Monday, December 24, 2007
recreating a beyond
the piece formerly known only as "the new song" is called "recreating a beyond," and is a little different. check it out on the music page!
Thursday, December 13, 2007
a history of solitude
[this is a section of an originally longer post]
So, I have to admit, I had my apprehensions about this trip. Living in a van and roaming around the country doesn’t exactly scream “airtight security.” Especially with my budget – I had weighed my money heavily towards being on the road longer with less comfort – there were any number of things that could go wrong. Sure, I had passing images of myself leaning against a broke-down van in the Mojave Desert as buzzards circled overhead, or of ending up bloodied, facedown in the toilet of some sketchy backwoods rest stop, but ultimately, those extreme scenarios didn’t really stick to the wall. What did was solitude.
...
Almost immediately, van life revealed itself as a true pleasure. All around me, American life rolled out, people woke up in the morning, went to work, lived, went to sleep at night, and the whole process reminded me of the natural drama I found in the woods in middle school. Like any kind of living, van life allows you opportunities to pursue the white whale, but the chase is not impersonal as it is in a world of books or full of adversity as it is in the woods - it’s simply pleasurable. In the long hours between stops, time stretches out, your mind relaxes, and your thought rate decreases. I found I had inadvertently traded in the nonsense intellectual flurry that so characterizes modern living for something slower and truer, a thought every fifteen minutes; enough time to take it and hold it in your hands, regard it, understand it. Spend enough time at this pace and the whole world settles into finer focus, your mind and soul fit into a clarity of thought and feeling. I felt no additional loneliness as the days stretched into weeks with little human contact. Instead, what contact I had was cast into a bold relief. A simple interaction, exchanging money with a toll clerk, ordering a plate of wings, whatever, somehow sprang from thoughtless two-dimensionality to meaningful, three-dimensional nuance; it became a room you could walk into and look around. Longer conversations become invariably profound. Avdo, a Bosnian construction worker and a marvel of human decency and innocence, overturned a year of study at Princeton in the course of a conversation.
My gaze turned outwards; with fewer deadlines to meet and personal challenges to fulfill, I began to look outside and around me, to open my eyes and ears again to what was immediately present. Freed from the absurd self-orientation that college practically demands, I thought less of myself and more of my environment, less time wondering who I was and whether I was fit to belong, and more time simply being – and belonging.
My gaze turned outwards; with fewer deadlines to meet and personal challenges to fulfill, I began to look outside and around me, to open my eyes and ears again to what was immediately present. Freed from the absurd self-orientation that college practically demands, I thought less of myself and more of my environment, less time wondering who I was and whether I was fit to belong, and more time simply being – and belonging.
...
All things considered, it’s not entirely surprising that finding real solitude again should produce reconciliation of mind, soul, and purpose. This was first made clear early in my travels to Acadia National Park. I shot up to Maine straight from New Jersey, intending to spend the rest of the fall trickling down through the northeast. I ended up spending most of my time stuck up there at the top of New England, unwilling to leave. Acadia National Park is a strange place in many ways; it’s hard to say what keeps bringing people back there, where the magic lies. There is no single, sweeping vista, no grand canyon or Niagara Falls, the grandeur is never overwhelming. But few places in the country have such a history of human investment; Acadia National Park has in some way been protected land for over a century now, and is currently one of the most popular nature reserves in the country. It is not quite wild; in the 1920s, Rockefeller created a series of walking trails and beautiful bridges throughout the island, and before a great fire in the 40s, it was dotted with magnificent estates of the super-rich. Now it’s less exclusive, and a ring road along the coast of the island permits people from all over to get a quick sense of the landscape, and to dig deeper only if they so desire. My life there was idyllic; I spent about a week and a half driving into the park before dawn every morning, watching the sun rise over the ocean, going for hikes, recording and exercising in the van, swimming in the clean, salty water, watching, listening, soaking it in, and leaving only after the sun went down over Cadillac Mountain. My favorite place to sit and think (or not think) were the rocks above Otter Point; I spent hours at a time there, watching the waves come in and the crows somehow find food amongst the cliffs. Then it was off to Sand Beach to get the blood flowing again. Here, at the only natural sand beach on the rocky coast of Maine, the water sometimes gets up into the fifties in the summer, and while I was there in October, I could sometimes feel ice crystals in the water. I would change into my bathing suit in the van and then take off at a run from the parking lot, down the hill, over the beach, straight into the water, never stopping until I could no longer touch the ground and I was far out in the chilly surf. Then I’d turn right around and do it in reverse, moving hard to keep my blood from freezing. I went religiously, once a day. Sometimes the surf was high and brown, sometimes the water was like polished glass. Sometimes I’d do it alone, other times there’d be bemused tourists gaping. “He must be training for something…” an old lady confided confidently. “How’s the water?” a big man asks in a Southern old-boy drawl as I shoot past, arms pumping, little wet droplets shaking every where. “Very cold,” I reply, not pausing to stop, “very good.”
