The Pragmatic Analysis

What is it that you want to do? I suppose what I’m looking at is the subject of “story telling.” Story telling.. in the live stream.. how does one go about that?

A few latter

The answer that floats through my mind is a complex one.. One that’s frankly too complex for this blog entry.. particularly given how sick and weak I’m feeling… and lets just face it.. its mostly presumptive stuff given that I haven’t actually spent too much time following any live streams.. never mind making them.

A few latter still 

But.. as this line goes.. one can start one’s thinking with what’s already been done / is out there.. or by sorta thinking about the possibilities.. and the structure of the medium.

In social media we have a range of communication formats that range from.. roughly speaking.. the synchronous to the asynchronous..  What are the implications of any point in that range?

Obvious stuff

 

•  Synchronous / live stuff.. it is difficult to have the same sorta production values as what you would have for stuff on the opposite extreme.. time / energy / money put in, per moment, of communications.. One can develop strategies for dealing with this sorta thing…. but.. 
• The more live / synchronous you go, the less control you generally have
• The more live / synchronous you go.. probably.. the more the context of what your doing is important. 

A few latter:

Some of these points strike my as somewhat dubious… at least from a serious philosophical perspective. Another thing to think about is that we are talking about “social media” which is to say it’s social.. or at the very least interactive… So the live stream is.. not really a one way affair..  necessarily. What this means is that an understanding of pscyho-social dynamics is helpful in approaching the medium..  The approach most of the successful folks in social media.. at least the ones I know.. seem to take is something like a game theory esk solution..  What game strategy would be most successful? If you’re dealing with a “merit based social hierarchy” which.. as it turns out.. is to say a “female social hierarchy” then.. status bares a relationship to your contribution to the collective..  

So the place to start is to ask your self “what has thou to contribute?” There is a sort of “invisible market place” which.. in a rather supply and demand esk way.. influences the value of various sorts of contributions.. What drives this market place is the various challenges folks are dealing with. (Chris Brogan has a recent interesting post on “content marketing” and the future of marketing, that supports this claim.)

An anarchical institutional theory of value? 

Each of us is a unique individual.. with unique qualities / virtues as well as vices.. what constitutes virtue or vice has to do with this ecosystem.. how the “crowds wisdom” defines you, so to speak. So.. for this reason.. I think it helps if you get in there and play.. before you really develop a serious hard lined sorta strategy.. or to put it another way.. always experiment with an eye open for magical possibilities.

Now listen.. I know this sounds a little creepy.. this notion that the crowd shalt define you.. for the artist’s in the audience, it’s a bit like Arthur Danto’s institutional theory of art.. accept not quite so exclusive.. For you who feel uncomfortable with this notion.. I understand.. and for you I ask you to hold on till such time that I can give this notion more attention.. at which point I’d imagine it would become a good deal less creepy.. for now I ask simply that you indulge me this one.

So there’s this kind of interrelationship between who you is, what the collective is, and this sorta dialectical relationship inside of which you evolve… and its somewhere in here that you build your personal brand..  

Next day sometime:

Well, hmm.. lets see.. so I guess what I’m saying is that there’s a certain sorta strategic subtext to the life stream..  That might not be the best way of putting it but.. Well I guess I should just post this and return to the subject latter.. seems like I never really got to anything too interesting here.

I figure I gotta post something.. I have a draft almost ready to go.. but It’s another one of those music gear things.. and my feeling is… I don’t want to have so many of those in a row.. and given that it’s a late hour, I’m not really sure what subject I can properly deal with.. in the amount of time I’ll have to give this, so….

Well, how about a little news in what’s up with me these days?

There’s a lot of tension beneath the surface.. but for the moment I’m putting that aside.. while I try and focus on some other things.. hopefully this won’t spell disaster.. how cryptic is that?

I want to do some more posts on the anxiety subject.. I’ve been thinking pretty deeply about this.. think I have some interesting things to say.. including some interesting things I would have liked to have put at the end of a recent entry.

I’m working on new podcasts episodes.. so expect that soon.

A couple latter:

I’m having this very difficult to fight urge to say something really smart. You ever get those? It’s like a knock it out of the park thing.

I want to.. .hmmm

Ok, some thoughts that have been germinating…

I’ve been thinking about making my blog a kind of work of art… a work of art in the sense that.. Ok, dig this.. usually I’m like “Mr. Smarty Pants,” right? Like.. if you’re a “real” expert in something I’m talking about.. you know how naked the emperor really is.. but barring that.. I’m just a real great con, ha? Ok, maybe that’s over stating it but.. .  well but that’s besides the point.. 

What I’m thinking of is like.. making my writing a kind of art.. which means.. What if my words transmuted into a painting? I mean.. Here we are wondering around these like.. hyper intellectual.. rational.. kinda deep.. thought path.. but what if that path suddenly vaporized.. and the going was like.. juxtapositions of paintings.. that the path had something to do with a poetic juxtaposition of…. well whatever it was?

There’s certain reasons this appeals to me.. For one.. In intellectual mode.. I’m often motivated by this need to express something.. to communicate a vision.. but I often have to go so far to get you there… has to be this long winding path.. … and even then.. the words are at best pointers to something.. and its very easy to get lost in the words, as a pose to the thing.

