28.11.15

a good, strong heart

just went on a bike ride through an old and established part of my childhood neighborhood into which i have never ventured before. the day is utterly amazingly beautiful - the sun makes every color look as vibrant as possible, and tinges every gently flickering leaf with a shimmering pale-yellow hue. everything looks to be moving, to be thriving, to be living.

two things came to mind as i rode past front, side and back yards that had become beautifully overgrown and overstuffed with both lush green foliage and dead golden leaves. i saw gardens and jungles of yards that were all dotted with things that could be considered rare eccentricities in my neighborhood, like archaic-looking chairs, trellises, topiaries and woven wood walkways that led one down charmingly dilapidated brick walkways. there were heart-shaped lawn sculptures and little, ornate white tables that seemed stages for little, ornate tea parties attended by fairies and dolls.

as i rode down those sunny streets i thought about what life really, truly was to me - how it can be that it just is, and all because of this very life i have yet lived.

-

one

life is a constant juggling of two truths. one of them is that to be alive means that there is the opportunity for an infinite amount of possibilities to occur. the other truth is that being alive means you will be faced with an infinite amount of reasons why the greater majority of those possibilities are physically impossible.

therefore, whatever is accomplished in your life will have been successful because you overcame the self-told reasons for why it would have been unsuccessful. you must talk yourself out of talking yourself out of acting, living, taking on challenge, pushing boundaries.

if only one could live solely in the world where there was nothing standing in the way of the infinity of our selves, our existence. is it possible?

two

the thing that i am really afraid of in life, above all else - the thing that causes me to close up, every time, in the face of the opening up of my self to the world - is that i can't bear to let the world see any truth about me that they could recognize through the physical functions of my body. to open up a view of my body to the world in the form of my voice, my body movements, and my facial expressions, is an act i seem to consistently avoid at all costs. it takes an enormous effort to sing in front of someone else without giggling and stopping halfway through, then trying to pretend like what they just saw wasn't really me and that they should just forget they saw it at all.

does anyone else do that? am i just shy, as i have always been told from birth?

i think i just am not confident in who i am, and i wish i knew how to fix it

Lilja 4-Ever


so chic, 'cause we're psychic


i have been listening to non-stop Oneohtrix Point Never's newest release:

Garden of Delete

i bite through it


i especially love to listen first to the song "Animals" and then finish  out the rest of the tracks chronologically. i like the second half more than the first, it seems. there is just something fascinating about the construction of these songs in particular, and how they maintain their structure even though there are so many other elements present whirling about and causing chaos elsewhere. the tracks are frequently pop-like, as many people have said, but the reason for this is because the fundamentals of OPN's sounds appeal to the basest of our desires. he exploits the strength of our emotions and non-emotions, and OPN makes these easily recognizable through sound.

these tracks are journeys from one's current position inward, as through a wormhole of ever-morphing sound structures. the image that i always end up conjuring while listening to OPN - GOD is a black background with pencil-thin lines, multitudinous in color, intersecting and intertwining in chaotic, unpredictable movements. this image of mine was inevitably inspired by the front cover. for some reason, this is also how i imagine a distant future to look.

the voices that emerge from his textures, however distorted, seem to reflect the lives and learned practices of modern humans. once-familiar sounds heard through a veil of sonic, almost alien distortion has always been something i found really interesting to listen to. i think the modern trend of using auto-tuned and electronically produced voices in tracks as legitimately as if they were created by singers in the studio is really awesome.

listen to "no good" off of this OPN album. it will blow your mind.

/

burial is another artist i love who does this, as in this track, a personal favorite of mine ;

"come down to us" / rival dealers, 2013


17.11.15

spring is here

bill evans has the piano skills of an absolute dream. i have never heard the piano played like he plays it. so dead-on accurate... so brave and so confident.



i think i never have or at least never have in detail explained to you my deepest most achingly unfulfilled desire in all the world.

are you ready?

to play... jazz... piano

-

bill evans, dave brubeck, thelonius monk

just some of my very most favorite pianists in my meager experience of listening to jazz. a common trend among the three, one might rightly argue... is that their music sounds to be classically-influenced, yet experimental and reaching. i think i would have to say the most admirable thing i have ever found in music is this very quality: reaching.

ravel, debussy, debussy, ravel

in ravel, there are always chords that seem to be plucked right out of the very strings of life, those very phenomenal and very infinite strings. so full of unpredictable life. in debussy, softnesses you didn't know existed lightly dust the corners of depths unknown like fine snow.

to be able to play the jazz piano would mean that i could actually give a voice to the discord inside of me. i want to find the chords i dream of, and to play the passages that seem to climb stairs to a place that exists in a different dimension, just out of sight, barely within reach. jazz and jazz theory literally encompass everything that fascinates me about music and music-making. so many chords... so many impossible combinations of notes that seem to be never-ending. on the piano there are 88 keys, but there are only 12 notes with which you can actually create the combinations. what i love the most is finding those combinations which sound unlike anything i have ever heard in my life.

anyway. where to now?

14.11.15

untitled lilac

i am reading back over my blog here and i keep finding myself so inspiring... what inspires me, perhaps, is not an other person but the very same me that i am, or at least, was.

this is great news!