Later, back in Pennsylvania, I had an interesting conversation about Acadia with someone who had grown up in Maine. I mentioned my uncertainty about the attraction of the place, the sense that it was truly magical, but how I wondered why. “It’s because humans and nature have grown up together there. We found it long ago, and lived there with respect for the place. When the fire burned everything down, we recovered with the land. Now it’s not really wild, but it’s not really human either.” That made a lot of sense to me. It’s a place humans can go not to test their might against the wild, or marvel at wild natural spectacles, but to rediscover Eden. Acadia is a new garden, a place still somehow unfallen, where humans can leave the cities to find mountains not made by the hands of man, but where nevertheless, man still somehow belongs.
Later, back in Pennsylvania, I had an interesting conversation about Acadia with someone who had grown up in Maine. I mentioned my uncertainty about the attraction of the place, the sense that it was truly magical, but how I wondered why. “It’s because humans and nature have grown up together there. We found it long ago, and lived there with respect for the place. When the fire burned everything down, we recovered with the land. Now it’s not really wild, but it’s not really human either.” That made a lot of sense to me. It’s a place humans can go not to test their might against the wild, or marvel at wild natural spectacles, but to rediscover Eden. Acadia is a new garden, a place still somehow unfallen, where humans can leave the cities to find mountains not made by the hands of man, but where nevertheless, man still somehow belongs.
Friday, December 7, 2007
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
more new music
just uploaded another new song. this one really came out of nowhere and came together very fast. it's short and pretty self-explanatory, so I won't talk a lot about it here, but it's called paper vs. plastic. it features a somewhat new style of recording / approach to using noise, and I hope to continue moving in this direction in future pieces. I'm already going back to the last song I wrote before this and trying to fiddle with the noise aspects of it to bring them closer to this sort of sound.
check it out here and lemme know what you think!
check it out here and lemme know what you think!
Monday, December 3, 2007
new music
so, I uploaded a lot of new tracks yesterday, only one of which is actually new. its working title is, creatively, "newsong." let me know if you come up with anything better. it uses a guitar - mandolin - cello trio (which may well become my signature outfit this year) as well as the sounds of surf rolling into thunder hole at acadia national park in maine and of passing traffic coming down off frankonia notch in new hampshire. there are two themes, one of which is in 4/4, the other in 7/8. the 4/4 one is divided into 3/3/2, and the 7/8 is divided into 3/2/2, so rhythmically speaking, much of the song is a power struggle between the threes from the west and the twos from the east. now here's the trick; in the parts where either theme really settles into a rhythm, the noises also settle into their own rhythm, but in a pattern opposite to the instruments. For example, when strings start pounding out that 4/4, the surf undermines its regularity by crashing in 7/8. this way, the texture is always on the move, and the sound never really settles to a rest. not that it particularly wants to; this is the most simply exuberant music I've written in years. It's inspired mainly by the pure joy I find in living in the van, and in moving about. The sung words that appear briefly at the beginning and the end are from the american folk song Shenandoah, a homesick western settler's ode to his homeland. in my excerpt, however, he discusses being "bound away across the wide Missouri," and for me, that's a happy trip. america is vivified again and again by its tradition as a young frontier country, and it has beckoned generation after generation of young people to new frontiers, be they rivers, oceans, prairies or highways. on the frontier one can learn things hard to get anywhere else, but today, frontiers are fast disappearing. to a large degree, one has to seek them out and create them for oneself, and living in a van is a great place to start.