Another issue is that the intellectual shtick..  On some level I feel unaware of the implications of it.. but I think there might be this… If I’m hyper intellectual… you might look at me in a way that’s.. . well “thats not me” you say to your self.. “I can’t do that” and this somehow separates us…. it can get in the way of a sense of a shared humanity.. a sense that we share a commonality.. .  

A few latter:

I have this gear I go into.. It feels like some kind of hyper warp mode.. like some kind of mind meld with god… It’s as if… well, let me ask you this, where do your thoughts come from? It’s as if you followed the trail.. to the source.. and the closer you got the source, the more kinda powerful the thoughts were… something like that..

Latter:

God, I’m over tired.. I’d like to really go deep into this.. but basically.. every thought / psychological phenomenon.. everything.. comes from this source.. anxiety, as a for instance.. the thing is to learn how to relate to these things so they help, as a pose to hinder, you.. I’ll leave it at that for today.. 

or how about a video to leave on?

Ok, this is a somewhat long-ish story.. the story of Matt’s recent woes.. from anxiety, career, money, banks, and what not to.. well lets say stuff..  which will eventually lead us into my most recent trip to guitar center, the buying of the Liquid Mix 16, and then into the current music production project… 

It all started last Sunday. I was in a sleep deprived state, and as is my way, running late to the Boston Media Makers. The Boston Media Makers is now taking place at Doyle’s Cafe in JP.. (Boston).. so it’s new media plus breakfast…  and so I needed to go to the bank to get money to fill up my gas tank, buy an energy drink, smokes, and still have enough left over for breakfast.. and then things turned ugly! 

The bank tells me I put in the wrong pin number.. a few tries latter and the ATM won’t give me the time of day. WTF I think… but being sleep deprived.. in a somewhat LSD like consciousness.. made even more LSD-ish after watching a documentary on the Beats.. who knows, maybe I did get the pin wrong?

So long story short, got Gas, smokes, and my Monster on credit, breakfast on cash… but it was a stress feast combination of sleep deprivation, running late, and.. the ATM experience. All of which fueled a little extra anxiety over how I presented myself at the media makers..  but that’s another blog entry.

[Editor’s Note: This is a long, sometimes rambling entry.. so brace your self, you hardy souls whom might actually get through it.. also to note is a certain connection between this entry, and the recent social media cool-aid entry.] 

More problems:

1. I was actually planning on buying a computer monitor, at Micro Center in Boston, with cash after the meeting… It’s the closest “good” computer store I know… or at least see if they had the Dell I wanted, what there price was.. and that sorta thing.
2. The food supply in the house was running low.. so grocery shopping had to be done soon.
3. My dad had medication that needed to be picked up from the CVS

I should maybe break off from this and explain my anxiety paranoia at this point? When my mom died I was told, by a couple aunts, not to pay the credit card bills that were my mom’s bills. Someone had talked to a lawyer about this.. and something to do with Massachusetts state law.. trouble is, I never actually talked to a lawyer.. and am kind of vague about all this.

[Editors note: Matt wanted to insert this scene from the end of THX 1138, as it seems express of the psycho reality of his situation.

You’d perhaps have to see the full movie to really appreciate the significants of this clip.. and probably need to read the rest of the blog entry to, while you were at it.. but pay attention to a certain subtext of this blog entry.. its all sorta crystalized here..] 

In any event… there’s lots of credit card companies calling the house.. I have yet to talk to any of them as.. well until I get the iPhone.. I’m a very difficult person to get in touch with via the phone.

Now the LSD like consciousness of sleep deprivation does have… well you sometimes attribute causality to things that, in reality, don’t have a causal connection. These causal connections are truths of a kind of symbolic nature.. they have something to do what’s going on in you psyche.

So what’s going on in Matt’s psyche?

This is really a subject for another time, I mean to really dig into… I will tell you that since my mom passed things have not been real easy… and that most of the uneasiness of it is not something that expresses its self consciously.. It’s kind of a complicated thing.. and I feel like blogging about it might actually be helpful to me.. or at least talking about it.. but it’s somehow hard to talk about.

All these inward tension.. they expressed them selves in the paranoid dilution that.. well I think the bank might actually be one of the creditors… so the paranoid delusion.. was there was something more to my inability to get into the bank then.. some sorta pin number problem. And with this was the fear that I wouldn’t have access to money to pay bills.. so I shouldn’t write a check till I got to the bottom of this.

On top of all that.. another expression of anxiety is a procrastination of bill paying.. so the bills are.. now in the over due column.. and one expects one’s credit is getting dinged.

Crazy is as Crazy Does 

Ok.. so allow me to stop here and try and explain a little of this.. For one thing I’ve been behind on sleep for a little while now… for another I’m being a little operatic in how I’m talking about it.. which is to say I’m amplifying the story a little.. which is not quite to say I’m not crazy.. just that.. I’m turning up the gain of a certain sorta crazy.. or perhaps on the microscope through which we are looking at it… 

[editors note: Matt’s operatic-ness, at this point in the entry, is mainly expressed through with language like “paranoid delusions,” which sorta overstates things “a bit.” And what he’s talking about is the casual connections sleep deprivation is facilitating.] 

