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 Now online (1)Hyperflake ...and 160 guests Last 5 registered Oplandisks nothingstar N_loop yipe foxtrotromeo Browse members... |
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My life has always been a pursuit of meaning centered on a mystery which rides the horizon like a setting sun. As I have followed this luminous beacon I have traveled strange and wonderful territory, seeing the shapes and patterns of meaning lit up out of hiding from previously unexplored lands. Through all this change and evolution of meaning, one figure whose form has not changed but whose meaning grows in direct proportion to the rest of my perceived reality is that of music. Music on all levels—it’s rhythm, harmonies, melodies, tempo, lyrics, feelings. These things run a continuous gamut of correlated meaning when compared to our lives, culture, planet, and their bodies. The tempo of music is like our heartbeat and brainwaves, which, while consistent in function, modulate faster and slower, vibrato effect cascading an allocation of meaning and cycle to our more complicated nervous functions. The tempo is the base frequency of the meaningful division of time music can relate to us. Bass tones begin directly above this, their frequency audible at 20 hz, and while they can be detected by the body at lower speeds, known as sub-bass. Higher tones add to the harmony at frequencies above this, stretching through the range of human hearing that is centered on speech (around 400-800 hz). |
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Cheers professor |
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When one person speaks to another, they use a wide scope of nervous function to relate their message, related to all these divisions of frequency (which relate to the hierarchy of our brains) mentioned thus-far—a tempo of starts and stops, rhythm cadence in their delivery, their tone of voice, their face and body language, and more, come together to transmit meaningful information. On top of all these blended signals is one of further meaningful articulation—the frequency bands of thus, esses, kuh’s, etc, ( 7000 hz, 11000 hz etc). The combination of these things is what we know as a song with lyrics. If you follow the pattern up, the abstract meaning of words and their interplay become elemental in character. Music is harmony of all of these things. Harmony is due to coincidence of ‘hits’, or cycles, the message of which grows more meaningful with expansion, repetition, permutation of patterns, and self-reference. We perceive and enjoy frequencies whose coincidence is additive. Divisions of time by 2,3,5,7,etc become more strenuous on our capacity to distinguish difference the more complicated they become. In this sense of ‘complicated’, the ratio of 2 and 4 is about as complicated as 5 and 10. We enjoy music which resonates. |
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Harmony is due to coincidence of ‘hits’, or cycles, the message of which grows more meaningful with expansion, repetition, permutation of patterns, and self-reference. We perceive and enjoy frequencies whose coincidence is additive. Divisions of time by 2,3,5,7,etc become more strenuous on our capacity to distinguish difference the more complicated they become. In this sense of ‘complicated’, the ratio of 2 and 4 is about as complicated as 5 and 10. We enjoy music which resonates. I began playing the drums fifteen years ago when I was 10. I was in school bands and took a theory class from Leonard Duarte, a composer/teacher in Northern California. I forsook physical dedication to drumming for composing music with the assistance of computers, partially at 14, and more entirely a year or so later. I spent thousands of hours writing music with the contribution of electronic playback and metronome, thousands of dollars on software and gear. I would write synthesize and sample sounds, arrange them, and write them to CDs for my friends. I would play music with other people, live, only occasionally. I had difficulty playing exactly what I wanted to hear which seemed to be alleviated when I sequenced music with a computer. Using solely a machine to generate music has great disadvantages as well—your tempo and note placement is at much more finite resolution, loops can distract a composer from how the music will sound to someone who did not write it, and well—it often sounds very inorganic. |
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Oh shit, there's more, oops. |
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I had a lot of trouble with drugs from 13 til around 24, and managed to get dangerously close to the edge of the abyss. I frequently broke, lost, or pawned my gear or laptop. It became less convenient to make music as my material inventory degenerated. I spent less and less time writing music, and was not in a good place as a result. I was in Venice Beach, CA, where I met Dizz Sticks and Geronimo, two bucket drummers who played on the Promenade and Boardwalk. They were using buckets and found objects to play beats. I was captivated immediately, and began emulating shortly thereafter. I returned to Chico, CA, where I was born and raised and collected buckets—anything I could find. I used waste cans, buckets, and other items to play simple breakbeats. That was all I could really handle when I started—a few simple beats. People were supportive of this, tossed me change and encouraged me. I couldn’t count on it as income but it was highly addictive. When I drum I have access to a new understanding and mindset. My body and mind and soul are harmonized with everything else and I experience a holistic oneness. Not constantly, but whenever the music or situation pulls me there. Playing music live opened up new worlds for me. |
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even if you are an hobo your text is real uneasy to read man |
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I have been collecting trash and drumming on it for five years now. I just returned to Chico from a two year stretch in Seattle where I managed to resolve to non-existence my drug dependencies and drum on the street as much as 8 hours a day. I would find buckets and bottles all around downtown, capitol hill and other neighborhoods and play them on the street and at sporting events. When I first played there I met Emmet, a man who showed me how to place bottles in a milk crate for plinky tones. I showed him how I put a broiler pan underneath a square bucket for a solid snare sound. My typical set up now includes a low-pitch bucket with a can or other item underneath it, which I can raise up or down to alter a harmonic relationship between the two(my ‘bass’ drum), a bucket with a metal snare contraption, a crate with 4-10 bottles stuck in it atop a bucket, and a variety of tilted buckets with either side up. The key to arranging all of this ‘junk’ into meaningful music is doing it with consideration to harmony. The buckets and bottles all have their own frequency, and the more closely I can relate them all the more exciting the music becomes. I have learned in my experimentation with many many bottles (bottles often contain many tones, whose value can be enriched by the bottles used with them—often times replacing one bottle in a set of six will drastically alter the nature of their harmony). |
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but still keep up the hope son |
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Objects have sometimes magical harmonic properties. When good objects are combined, their relations to each other as well as to me dictate the tempos, rhythms that I will play. To decipher these hidden properties, all one has to do is practice. Once your mind has the kinetic melody in place to continue a rhythm [I started by simply alternating my hands and hitting over a 16-hit sequence: BRRRSRRRRRBRSRRR (bass, rim, snare)] the objects, and your environment will guide the rest of your development—you need only practice. The musician becomes a producer of unification, entrainment, between people and the material around them. For these reasons, playing music live in front of human beings who dance and respond is infinitely more rewarding than simply playing back music that was sequenced a priori. Music binds us together as well as the people who engage in it’s creation can be bound. When people come together and share a musical experience they experience a peak of the wonder that many of us live for. I have seen thousands of people in one place, entrained in a kind of mass union that made me ecstatic beyond the capacity of any drugs potential. Most successful artists sell their music to people en masse who have experienced it first hand, or through a chain of people whose emotional translation carried that implications of that amazing experience to someone desiring that connection. |
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It is for this reason that a musician or artist intending to be meaningful try to attune themselves to the values and emotional associations of their culture. Five years after I began doing this I am a much more qualified musician. I make considerably more per hour doing this in appropriate situations than I have ever made working for anyone. Performing music can be meditation and ritual whose benefits far surpass the dogmas of less liberating doctrines. We are at the threshold of an age of new understanding of the conscious experience, and communication is the way over that lip. All this complexity locked buckets and bottles, through proper manipulation revealed, hints at a great power in even the most seemingly mundane, like the explosive power of one split atom. The sun never sets on new ways of meaningfully understanding the world around us. |
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---- Also, I am furiously constipated. Sorry that it's hard for you to read it. I have read a lot of seriously dense writing lately (neuropsychology like Luria,) and it's complicated my expression. |
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