I also loaded a piece for voices called srebrenica. In 1995, the village of srebrenica, a UN-designated "safe area" fell to advancing serb forces. the defending UN troops, who had disarmed the villagers, continued retreating and retreating, afraid to fire the first shot and afraid of contravening international protocol, until they had nothing left to protect. men, women and children were rounded into buses and taken to football stadiums where they were shot, or locked shoulder-to-shoulder in warehouses with a bomb. it became the worst massacre of civilians in europe since world war II, and an enormous challenge not only to international humanitarian policy but to the very ideas of humanitarianism and even humanism. in studying the incident, it quickly becomes difficult to assign blame. from a distance, the inhumanity of general mladic, the ineptitude of the UN, and the demonic power-games of milosevic serve as effective targets. however, after closer study, one is ultimately struck by the manner in which violence and hatred seem like independent actors operating almost on their own physics. it becomes less a case of evil people employing violence than violence and evil employing people. and nobody is safe; even by following all the rules with the best intentions, we find ourselves in the midst of massacre. the text of my piece is the UN security council resolution that reaffirmed srebrenica's status as a safe area in the face of mounting hostilities, passed shortly before its fall. one voice simply reads the document, but other voices join with seemingly random nonsense syllables. however, they actually appear following a strict method. each time the first voice passes to a new clause, another takes the next odd syllable from the new clause and adds it to a regular rhythmic pattern. in other words, the first voice takes the the first syllable of the first clause, then the third syllable of the second clause, then the fifth of the third, and so on. each additional voice has an individual pattern of greater density than the voice before; the first introduces a quarter-note beat in 4/4, the second layers eighth note triplets upon that pattern, the third thickens to regular eighth notes, and the fourth introduces sixteenth note triplets. every time one voice completes its pattern, it simply repeats as a new voices begins its own. by the end, the resulting rhythms and syllables simply create a cacophony that drowns out the recitation of the original document.
the first movement of lost calls also appears here. lost calls is a piece for cello and answering machine that I wrote as part of my senior thesis at princeton. in this first movement, I dissect greetings in answering machine messages and examine their melodic qualities, eventually building a very short tonal trio for two cellos and voices.
finally, I included a short excerpt from my blue mountain suite, another of my senior thesis pieces. the recording is live, so its pretty rough, but its a fun piece. it's sort of a homage to the hills of central pennsylvania and the people with whom I grew up. the piece transverses 24 hours, and each movement follows a time of the day; this excerpt is from the "workday" movement. the pieces uses a lot of references to american folk music, as well as a lot of extended technique and general weird shit.
enjoy!
I also loaded a piece for voices called srebrenica. In 1995, the village of srebrenica, a UN-designated "safe area" fell to advancing serb forces. the defending UN troops, who had disarmed the villagers, continued retreating and retreating, afraid to fire the first shot and afraid of contravening international protocol, until they had nothing left to protect. men, women and children were rounded into buses and taken to football stadiums where they were shot, or locked shoulder-to-shoulder in warehouses with a bomb. it became the worst massacre of civilians in europe since world war II, and an enormous challenge not only to international humanitarian policy but to the very ideas of humanitarianism and even humanism. in studying the incident, it quickly becomes difficult to assign blame. from a distance, the inhumanity of general mladic, the ineptitude of the UN, and the demonic power-games of milosevic serve as effective targets. however, after closer study, one is ultimately struck by the manner in which violence and hatred seem like independent actors operating almost on their own physics. it becomes less a case of evil people employing violence than violence and evil employing people. and nobody is safe; even by following all the rules with the best intentions, we find ourselves in the midst of massacre. the text of my piece is the UN security council resolution that reaffirmed srebrenica's status as a safe area in the face of mounting hostilities, passed shortly before its fall. one voice simply reads the document, but other voices join with seemingly random nonsense syllables. however, they actually appear following a strict method. each time the first voice passes to a new clause, another takes the next odd syllable from the new clause and adds it to a regular rhythmic pattern. in other words, the first voice takes the the first syllable of the first clause, then the third syllable of the second clause, then the fifth of the third, and so on. each additional voice has an individual pattern of greater density than the voice before; the first introduces a quarter-note beat in 4/4, the second layers eighth note triplets upon that pattern, the third thickens to regular eighth notes, and the fourth introduces sixteenth note triplets. every time one voice completes its pattern, it simply repeats as a new voices begins its own. by the end, the resulting rhythms and syllables simply create a cacophony that drowns out the recitation of the original document.
