I can’t stop thinking of the end–it keeps arriving, yet stretching out so far… If only I had taken and accepted you as mine sooner. If only I had trusted myself to find you. I loved and lost, but to what never ending end?

The ending untied itself from the beginning and looped around itself, wrapping into knots until it came apart into pieces… When the ending ends, never here, and when the beginning starts, always beginning, I will have found the answer.

If there is an answer to life’s riddle of joy and pain, of finding light in the darkness, it is the hope of love. If there is an end it won’t come so swiftly. If there is a death it won’t be so bitter. I promise to seek any answer I can.

This world is not my home, I’m just passing through, my treasures and my hopes are placed beyond the blue. Many friends and kin have gone on before, and I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.

Oh Lord, you know I have no friend like you, if heaven’s not my home, oh Lord, what will I do? Angels beckon me to heaven’s open door, and I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.

I have a loving mother up in gloryland and I don’t expect to stop until I take her hand. She’s waiting there for me up in heaven’s open door, and I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.

Oh Lord, you know I have no friend like you, if heaven’s not my home, oh Lord, what will I do? Angels beckon me to heaven’s open door, and I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.

The spirit of all things is the spirit of goodness and it is true qnd lovely, itself tying life to these things. “An airplane, a puppet, an orange, a spoon, a window, an outside, the stars and the moon.” Not only are we alive, but the world around us and the world itself is alive, and the flora, fauna, the mountains, the skies, the heavens, we are connected to these forms of life that make up a boundless source of life and goodness. Goodness, truth, love, beauty, these things are natural, and are inside everything, separate and combined, and finding this divinity will guide us toward the truth inside the answers we seek.

May we find these things, and may the light of G-d guide us toward what we need, and may we find, within ourselves, the beauty of all things, and in all things, a beauty in ourselves. Love is with us all please share it with those who deserve your love, and show them your truest self and the love will return manyfold.

Immersion in the wrong sorts. This is my manifesto. Trying to write a hole in the page with tingling hands, tingly body, mind sunk deep within. An arbitrary conversation. Looking and seeing and feeling the wrongs. A simplified overcoming of stature and belonging, nevermore, this overcompensated delusion of downtime and no time of babbling. I will set aside and overcome with suds of porter in hand, a mild-mannered genius has come to save me.

I seem to rise as morning draws near, Pushing through fields of tracks, green and alive. The dew draws close to my hung down body, feeling alone, but in the comfort of friends. If I drew this close to perfection, every moment I would be the field and you would be the green. A conflict of mind and matter. I would live in harmony beside you, but never alone. If I drew this close to perfection, every moment I would the field and you the green, but never alone.

On the nature of coinciding moments and their inherent meaning

In every moment, there is a chance that fate ties together another moment together, or many. The multiple coinciding moments bless us with meaning that is personal to us, beautiful, and these meanings transmogrify, transporting us to new places within ourselves. These synchronous moments, whether significant or less so, whether in an instant or across a lifetime, they show us the connections we share between the world around us, the people and life in it, and the intrinsic ways the meaning expresses itself to us. The subjective viewpoint guides us toward an objective view of spirituality–love, beauty, truth, honesty, divinity itself–the spirit of all things will be revealed to us in time through the appearance of two or more moments coincidentally.

In essence, these are the manifestations of the ghost of G-d that guides us, a revisitation of the manifestations of G-d, His love, His light, and His guidance, and in these manifestations we will certainly find meaning, truth, beauty, divinity, and love in our lives for us and for others.

The beauty in coincidence, in coinciding moments, happenstance, circumstance, joyous accidents–they are something that immediately connotates meaning and it has always guided me like a deep well of external intuition, as an ocean of divine light, the aurora casting itself across the northern skies, the North Star, or the heavens themselves, and the dew of the heavens hangs onto the fields of our minds, the green magnified by the dew of inspiration…

We will see more clearly as long as we allow ourselves to find these connected moments. The will of G-d guides us through these moments, through a hidden blessing, through a loss, through passing a veil inwardly. Again, these moments are of and by G-d, they are gifts of the spirit, and true divine beauty. In all things and all times you may find these blessings. As soon as one finds these moments, and these blessings, as soon as two people are connected by two or more moments, we must connect their meanings together. It will be easier than it seems, since it is personal to those who receive it.