Matt’s Plot 

Ok, so lets pull back a little and take a look at my life’s plot, and where this moment fits in it all. I’m trying to do this “artist” shtick thing. I don’t know if you’ve heard the cliche about starving artists? Well.. I don’t believe that being an artist means you have to starve.. but the cliche is at least expressive of the fact that making a living as an artist is no easy feet.. more so when you’re as uncompromising as I am.

Though I march forward in a sorta heroic-ish way.. I don’t think anyone could walk this walk without there being a lot of really huge tension over what the future might bring.. It’s really that I’m crazy enough to not let that keep me from walking this way…  [Editors note: This would be part of the significance of the THX reference] but there is still that fear that it might all come to naught.. and that perhaps all my sacrifices are in vain..  and this is a very big tension.. particularly as it interacts in a larger ecology of tensions.

Now.. if you ask me about the “objective real reality” of the situation.. I’ll tell you.. things are probably “A-Ok.” Allow me to give you reasons why things are probably “A-Ok.”

1. I’m doing the social media shtick. Why would this make things A-Ok? Well.. I’m connected / networked in with a pretty substantial crowd of folks. If you’re reading this, you might be one of said substantial folks? There’s a humanness to.. many of these connections where.. to one degree or another, we really do care about each others well being.. and.. all of us are pretty well connected, one way or another.. and the long and the short of it is.. social media is a powerful tool for finding work.
2. It is not an infrequent thing that.. I get a job lead.. or some connection leads to something. Of course I don’t put a premium on following this stuff up.. because of how focused I am trying to be on trying to do my own thing.. but the point is there is stuff out there.
3. Very sweet and wonderful people have actually come out and asked me what they could do to help. Can you dig that? For me that’s down right mind blowing.. but its true.
4. What I’m doing.. in my own adventures.. has within it’s self the idea.. that I’m putting together a skill set for a job that does not yet exist. And believe it or not I’m actually networking with people who could us those services.. even if they don’t know it yet.

Latter:

There’s more to this story… lots more.. but for the purposes of this blog entry I only want to go so far as to say that tensions can obscure this reality.. so that it doesn’t feel like things are “A-Ok” in the big picture… even if they kinda sorta are. And we could talk about this more but…

Yeah.. so imagine the fear like.. you don’t know if you’re going to be able to take care of your father or your self, that the world could be crumbling down… This kind of stress inevitably leads me into pushing harder in my work.. and my self criticism gets much worse then it sometimes can be anyway.

None of this would have been a big deal if not for.. by that monday.. there was very little food in the house.. and if not for.. I had gotten to the bank that day prior to its closing.. I didn’t realize this.. but our bank likes to close at 4PM.. in order to get there I kinda have to fight my way through my tensions over it.. and so find myself there and.. the bank closed.. and I didn’t even know there hours! And so days passed with this hanging over my head.. all of it.

Add to all this that here I am gearing up on these music projects.. and I need to go out and buy more gear! I was also planning on getting an iPhone.. still needed to buy my Podcamp ticket.. I’m not sure what else.. and all of that was.. at least in my fears, looking like it might not work out.

And the dark clouds reseed.

Well finally I did get into the bank.. did make a with drawl so I have enough cash in my pocket to run for a few weeks.. somehow the pin number.. sorta fixed, accept it still wasn’t able to use it.. so maybe I’ve somehow miss remembered it.. anyway they are sending me the numbers so I’ll have them..

That dark cloud emphasized how fragile I can feel.. way out here in starving artist vill.. and it was a crazy rough week for me.. when the clouds finally did leave.. I finally decided that it was indeed time to make my trip to Guitar Center and pick up Liquid Mix 16. This was a long deliberation.. most of which is documented in this blog.. 

But wait, there’s more! 

I couldn’t find my car keys.. and not only that but I still had grocery shopping yet to do.. I had done a little after the with drawl…  but.. now without my keys, how could I do this? It wasn’t till sometime today when I finally found the keys.. and boy do I hate doing grocery shopping on the weekends, when the places are a crowded madness.. screw that!

So I made my way over to Guitar Center, finally. Was I really going to do it?

I wish I knew these guys names more.. I told the sales guy “I’m here for the Liquid Mix 16.” His eyes sorta widened.. “That’s a great little unit.” What? Every sales guy in the pro audio department didn’t even know what it was.. nor did they know much of anything of any of the mix engineer-ish tools I had been looking for.. but this guy new it.. and was thinking of getting one for him self.

I then rattled off a number of things I had been looking for..

Ok, let me explain. Guitar Center has a thing where you pay no interest for 3 months, 6 months, a year.. depending on what mood there marketing department is in.. what this means is you can buy stuff on credit without interest payments.. which is something you can’t easily do over the internet.. and credit card interests rates being what they are.. buying on credit will add a hell of a lot to your bill.. so going to Guitar Center for the big ticket items is what makes the most sense at this point..