the first movement of lost calls also appears here. lost calls is a piece for cello and answering machine that I wrote as part of my senior thesis at princeton. in this first movement, I dissect greetings in answering machine messages and examine their melodic qualities, eventually building a very short tonal trio for two cellos and voices.
finally, I included a short excerpt from my blue mountain suite, another of my senior thesis pieces. the recording is live, so its pretty rough, but its a fun piece. it's sort of a homage to the hills of central pennsylvania and the people with whom I grew up. the piece transverses 24 hours, and each movement follows a time of the day; this excerpt is from the "workday" movement. the pieces uses a lot of references to american folk music, as well as a lot of extended technique and general weird shit.
enjoy!
Saturday, December 1, 2007
so you can kiss goodbye to any narrative continuity this blog once had...
...and instead, I’ll just paint you a picture of a fast food evening. I’m driving through this cookie cutter town not far from the coast of Maine, packed in tight with its requisite gas stations and laundromats and lobster shacks. I drive down Main Street, a somewhat ragtag affair with October leaves and American flags strewn about the sidewalks. Night has almost fallen, but I can still read the signs. BELLYDANCING CLASS 6PM TUE DOG OBEDIENCE 6PM WED. I’m looking for a decent place to eat. It’s not forthcoming, and I’m tired, so I pull into the strip mall on the north side of town and opt for my old fail-safe. Every once in a while, I like to poison my body with a good, greasy Big Mac for dinner. It’s the most reliable meal I know; I can always count on finding it anywhere, those wide, yellow arches brightly shining my way towards familiarity. Each individual McDonalds will usually have some sort of locally specific knick-knacks hung up on the walls leading to the bathrooms. Here there is a handsome wooden sign slung on the bright yellow wall: “Old Jack’s Eatery,” it reads, “best burgers in Maine since 1912.” The rest of the restaurant, however, is comfortingly bland, universal in its facelessness, in the cheery void it evokes with its red plastic seats and yellow plastic counters, its happy meal figurines waving at you through a translucent plastic display case, the bright red ketchup dispenser with the little white cups stacked neatly nearby, and everywhere, that goddamn clown, grinning. When the robots become self-conscious and take over the world and enslave humanity, they won’t have to implant tubes into our stomachs to keep us fat until they can harvest our souls; they’ll simply keep all the McDonald’s running. Until then, however, the ketchup dispenser is still filled by a pimply red-headed teenager named Carl, and that thought always keeps me hopeful. Or at least keeps me from running out screaming.
Of course, what people come to McDonalds to do is eat, and so the heart of the operation is presumably its menu. It is here that you can get a 99-cent cheeseburger, a price simply unbeatable anywhere. Or upgrade to a three-dollar double quarter-pounder, or get a whole damn meal for just over five. You know it’s nothing but preservatives and high fructose corn syrup, you know it’ll clog your arteries and it may not even be real food at all, you know that the coke in your Extra-Value Meal is coming at the expense of some river in India and that the cow that made the beef of your Happy Meal farted so much it punched a new hole in the o-zone layer, and for all you know, the ketchup may cause birth defects in your children or something, but still, it’s the way to go. It tastes good, as long as you don’t have any pretensions, and it’s cheap, and you know it’s cheap, because it’s the same everywhere. And look around; if it does kill you, it’s going to kill everybody else too, so there won’t be anybody left to laugh. So many people can’t be wrong, and the few who do make a fuss – the tree huggers and the liberals, waving signs because they never learned to do any better work with their hands – ultimately only serve to lend the place an extra dimension of dignity. And so with a trustworthy, ironclad cheapness and a blanketing, vacuous universality, McDonalds beckons the masses. The dollar menu and its more glorified cousins are the lance of the McDonalds war machine, a formidable amour that can rumble through even the most backwoods community, slay whatever pesky local dragons lurk (like, presumably, Old Jack’s), and set up a well-ordered colony.