Through all time, and through all mankind, there shall be this guidance, and intrinsic meaning and divinity in all things, whether receiving a symbolic meaning or sign of something familiar–a leaf, a fallen tree, an insect, a deer, a canine, a love– these might appear inoccuous or seemingly unrelated, but they are tied together to make a whole.

(Originally written in late 2024.)

Questions lead to answers, and answers lead to questions, which lead to more answers and questions in a loop, yet when a received answer implies a question, when is it enough of an answer in itself, and when is there a purpose in continuing to ask more questions or look for more answers?

I continue to find that the answers are not so easily understood, and not always satisfactory, or not satisfying, yet I could try and fail to find every answer to every question I have, although I’m more inclined to find the answer to healing my mind, heart, and soul.

The answer I received:

“Strengthless & female fruit.”

The only way out of a hidden veil that can cause such great confusion that we may not know is there blinding us, the answer to the riddles of life, of defining ourselves, of defining our identity and our lives, the only way out of this confusion is through it: inward-outwardly, then returning outward-inwardly. Looking into oneself, into the hidden recesses of one’s deepest self, deepest motives, and intuition, then facing outward, the joy of love and true inner peace comes from the intersection of what is inside the self with what is outside the self, not simply the world, but yet the life in it.

(Originally written in late 2024.)

I updated the theme again and this time there’s a browser readable RSS feed and a better site nav in general. 8kB Challenge is now 16kB Challenge and there are some posts which received an update, as well as some posts that are new.

The theme is more stable and more sensible, and its code is more expressive, the theme is also slightly better with color contrast, and codeblocks are better. A link to the post’s section is now at the bottom of each post too.

Total CSS: 4.3kB
Total HTML on index.html: 16.6kB
Total load on index.html: 101kB
Total site size: 2.9 MB

• New posts since 2025:

  • On Synchronicity
  • On Questions & Answers
  • A Veil Passed, Inward-outwardly, Outward-inwardly
  • The Warner Bros. Mentality and The Underground

• Updated posts since 2025:

  • Harmony
  • In a Birdsong
  • Quiet Musing on the Ineffable
  • On Humanity and Imperfection in Art

Music can be lifeless, bland, lacking honesty and integrity, and standardized, or in other words so-called ‘factory’ music is what is heard and played for the majority of listeners, since it is the main type of music played on the radio. It’s as Zappa once said in an unearthed and unaired MTV interview, “pop the lever and pull the chain, out comes the little brown choo-choo train,” calling it “the Warner Brothers mentality,” and “corporate America”, and describing it as a reverse toilet for eating defecation. Standardizing the concepts of genre, stylistics, format, and visuals in music, as well as regulatory and market capture, destroyed an industry that was then rebuilt out of its own self-destruction by artists that were lesser known, and had little to no capital, simply making better music. Novelty, experimentation, and new forms and styles were largely played by unknown artists that thrived and survived in cultural droughts, even creating trends in mainstream and radio music that built from unknown artists.

Starting in the 1920’s and 1930’s through to the 2020’s and today, the music industry has had a hegemonic, top-down control on the music industry. OSI in the 1930’s during The Great Depression created what was called ‘Easy Listening,’ and it was the only music on the radio at the time, intending to ease and pacify the concerns of the populace. This period of radio music has roots in the Red Scare and is the first and primary example of where corporate and government meet in the music industry. It stood in stark contrast to prior forms such as romantic classical, yet was part of a series of shifts to capture the industry, starting as early as Ragtime.

These trends would continue into the 1940’s and 1950’s where corporate interests and standardization in country music, blues, and jazz culture didn’t hinder these genres, but would ultimately lead to these common standards falling behind. With country, the standardization followed the time of westerns on television, and popularity with both rose around the 1940’s and starting falling around the mid-1950’s, As for Jazz, sadly the standardization came early, for example with “blue eyed” Jazz and Soul, a genre black musicians in the 1920’s that innovated by interpreting classical and orchestral works in novel ways by adapting them for smaller ensembles, which also led to the creation of the drum set.