So a number of pieces of gear.. gear that other sales folks had never even heard of.. stuff that you often can’t find on the Guitar Center website.. he could find in the computer.. stuff that the other sales folks didn’t think they carried.

So it was pretty awesome.. I mean he could actually answer some of my questions!

Onto the Liquid Mix 16

I had read where people had had problems with instillation.. particularly with Digital Performer.. and boy have I had software problems lately..  so I was a little nervous.. but the instillation was more or less as smooth as they come.. and before you knew it, I was up and running.

Liquid Mix is… well you get a library of 40 compressors and 20 EQs. I’ve explained this ad nauseam else where in this blog.. but basically you’re getting this library of the most high class EQs and Compressors on the planet.. each of which works in slightly different ways… is good for different sorts of applications.. colors sound differently.. etc. 

The first problem you run into is.. “which should I use?” To further complicate matters.. its sorta like a hockey video game where they can’t use the names of real NHL teams.. where they can’t give you the names of the real gear you’re using.. not that that would make too much of a difference as I don’t actually know the names of the real gear anyway.. but.. if you read interviews with various mix engineers.. telling you what they use for what.. or articles on these subjects..  you’d kind of like to know what you’re dealing with… Fortunately I found an old Sound On Sound review of Liquid Mix that included the names.

The light in my room is out.. so I couldn’t actually go digging through magazines to find that recent article on mix buss compression…  but upon doing the google.. I found this blog entry.. from of all people.. Charles Dye, which covered the subject.. and recommend an SSL compressor for my master buss. (Charles is quite the sophisticated fellow for this sorta thing).

And with that I jumped in

First, you must understand that I usually make crazy music like this (click on the little arrow to hear, and yes, it is a free download.. but it’ll stream for ya fine )

Matt Searles – Offering A Hand To The Ghost

This kind of electronic music has very different sorta mixing requirements from my new experimental electronic metal thing.. I mean.. now I have to try and be “a real” mix engineer. God save us!!! And I was fearful that.. well I hear a lot of stories of the struggles folks go through when they are first starting out..

But strangely.. I felt as if I had discovered that I had a real talent for this…  upon reflection

The Start of my Mix Engineering Training: “The JP Years.” 

After college I would hang out with.. the man we call “The Doctor” aka Diggity Dave.. and Ev-on, as he sometimes refers to him self in the comments of these blog entries.. Now.. these fine upstanding citizens..  well

1. They are artists to.. and were struggling to
2. There was more alcohol and Pot going on then…  lol, good times
3. Crazy adventures were the norm.. one could become quite a fine author with the material our of those times.
4. Diggity did indeed have a stereo system with the best speakers I had ever heard in my life.. at that point.

We’d throw CDs in there.. just to see what we had been missing all these years.. and I was forever analyzing the mixes. Mind you, at the time.. I wasn’t really all that sophisticated in my mix analytic abilities.. but it was surely something.. Dave and Evan’s music tastes had a whole lot of Hip Hop going on.. classic rock.. metal, electronic stuff..  even Curtis Mayfield.. quite the eclecticism.. and I with my Zappa and assorted strange stuff… and there was Jim whom would sometimes be there.. with his punk and indy rock.. and so.. though we were all rather poor.. we were wealthy in terms of the music we were all able to hear.. and it was quite an education.

I’d just listen to those records and dream of the day I could have a chance to put one together.. and could I ever make one as good as some of the stuff we were hearing? Oh my god, so much amazing stuff!!! Seems like these days I don’t get a chance to listen to too much.. but back then, oh wow!

The electronic music Mix training:  

Ok, how about another one of my tracks?

Matt Searles – Vasperian Blogocombat

The production in this track was a little rushed.. so there’s certainly things in there I’m not totally happy with.. but there’s also a lot in there that has me feeling very proud…. that I think is sorta amazing.. the marriage of the mix and the composition.. the experience.. the scenes.. the painting of it.. to put it a certain way.

When you listen to stuff like that.. you can kind of tell I’m really thinking about the mix… even if there are huge problems here and there.. and even the problems.. its sorta like a punk rock school of mixing or something.. where we kinda consider them in a different light.. or something.

So.. my music production is kinda all about the mix, on a certain level… but the mix isn’t static.. nothing stays still. In metal.. things stay still. The guitarist stays over there.. the bass player over there… no ones moving that drum set.. so my electronic music is all about a mix that has a virtual stage that is forever in flux. I regard it much more as being about “Mix Painting” then “Mix Engineering.”

Buckling down into Metal. My god, how am I going to handle this? I didn’t know.. but I knew investing in Liquid mix would be an important step along these lines.

First Impressions on the mix metal path

The first thing you realize is that what you’re really doing, as a mix engineer, is quite subtle. No wonder those guys seem so obsesses over so many little things that I don’t think I can even hear! Being subtle is the first thing you have to get used to… That you’re really thinking in terms of a lot of subtle colorations which, hopefully, eventually lead up to a whole that is more then the sum of the parts.. 

My recent obsession with effects has been one of… well a kind of obsession with with subtleties. 

