OK, so I’ve been super busy with the bathroom lately and haven’t had much time to post anything. So, until I’m done, I will leave you with some music that my friend Brian and I wrote while I was living in L.A. Hope you enjoy.
I’ve had a busy couple of days, but things have finally calmed down a bit and I’m looking forward to having more time for music and hanging out. The Decible festival was fun, although I only managed to make it for the night I was working. That also happened to be during the one workshop that I really wanted to catch (on Abelton Live). Next year I’ll plan that out a little better. Things went relatively smoothly though and only one of the bands behaved like divas, which is better than some other events I’ve been involved with. I got to hang out with Static from Berlin, who was a really interesting guy, and I really liked his music. Half of the reason to get involved with music events for me is that you usually get to meet some really great musicians and pick their brains a bit.
On another note, the rainy season has started, and I’m very much looking forward to squirilling away for the winter. My summer has been fun and full of projects, events, social engagments and such, but I’m ready to hibernate for a while. I want to shrink the number of projects I have going on so that I can better concentrate on the ones I’ve got and really sink my teeth in. One of the things I love about Seattle is the ebb and flow of the seasons and how it sort of nudges you into modes of being. During the summer, the sun is out and it’s time to play. When winter hits, it’s raining fairly constantly, so the best option for me is usually to stay at home and hunker down in my studio. It’s like forced creativity or something.
When I was a kid, my parents put me into piano lessons, which I took pretty much up until I went off to college. When I was really little, I remember thinking that each note was somehow good or evil. Their moral standing was not a static thing either. It varied from song to song. While a B-flat may have been a force for evil in one song, in the next, it was imbued with a righteous glow. Each notes respective goodness or badness was intuitively understood by my childhood self. I did not have any power to influence its standing no matter how hard I tried. It simply was what it was. I assume that this was part of the tension that certain songs play with, but I really don’t know.
I was remembering this outlook towards musical notes the other day when I was playing around with my keyboard and I realized that I no longer have the same moral compass. A note is simply a note, and does not have any inherent goodness or badness. I don’t have any memory of this changing at any given point in time, but I find myself wondering if a) I’ve gained some perspective and can thus see each note as simply a tool to be used for a purpose, or if b) I’ve lost some innate childhood insight into music that is really the deeper understanding. Maybe it’s a bit of both. I don’t know.