Blues also led to quite a lot of innovation, as with its amount of improvisation, something it shares with Jazz, and yet, in times since, and despite the innovation, blues has become less relevant over time. Through innovative genre-blending, Blues, Jazz and Country would come to form the basis of Rock and splinter into various forms, such as Folk, or in later movements, ‘Doo-Wop’ in the 1950’s and 1960’s that stemmed from Soul, Blues, and Jazz. The meeting of Jazz and Blues and Rock is also notable which could be considered to begin as early as the 1940’s, yet would not see a large interest until the 1960’s and 1970’s. These styles and forms continued to blend through to the 1960’s.

In contrast, in the 1930’s through to the 1950’s and today there was a burgeoning Avant-Garde and Post-Jazz or Post-Classical experimental movements. The experimental music of the 1930’s through to the 1950’s started to experiment with small Jazz ensembles and smaller ensembles for performing experimental and modal compositions. In the 1950’s and 1960’s there were also Rock-oriented experiments and experiments like field recording, Ambient, Music Concrete, and from the 50’s forward these experimental new forms found a home in the studio and on handheld recording hardware. These were experiments which would take music forward into a counter-example of the standardization of radio music.

In the 1960’s the media stranglehold tightens with giants like Capitol, yet it marks an era of experimentation contrasted by the standardization of previous decades, and despite the drugged-out radio musicians of the day. In this time talent was valued more than skill, and from the 1960’s to the 1970’s production would become more highly valued and as a trend it would become more common. Music grew up and in different ways grew stale in the 1970’s, and the experimentation thrived while becoming more cohesive and structurally sound, while the age of Disco, Club music, and dance clubs walled stylistics into a box of pop senses and sensibilities, leading to a period in the 1980’s where the factory perfected itself with a series of stylistic and formattic commonalities.

The 1960’s fusion of Jazz and Rock brought a large amount of experimentalism to the forefront, with the Rock’n’Roll and Country movements turning to Psychedelia on the radio and Folk and Folk-Rock respectively. Genre blending was at the forefront of music, and these new musicians in the Jazz/Rock scenes prioritized progressive and compositional music with a skillful and nuanced performance, taking Rock structures and instruments beyond their normal capacity, and this is similar to the Psychedelic Rock movements and radio music at the time tended toward loud and with guitar solos. The invention of the electric guitar had proven to be important for the music industry, and listeners love the sound of Rock, but also start to appreciate more experimental forms, as evidenced by the appearance of 10+ minute versions of songs on the radio.

The 1980’s saw standardization in the form of technology, such as the popularization of the drum machine, or synthetic instruments, or studio techniques that wound up taking away from the creativity and performative or stylistic elements from the artist, such as compression techniques that make analog instruments seem synthetic, or quantization techniques that “fix” off-time drummers in post-production, or even the DAW, the Digital Audio Workstation. In other words, these technological innovations brought a death of analog, and thus a death of the performer, and a death for the skill of artistry. There was more standardization than ever.

In contrast, while this standardization took place, the 1970’s and 1980’s experimental music was counteracting the ‘factory music’ of the era. Running counter to the norm in the 1970’s were genres such as Noise, Ambient, Art-Rock, and Punk, and in the 1980’s Hardcore, EDM, IDM, No Wave, Post-Punk, and Hardcore Metal, along with other expressions. These many forms began and gained popularity in the underground and would continue to see growth and novel experimentation through to today, in a cultural Renaissance of sound-art and creative, experimental, novel music.

In the 1990’s underground music grew more popular and even more experimental through many style and genre combinations, deconstructions, reconstructions, and blending, etc., and gave rise to somewhat common forms of experimentation. Unusual, abnormal, and novel music was highly valued in these times, and artists valued the novelty and quality of the music over audio fidelity, contrasting trends in the 1960’s and 1970’s pop recordings.

A problem during the 1990’s was regulatory capture. The ‘Telecommunications Act of 1994’ consolidated lawmakers, radio stations, laws governing transmission of music, and laws regarding copyright and music publication, along with disc-jockeys, producers, labels, and musicians into one legal and corporate umbrella. This act brought all radio stations under the control of four labels, which controlled three radio conglomerates, which employed only 20 or so disc-jockeys I’m a regulatory capture scheme that aimed to control which music made it to air–a move that was directly anti-competitive, anti-consumer, and monopolistic.