Next morning (still not really awake):

The metal I have going on right now is.. incredible

The transition from my normal experimental production and composition style.. to a metal sorta song writing thing is a huge jump. In my electronic stuff there are no rules… there certainly isn’t anything like a traditional structure.. and In Metal.. I’m not sure how traditional my structures will turn out to be.. but at least from a starting point sorta perception of things.. I need to figure out how to make my music work inside of the limitations of a popular music format.

The funny thing is.. I’m kind of an amazing heavy metal guitarist from certain perspectives. As a guitarist I’ve never been too terribly big on playing other people’s music.. I’ve maybe learned 3 such songs in my life.. but I’ve certainly learned a lot of riffs.. and what not…   The point is that my guitar playing has really always centered around.. being more interested in making original music then replicating other folks stuff. 

I would say, generally speaking.. my style draws heavily from the riffs of Black Sabbath.. and a kinda speed-e metal of Metallica and Megadeth… and from there comes an original vision. That vision is largely about a strange interpretation of music theory… and a strange kind of aesthetic vision.

For me, a lot of what you of what you see, in say a John Coultrane.. is like.. just natural and obvious? Let me share with you two videos.. one with Coultrane playing, another with a critic talking about it.

In a certain sorta way you could kinda imagine critics talking about my work this way.. hope that doesn’t sound arrogant but..  

Now I’m not sure if Ben Ratliff totally gets it. See… composition is about “organization” of sound, and the framework for how we organize sound.. is the same sorta thing for how we organize facts into a conception of reality… and that’s sorta the implication of what Coltrane is doing… Thus a critics application of the terms of American Transcendentalism is… not really all that far fetched. [Editors note: The second critic quoted.. his “conversion story” has some relation to the earlier THX clip]

So if I tell you that I have a hard time thinking inside of conventual structure, that’s sorta what’s interesting in my work.. So here I am embarking on an adventure to.. think in conventional structure? I’m not totally sure about this, I think maybe its like.. that’s just the starting point.

So I’m obsessing on song writing.. thinking about song writing, or thinking about music making from a “song writers” perspective…..  

It’s so hard to know how to bring you in on this.

In a traditional structure there are lots of possibilities. (sub structural interest?)

Lets say you have a chord progression going on..  Now really, that chord progression could be anything.. but what we usually here is sorta limited… I mean were used to a fairly limited number of chord progressions. Once you have your chords progression, there is the question of how it gets voiced by the individual instruments… What’s guitar 1 play, what’s guitar 2 play, what’s the bass playing… Even if what we have going on is a simple riff… that riff can be interpreted different ways.. you could have two guitarists harmonizing the riff… or playing different parts of the chord.. and perhaps they don’t play it the same way twice.. 

Then you have the matter of how each instrument “interprets” the other instruments.. I mean screw the preconceived chord structure!  This where we are in some ways echoing Coultrane.. or Jazz..  This is especially doable in a metal context because… the guitars are generally not playing the 3rds.. So how is the vocal line to relate to the guitars?

Then you have.. well you have things like how one riff relates to the next… how the riffs are moving around.. In the particulars of how I’m working.. the consideration is generally.. where’s one riff starting and ending.. what’s the chord there.. and then if you look at that riff over all.. where is it hanging out most.. and how do these characteristics relate to the riff that came before? There’s also issues of how the energy works in a given riff.. contrasts in energy.. and a number of other things.

So all of this is kind of how I think about music generally.. when making it, but it’s different in that.. It’s like going from free verse poetry to poetry with a structure. What’s interesting about being forced to work inside a structure is.. you find your self spending more time refining things… as I write vocal lines I’m like “oh, no really, what’s the right word to put here?” 

There also is structural anarchy going on.. which in a certain way you could call the linguistic framework of the music. Or the anarchical aspects create the linguistic interest…

My Goal

My goal is to make something that is.. as good as anything I’ve ever heard before, at least. Good in the sense of.. how developed the details are, in the sense of the refinements of the song writing.. the composition… the mix. Beneath all of this there is the essential idea of what it is I’m doing.. the core of it.. and that… that I think is amazing.. and that’s one of the first things that hits me…. that’s one thing that is already in it.

I think it must be the anarchy speaking.. It must be my difficulty fitting in, in a certain way.. it must be how strange I am.. that that strangeness has been allowed to evolve for so long.. to have its own depths, its own maturity.. that it managed to escape the forces of socialization.. that we are seeing a kind of new animal before us.. one that lives within us all.. and it is like a call to becoming… a voice we have often heard before.. but perhaps did not have the courage to follow.

Creating the Mix and the Song at the same time:

The process is an experimental one.. one where the composition it’s self, at a certain point, is made to fit the mix, just as the mix is made to fit the music…. and the mix even is the music. So again.. I’m drawing from my experimental electronic music.

A we bit latter:

So let me wrap this up

For starters I’d say that I think this new direction in my music.. will correct certain problems I have with my work.. I’ll leave this at that.

Now I want to talk about Anxiety.

