Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Good Day Sunshine
“There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine; new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we’ve discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give to those who listen the essence, the best of what we are. But to do that at each stage, we have to keep on cleaning the mirror.”
- John Coltrane
This here is a blog about music, art, and their function in culture.
I’m very interested in music and art – partially for their own sake, but also because they communicate ideas. Some of these ideas are powerful, and many of them have more implications than we tend to consider. One thing I’m really interested in right now is information that is hidden in art – what Slavoj Žižek calls “things we don’t know we know.”
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This here blog is about instruments, traditions, and dealing with the race to instrumental mastery in a time when it seems to matter less than ever.
I’ve been a music school dropout for almost a year now. I spent two years at Berklee College of Music, decided tonalism wasn’t quite for me, and came back to Oakland to play improvised and textural music – mostly sans-notes. (Let’s be honest, notes were OK a hundred years ago, but seriously, are you gonna stand there and tell me the world still sounds like that?) The musicians I care about are mostly people that play abstract scratching sounds, refrigerator noise, duck calls, sine waves.
Or, that’s what I tell myself!
Somewhere along the line, I’ve found myself:
- studying koto
- forming a pop band
- listening mostly to shoegaze and IDM while I’m at work
Damn that’s hella notes. On some level, I must be interested in this stuff.
But I mean, notes are so… manipulative and… icky.
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This here blog is about synthesis of ideas. Connecting dots and fitting things together in interesting and compelling ways. Not necessarily drawing conclusions, but making observations and asking questions.
This is a blog about how freaking complex and multi-faceted a lot of things are. It is a celebration of that complexity.