-

listening: HTRK - psychic lilac

you know that i got mood swings that i got no control of

never-before-heard instrumental track and a rough, skeletal sketch of "chinatown style," one of my favorite HTRK songs of all time.



now that i remember that, i am going to listening to: HTRK - "chinatown style"

how is this track so great? everything doesn't fit, it seems like a randomly assembled assortment of sounds; intermittent bass pumps that seem to have no god. swirling harmonics with divine intent; jonnine's voice deep yet soft, and gentle... she comes in last, like the final blessing on this track. her voice from one becomes a chorus of echoes that mouth words in inconsistent waves. sound that undulates and unfolds, a painting being stroked and smudged into existence deliberately, and thoughtfully. it is casual, nonchalant, without added meaning. like a person walking down the street. he or she has purpose, but is also completely unable to escape the indulgent and tragic whims of the universe, of this thing we call life.

the most purpose a person can possibly have is completely self-made. one must create their own purpose, and their own beauty. their own-shaped path through time.

this is what music makes me feel. when i listen to music, the doors of wisdom seem opened up to me... a wisdom that explains in careful detail the usual mysteries of my every day life. i become aware of the existence of frameworks, the background rather than the fore, the space beyond just the sky.

-

yesterday evening i was on my way to mindlessly browse social media when i became informed of the happenings in paris, france. it was strange to hear that something so grandiose and vital was occurring right at that very moment; hundreds of peoples' lives had been turned upside down forever in a mere instant, all while i laid in my bed possessing, honestly, the absolute least amount of worries a person could possibly have. i would have never known what had happened had i not turned on my computer. so many people are experiencing excruciating pain that they have never felt before; a pain they had never anticipated and for which in all their life they had not prepared. out of all the things that regularly confound me, and out of all the daunting alleged truths about this universe and about ourselves, the mass murder of innocent people at the hands of an ordinary human seems to be the greatest mystery of all. it is the greatest, most horrific manifestation of what humans are, at their core. we are not happy and safe things. we are not fun-loving, gentle, or kind. we actually are the beasts of the wild, but only if those beasts were ten thousand times more cruel and heartless. our hearts are imaginary bags of dust; we thrive on violence and crave destruction. is it sadness? is it meaninglessness? is it the complete and utter absence of love?

2.11.15

the great divide

i was just shown this video -



it is one of the latest compositions by Swiss-born wandelweiser composer Jürg Frey, who is notable to me as a composer of works that employ the playing of the piano in a sparse manner, as is this one.

"Extended Circular Music." Circles and Landscapes.

the notes of this work are clustered, and occur only together and only as individual units. in this piece it is as if all of the "other" music, the music that has always been there filling the spaces and filling the void, has been erased. here, all that remains are the pillars that kept everything standing upright - the fundamental memories. all of the memories you have of music can be condensed into these moments of music, these moments of the instrument that are so often overlooked. take away the dancers, the flickering lights on the stage, take away the institutions and you are left with almost no visual image... nothing to distract yourself from the pure absorption of sound moments.

i think a lot about time while listening to this, and to some of Frey's other piano pieces. time as a nonentity. time as fluidity, moldable and malleable. sound and music can easily have the ability to transport one to those places where our bodies cannot.

-

i have not written for this blog as often as i should, or as often as i used to. i do apologize. it is most unlike me.

i think the reason why it has gone so long without a single new post is because this blog directly correlated with my experiencing of music as a separate entity from "the rest of the world," which i would usually just call "life as i have come to know it, life as i did not choose for it to be." music became more than just an obsession, more than a hobby, more than something to listen to, even more than something to make. music was an element of life that allowed me to actually experience happiness. to enjoy my time alive, to make every second as great as it possibly could.

using music, i found so many dark places and incredible places that i could never access in my normal, everyday life. music opened my mind up to imagination, to knowledge, to love, to passion, to history, to true reality. in it there was always such possibility, such a promise for what life could be, and what many different emotions or feeeeelings there were to experience.

without wanting to be too vague, let me try to be more specific about what kinds of music i am talking about. i was part of a music community called Last.fm where finding new music was the whole point of the community. it was all about grabbing as much unique music as you could possibly find the time for, and listening to it all either for status or for true interest. some people wanted both. it was and i'm sure it still is a complete lifestyle, an every-day-after-school/-work and all-night activity for many people, including myself. i spent so many more hours exploring the different sounds of music than i ever spent getting to know my classmates or spending time with others my age outside. i can't even remember all of the genres i explored... music from every era and from all over the world; modern and ancient, traditional and revolutionary, political and poetic and instrumental and atmospheric and influential and underrated and extremely rare.

when i say "i listened to this album every single day for years in high school; i listened to this piece repetitively when i was younger; i couldn't get enough of this band throughout all those years"; it comes from a place that has now faded into the recesses of the mind but is just as powerful a memory as the first time i felt love deep in my being. music is a close friend, and not only an escape but a destination. i dislike hearing people dismiss the idea of wanting to find an escape solely because they assume it is a desire born of weakness. an escape is the traveling from reality into a secret place, a mythological place, a place that everyone always told you didn't exist.

the reason i am expounding on this is that i just now realized that music was all of this and more for me for so many years, so much of my growing adolescent life. and now i am entering new stages of my life.

this passion and this lifestyle are fading slowly away from me. this blog, included. the friends i've made and lost, the love merely a flame that is now all but gone - all are like grains of sand slipping through my fingers and being blown away by the winds of time. i only feel sorry about it all, i only look back with sadness for a few moments, and i am usually only reminded of them when i discover unexpectedly a single grain of that sand still stuck to me somewhere. i do not feel unhappy about who i am now. i do not feel scared or sad or like i have lost anything. in fact, i am very happy, and very content. in a very different way.

funny how life works, huh? :D




here is the latest from my friends Joshua Adam Acosta & Joe Wheeler - Differential, released on the speculations editions label. it is very rich and full and terrifying. something about the sound manipulation and combination here is very physical, almost tangible.

"every idea, extended into infinity, becomes its own opposite"
which is to say, anything is nothing and everything is hilarious and grotesque