A little while ago I did a post entitled Death by Anxiety. It was a kind of strange post. It was strange in that it painted a picture of myself that was.. raw and naked and.. well what it was. After making that post, and the feedback I got on it.. I started to think of my self in different terms then I normally do. The people in the videos suffered from very bad anxiety.. and I both identified with them, and began to see the roll of anxiety in my life in a way that threatened my self concept. This then lead into a wrestling with the subject.. and it reached it’s worst point when I ran into my ATM trouble.

One of the things you run into thinking, or I did, was.. is anxiety an organic problem? Some sorta genetically inherited issue.. was it a mistake to blame my mom for it? Perhaps heavy metal is nothing but a kind of expression of anxiety? Or I mean about anxiety? What is anxiety?

Well you know I’m kind of a philosopher of the mind… and in my LSD like sleep deprived consciousness… I began to explore my mind in relationship to anxiety. Indeed the anxiety threatened to capsize me!

One of the things I notices was that anxiety seemed to be a “normal psychology” that relates to reality in “interesting ways.” Anxiety seemed to be a situation where the unconscious mind is participating in our organization of the details of life, of reality, and painting a picture for us. Reality is ALWAY this… as we experience it.. detached objectivity, though it is a modern ideal, is an illusion. Reality is ONLY experienced through the lens of consciousness. And so it is that anxiety is an adventure into our own depths.. with our depths expressing its self on the world around us, or through our experience of the world around us.

This is obvious enough stuff.. to any student of depth psychology… medication treatment is never about fundamentally changing the matter, its about living with it..  where as the natural way of the psyche is one of changing the matter. Indeed, it would seem that anxiety is actually a kind of advanced process of self evolution. We are confronted with the question of how do we relate to our own depths.. as this is projected in front of us. Our living in the world becomes about a psychological process / evolution.

I have a long held belief, a kind of presumption, that one’s psychological reality is always as it is for a reason. The existence of a psychological phenomenon is there to serve us, if we can just find the proper relationship to it.

As I stated earlier in this entry… there are things In my life that I’m having a hard time dealing with… It’s hard enough that I’m really only able to deal with so much of it at a time.. in a kind of direct experience. When the pressure of it builds up to a certain point.. it forces a confrontation. It can ether do this via a sorta psychological confrontation, or via reality.. by which I mean that the unfolding events of one’s life are direct manifestations of the inward realities, versus a projection onto our understanding of reality.. we are, after all, talking about the first stage here.

When I talk about composition as being about organizing factors that have a relationship to how we organize our understanding of reality.. and when I say my music is prophetic in the sense that I’m developing new organizational methods.. more advanced, I think, then what has come before.. my music, on a compositional level, is a way of dealing with all of this.

This is really deep and profound stuff.. 

Latter:

THX 1138 Revisted

THX 1138 is a dystopia… its is a kind of prophetic vision of our modern situation.. A few points

1. The power relationships relative to mental health, define what is a normal or not normal… and of course proscribe medication.. treatment that, as mentioned above.. is more about coping that dealing with the underlying problems. In THX it is law that we take medication, and when we stop taking it.. we become anxious
2. Consumption is the enforced behavioral norm in THX.. again leading to the behavior control.. the sense that everything is “A-Ok.” We see this in normative modes of being.. in our modern situation.

It’s really all about the power to define a thing. We are now used to –

Next day

I’m thinking this entry is long enough, and I ought to cut it short.. what I want to suggest is that there are connections between social control, anxiety, human potential, the structure of the psyche, collective evolution, and um.. so the symbolic significance of what I’m trying to do… has to do with how I’m relating to this complex of factors, and how my work does..  and we’ll leave this at this for now.

[Editor’s note: It turns out that “The Dr”. Has been hanging out with Carl Sullivan.. somewhere in rock port.. and via a secret under ground army (yes some people in the government know about this, but you know how conspiracy’s go) message got back to Matt, and it was Matt’s Job to publish this report… This accounts for the madness of it all ] 

First a video  

Ok, did you happen to catch that? I mean the symbolic significance, it didn’t get past you did it? Yes indeed-e, the fellow for whom the term “cool-aid” comes from.. more or less… he would seem to be… *gasp* making some sorta social media thing. I mean is he not talking about social media? Danger will Robenson.. how could this be?

Ok… Ok… Ok, dig it.. I’m not a bid Dead head, or anything like that.. and I’m not someone who ever made a life style out of LSD… so don’t chew be thinking I’m coming at you from quite that angle! Lets curve, and swerve.. around a bit.. so I can speak to you about what it tis… 

Yes, Beware that Cool-Aid! 

Well.. it’s not that there’s anything wrong with cool-aid per-say.. the question has more to do with from where the cool-aid came.. something to do with the brewing.. a kind of DNA like imprinting…I’m now given to calling myself a social media philosopher.. that seems like the best kind of language.. at least of what I’ve found thus far, to talking about where I is a come-in from..

Err.. perhaps I should shift my manner of speaking.. so that my tonality might not confuse.. the some..I have developed a systematic, you might say schematic, of the underlying dynamics which influence the evolution of social media. That’s probably not saying quite strong enough.. We aren’t talking about influence, we are talking about “is.” Another words.. I’ve cracked the code.

As near as I can tell.. nobody’s cracked the code yet.. but much like Darwin, I’m not actually talking about it too much.