Tonight, however, is not a good night to eat at McDonald’s. There’s a whole boy’s soccer team in for a victory meal, so I decide to retreat to the van with its silence and its beer as soon as I acquire my food. The girl behind the counter – Kathy, according to her nametag – turns out to be a new employee, a spunky teenager vaguely resembling a fish. She’s got bug eyes and buckteeth, a goofy smile and bright yellow spiked hair awkwardly half-matted by her McDonald’s visor. There is an older employee hovering worriedly about her, watching the register screen. “Hi there!” she says cheerily. She waits for me to return her greeting, and then pipes out “welcome to McDonalds!” with such verve that I’m compelled to thank her. “What can I get ya?” I give her my order; she waves her hand over her electronic food-ordering doodad, wide eyes scanning for the right buttons and a long “uhhhhhh” escaping from between the teeth. The older woman frowns and leans in, her eyes never leaving the screen. “Ask him if he wants something to drink!” she hisses. “Oh!” Kathy says with a smile, “so, do you want something to drink?” I tell her no thanks. She grins with victory at her supervisor, who only nods at the screen.
Soon, I have my bag of goodies, and I begin to thread my way through the hordes of screaming sugar-high soccer players. Halfway to the door, I hear a shriek behind me: “bye!!” Kathy has picked me out with her bug eyes and is waving from behind the counter, almost lost in the sea of blue jerseys and yellow-uniformed coworkers hustling to feed them. Her buckteeth are bared in that same ludicrous smile. I make a point of turning fully around to return her wave and shout my thanks.
Back out in the van, I set down my dinner and breath a sigh of relief in the dark. I decide to relocate to a different part of the strip mall parking lot where I can camp out for the night. Switching on the lights, I’m met with a shock. I’ve inadvertently illuminated a whole family, my headlights beaming through the windshield of the minivan across from me. They’re all there, mom and dad in the front seat and kids in the back, some with open mouths poised at the burger, others reaching for the fries, all frozen dumb in the shock of my headlights. They looked lurid and two-dimensional and vaguely green, these strange specimens. It feels like turning on the light to a fishtank, or gazing by waterproof floodlights with all the sordid fascination of science through a little round window of a submarine. Here are the strange, sunless creatures of the deep, blinking back at this bright, inexplicable visitor.
I drive off to a nice, dark parking space and kill the lights. A whole family, eating McDonalds in the car in the dark. Who does that?? I think, biting into my Big Mac.
Of course, the robot invasion has already occurred. Here we are, the tattered human refugees, shrinking about in shadows of post-apocalypse strip mall parking lots, hiding from the neon glare of our aggressors and taking risks only to steal necessities from overturned vending machines. There are those few who still feebly fight back, boycotting products or waving signs or signing petitions or writing blogs. But in this bleak present, Kathy is the real hero of mankind. She roils in the belly of the beast, bright and unquenchable, proudly trumpeting her humanity even amidst the machines, communicating with indestructible innocence, thoughtfully refilling the ketchup dispenser.