[Editors note: The Dr.” is getting a little esoteric on your but-ox, Darwin worked out his theory of Evolution long before he actually published it.. he just sorta sat on it for years.] 

[Note to self: Thy readers proll-e think I’m nuts now.] 

Ok.. lets scoot-a-dew on over to some of this here top secret schematical stuff..  

[Note to self: I should probably make people buy ticks before I show them into my top secret Hanger 18 type laboratory.. well as long as the don’t spot my top secret world domination plot, I’m sure I’ll be ok]

Um.. so what I’m trying to get at is.. the DNA… hmm… did I mention information was a virus?   

Take it Away Laurie

So language.. that’s a way of encoding information, isn’t it? So is it language or information that’s the true virus? Language.. at best can point to the truth.. its always somehow removed from the actual reality.. can only take you part way there.. This would be a kind of Kantian thang.. 

So.. When I’m talking about cool-aid, I’m not actually talking about reality it’s self.. I’m talking about something to do with something that can influence our understanding of reality. The reality, in my view.. and the cool aid.. there’s some overlapping truth..  here…

[Editor’s note: Word in the underground was there was some king a crazy banging going on in that there cell block.. just after we lost the transmission, so you’re going to have to make of this what you will.] 

[editors note: This was written a few days ago.. Matt sorta touches on some of what he’s explore for his new “super duper” heavy metal.. which is a kind of crazy combination of heavy metal and electronic music.. the electronic music element being mainly about music production techniques rather then genera.. mostly all this as it relates to guitar playing, and aesthetics more generally] 

I just got in, a little while ago, from Guitar Center. I went there to pick up picks, found it was a big sale day.. so I bought a audio cable to. I also came dangerously close to buying an electronic drum kit.

On Electronic Drums. 

Super duper long term readers will no doubt know.. that I’ve been thinking about buying an electronic drum kit for about 3 or 4 years. The reasons are as follows:

1. They are generally cheaper then acoustic kits
2. They produce MIDI, I can sequence them into my electronic music’s work flow
3. Electronic drum kits are probably pretty good for heavy metal production styles
4. They don’t make to much noise, so neighbors won’t hate me
5. It would allow me to create a situation where folks could come over and jam
6. learning to “think like a drummer” is pretty important for what I’m doing
7. Hey, it’s a pretty cool thing
8. Did I mention I have a fairly substantial drum sample library? Battery, Kontakt, Reason, Ableton Live.. all come with such things.. plus the LMR4 from Steinberg.. and the Waldorf Attack drum synth..

So.. Guitar Center had $100 off a super cheap-o electronic drum kit. The sales guy was actually someone I felt pretty good about.. asked questions.. and it came around to the feeling that I would need to buy a special double bass piece to go with the kit.. and the whole think would be… oh, around $700. This would be a little more then what I’d planned to spend, should I get a kit.. but maybe it would be worth it? 

I had him go searching for the kit.. the box.. and it was found that there were no boxes in the store, the only option was the display unit, and I just wasn’t willing to buy the display unit without further discount so…  I returned home without the drum kit, and feeling a little relieved that I hadn’t parted with the money.

Onto the Guitar Madness

It’s been a while since I picked up my guitar.. or at least it feels like that. I still don’t have Melodyne working in DP.. accept that it will load up inside of Kore, so I figured that was good enough for government work in the Bush administration.. so decided to pull out the guitar.. which of course is why I went to Guitar Center in the first place. 

It was time to restring my guitar… which I haven’t done in.. well probably a couple of years! So it’s interesting to hear what my guitar is supposed to sound like.. 

So I started to monkey around with Guitar Rig 3.. which I still haven’t done all that much with… just to kind of see what I had.. 

What blew my mind was.. even though I’m rusty as hell.. my hands are super duper uber fast. Yes boys and girls, I was meant to be a metal god!

On the negative side, though I wasn’t playing with melodyne as I was playing around, it was clear that my metal guitar playing isn’t really monophonic… which means those non-monophonic parts might not translate to terribly well. It was striking me to take notice of just how much of my guitar playing wasn’t monophonically orientated.

Ok.. so here’s the deal.. Monophonic basically means playing one note at a time. Metal is generally ether one note at a time or a “power chord.” A power chord is as good as monophonic… your two or 3 note move together.. and generally speaking the intervals stay the same wether it’s minor or major as there’s no 3rd in a power chord.. it’s just route 5th…  The 3rd, of course, is the note that tells you if a chord is major or minor.

Here’s the think about my playing..  It’s all about blurring the root, 3rd, or 5th..  This is done in such a way so as the make my playing “extra dark.” My playing is perhaps “slightly darker then Black Sabbath.” In any event.. these moments of blurring are often polyphonic moments… and this blurring of the root, 3rd, and 5th is pretty much a corner stone of my style.

I spent a little time going over the usual suspect sorta riffs.. riffs I have lying around that I haven’t really gotten around to using for anything yet. When you figure there’s very little guitar playing in my music generally… these are most of the riffs I’ve come up with over the last.. 15 or so years. 

So, early reflections on what I could mainly do?