Of course, what people come to McDonalds to do is eat, and so the heart of the operation is presumably its menu. It is here that you can get a 99-cent cheeseburger, a price simply unbeatable anywhere. Or upgrade to a three-dollar double quarter-pounder, or get a whole damn meal for just over five. You know it’s nothing but preservatives and high fructose corn syrup, you know it’ll clog your arteries and it may not even be real food at all, you know that the coke in your Extra-Value Meal is coming at the expense of some river in India and that the cow that made the beef of your Happy Meal farted so much it punched a new hole in the o-zone layer, and for all you know, the ketchup may cause birth defects in your children or something, but still, it’s the way to go. It tastes good, as long as you don’t have any pretensions, and it’s cheap, and you know it’s cheap, because it’s the same everywhere. And look around; if it does kill you, it’s going to kill everybody else too, so there won’t be anybody left to laugh. So many people can’t be wrong, and the few who do make a fuss – the tree huggers and the liberals, waving signs because they never learned to do any better work with their hands – ultimately only serve to lend the place an extra dimension of dignity. And so with a trustworthy, ironclad cheapness and a blanketing, vacuous universality, McDonalds beckons the masses. The dollar menu and its more glorified cousins are the lance of the McDonalds war machine, a formidable amour that can rumble through even the most backwoods community, slay whatever pesky local dragons lurk (like, presumably, Old Jack’s), and set up a well-ordered colony.
Tonight, however, is not a good night to eat at McDonald’s. There’s a whole boy’s soccer team in for a victory meal, so I decide to retreat to the van with its silence and its beer as soon as I acquire my food. The girl behind the counter – Kathy, according to her nametag – turns out to be a new employee, a spunky teenager vaguely resembling a fish. She’s got bug eyes and buckteeth, a goofy smile and bright yellow spiked hair awkwardly half-matted by her McDonald’s visor. There is an older employee hovering worriedly about her, watching the register screen. “Hi there!” she says cheerily. She waits for me to return her greeting, and then pipes out “welcome to McDonalds!” with such verve that I’m compelled to thank her. “What can I get ya?” I give her my order; she waves her hand over her electronic food-ordering doodad, wide eyes scanning for the right buttons and a long “uhhhhhh” escaping from between the teeth. The older woman frowns and leans in, her eyes never leaving the screen. “Ask him if he wants something to drink!” she hisses. “Oh!” Kathy says with a smile, “so, do you want something to drink?” I tell her no thanks. She grins with victory at her supervisor, who only nods at the screen.
Soon, I have my bag of goodies, and I begin to thread my way through the hordes of screaming sugar-high soccer players. Halfway to the door, I hear a shriek behind me: “bye!!” Kathy has picked me out with her bug eyes and is waving from behind the counter, almost lost in the sea of blue jerseys and yellow-uniformed coworkers hustling to feed them. Her buckteeth are bared in that same ludicrous smile. I make a point of turning fully around to return her wave and shout my thanks.
Back out in the van, I set down my dinner and breath a sigh of relief in the dark. I decide to relocate to a different part of the strip mall parking lot where I can camp out for the night. Switching on the lights, I’m met with a shock. I’ve inadvertently illuminated a whole family, my headlights beaming through the windshield of the minivan across from me. They’re all there, mom and dad in the front seat and kids in the back, some with open mouths poised at the burger, others reaching for the fries, all frozen dumb in the shock of my headlights. They looked lurid and two-dimensional and vaguely green, these strange specimens. It feels like turning on the light to a fishtank, or gazing by waterproof floodlights with all the sordid fascination of science through a little round window of a submarine. Here are the strange, sunless creatures of the deep, blinking back at this bright, inexplicable visitor.
I drive off to a nice, dark parking space and kill the lights. A whole family, eating McDonalds in the car in the dark. Who does that?? I think, biting into my Big Mac.
Of course, the robot invasion has already occurred. Here we are, the tattered human refugees, shrinking about in shadows of post-apocalypse strip mall parking lots, hiding from the neon glare of our aggressors and taking risks only to steal necessities from overturned vending machines. There are those few who still feebly fight back, boycotting products or waving signs or signing petitions or writing blogs. But in this bleak present, Kathy is the real hero of mankind. She roils in the belly of the beast, bright and unquenchable, proudly trumpeting her humanity even amidst the machines, communicating with indestructible innocence, thoughtfully refilling the ketchup dispenser.
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