I think its time to really think about song writing on the guitar: This is actually a lot of work. Though in recent posts I have characterized my notion of working with guitar and this sorta software as allowing me to be a more lazy guitar player.. the process of actually writing the music.. if you do it organically, without relying on the computer for at least your main riffs.. its still a lot of work.

Hours latter:

Well I’m going to interrupt the train of thought…

Guitar Rig 3’s Possibilities

I’ve been spending a lot of time playing around with Guitar Rig 3.. which is an interesting program. Guitar Rig models various amps, and effects, and what not.. It’s basically “everything you need for your guitar,” and bass guitar to for that matter. You can just go line in to your computer… and you’re good to go. Some will argue there are better ways to go, but it suits me well enough.

What makes it interesting, however.. or interesting to me today.. is that as of version 2 Guitar Rig has had elements of synthesizer architectures built into it. This amounts to various “modulation devices.” A “modulation device” is something that “modulates” “something.” Modulating something means that it controls that something… which will make more sense once I explain the modulation devices…

You have various modulation devices.. A basic one is an “LFO,” or low frequency oscillator. You could think of the second hand on a clock as an LFO, it’s frequency of oscillation is one cycle per minute. When the second hand is at 12, it could be generating a number like.. say 100, and when its at 6 o’clock.. lets say that’s zero.. as the second hand moves… the the number changes.. So, if you used your second hand to modulation a distortion effect.. when the second hand is at the 12 it’s really distorted, and when it gets to 6, its clean.. no distortion.

Now.. and I’m not even sure off the top of my head if Guitar Rig does this.. but you can have different “wave forms” of oscillators.. one way to conceptualize this is imagine of instead of a clock being a circle.. it was a triangle.. so the the numbers coming out of our clock don’t change evenly with respect to time.. sometimes it goes faster, sometimes slower.. repeating this in a constant pattern at a constant rate. Do you follow this? Well it doesn’t really matter… I just want to give you a basic idea of this.

Now there are other types of modulators.. modulators that respond to how hard you hit your strings.. or respond in relationship from when you hit the note.. or any number of other things.. and all modulators can be used to control anything in Guitar Rig 3.

So why is this interesting? 

I’m not totally new to mucking around with these modulators, or Guitar Rig for that matter. What is new is the notion that my guitar parts, the audio of them, can be sequences, as can the over all mix, as can the parameters of Guitar Rig… and now even the audio being fed into Guitar Rig. This is a situation where the whole is more then the sum of the parts… 

What I’m looking at now is the possibility that I could be making electronic music that doesn’t sound like electronic music.. I’m looking at electronic music that sounds like.. a real guitar player. I am, of course, a real guitar player.. but the situation, at least as far as I can tell, is I’m entering a situation where the only real limitations are my imagination.

I don’t know where I’m going, this is all an exploration of the unknown… I’m sure there’s lots of bands out there who are benefiting from these kinds of tools.. but I’ll bet not too much of them are using these kinds of technologies in a way that’s about exploring new possibilities.. it’s more about managing costs of production in a market place where the funds band have for working in the studio are drying up thanks to the implications of P2P, among other things. It’s about creating an idealized version of what bands have been doing forever.

I don’t believe in the idealized visions.. Ideals.. they are so often about “removing imperfections” as if the imperfections where not perfect. All things are perfect in there own way, the question of perfection is more, at least in my introverted prejudice’s point of view, more about relationships of things then things onto them selves… or its an ecology between these things. 

What I’m interested in doing is like turning heavy metal into a fine art.. It’s a heavy metal that doesn’t live inside the old heavy metal box… This isn’t really some sort of elitism, and I don’t believe it carries the same sorta baggage that prog rock did..  It’s more like every piece of the puzzle gets more attention then it traditionally would.. and by doing this we can transcend the old forms.

For a long time I’ve been thinking about cliches.. The funny thing about cliches is that they carry inside them certain truths, certain meanings.. that somehow, the one who’s employing the cliche, has lost touch with. In any form of art, what you need to do is push beyond the preconceived notions everyone has.. or that’s what you need to do if you’re going to do anything worth while. You can do this via a cliche as long as you’re doing something with the cliche that’s worth while.

 

 

I’m in a crazy sleep deprived state, mind full of beats.. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burrough’s beats… Passions and revolts drive madly through me.. I thought of a part to a poem earlier.. when I was less sleep deprived deranged… I wonder if I could remember it.

 

God is not man made

Not even  man is man made

perhaps this is why he is so miserable

in his modern world 

 

So what do you think? It’s just a fragment of something. There was other stuff I was thinking of putting with it, but those memories have faded.

I wonder what you could do with those words, can you imagine? You could have those lines repeating over and over again… drenched in effects; an ambient timber.. some sound painting.

Perhaps its just a fragment, just a couple riffs looking for more riffs, to be come a whole.

Perhaps these are words that should be surrounding by still silence.. little movement.

Perhaps these words are no good at all. 

My mind has gone off in so many tangents in this state… I’ve had so many dreams to write about.. reflections, attempts at self awareness… feeling like a moth who bangs his head upon the glass in search for the flame… Even if I and the fire are one.