As for the longevity of any radio music near the mid 1990’s and into the 2000’s, the relevance of some song or musician was usually measured in weeks or months with more successful artists staying on air around one or two years. The music on the radio at this time borrowed heavily from previous successes in the 1990’s underground, with faux R&B, faux Gangster Rap and Hip-Hop, and accessible Alt Rock, marking a period where the industry had again come across a measure of market success in sales.

The 2000’s also mark another series of regulatory captures and corporate warfare, as in the Ticketmaster and Clear channel duopoly of ticket sales and venue management respectively, which ultimately destroyed the prospects of independent venues and artists in local scenes. Legislation pushed and created by the big four labels strongarmed venues to sell tickets through Ticketmaster pairing that “privilege” with being owned and operated by Clear channel, giving them the ability to host bands, meanwhile Ticketmaster and Clearchannel took massive fees and cuts of profits from the venues in the form of sales, ticket sales, food and alcohol sales, and merchandise sales in the form of royalties. Yet again the four major labels conspired to enact legislation which gave them massive undue control over the industry in an anti-competitive, anti-consumer, monopolistic capture of independent venues in many areas. There was also the corporate warfare of ‘payola’ or ‘pay-to-play,’ in which corporate-aligned promoters are sent into local scenes by labels to close gaps in their control of venues and the market which forced artists to sell tickets in order to get on stage. While this market capture began in the mid-1990’s this capture continues today.

The light in the darkness of regulatory and market capture during the 2000’s came from innovations in computing in the mid-to-late-1990’s. The inability of the music industry to capture or even penetrate online markets was a problem for them. In counteraction, Napster started at this time, with labels and radio musicians scared off the ’net while many artists saw it as a tool for promotion and distribution, and a sign of the coming times. Napster’s executives had many artists contact them asking how to promote, distribute, or sell on Napster; and Netlabels began to appear around this time, distributing MP3s for free on cheap hosting; and social media offered a way to promote and be heard more widely in new ways, with such sites as ReverbNation, MySpace, and YouTube being beneficial for promotion. The advent of the ’net along with digital sales helped underground styles and scenes thrive.

The Punk, Hardcore, and Metal scenes in the late 1990’s and 2000’s started to ‘converge’ with Metalcore, Screamo, Grind, Mathcore, and other experiments. There was also a notable amount of pop in these genres, yet there were many exceptions. Meanwhile, artists in the art-music scenes around the mid-1990’s and later tended to be more commonly lesser known yet would have quite the impact in the 2000’s and 2010’s. Ambient, Drone, Dark Ambient, Glitch, Sound Art, Abstract, Collage, these sounds begin to see more popularity around this time in a thriving underground, and other styles form out of these experiments stemming from the early 1990’s leading into the present.

On the other hand, in yet another instance of market capture, the 2010’s saw music streaming services, another cooperation between regulation, the music industry, and big data and big tech. Labels and lawmakers hailed Spotify as an anti-piracy tool, yet the irony is that at their start, around 60% of the music on Spotify was stolen by Spotify and put on their service. They didn’t pay artists, and most ironic, they used pre-release, bootleg, or unauthorized versions in their service.

Of note is the music streaming revenue model’s hostility to the musician and the consumer. A streaming listener pays 15-40$ monthly while listening to 400-700 plays on average. The three largest labels and Spotify take the biggest cut of this subscription fee, while the artist makes merely 3 tenths of a penny on each play, rounding down to the nearest penny. An artist on some streaming platform that reaches ten thousand streams in some month makes only 6$ or so for those ten thousand plays, less so if they pay for digital distribution, less so if they pay their label too. Usually, a single album sale direct from a band will earn some artist 6-8$, again, less under certain conditions. As such, streaming services have shown themselves to be an overpriced and low-value rental service for media that in truth is a big data harvesting tool and advertising company, rather than a media company. The sad part is when media disappears from the services we use, meanwhile trending media, ads, are juxtaposed over the music one is trying to listen to.

In contrast, the late 2010’s and early 2020’s led to many surprises such as the return of physical media, the vinyl revival, vinyl record sales overtaking CD, and streaming revenue being surpassed by purchase revenue, and in addition these changes in the industry were brought out by small labels that began to distribute and market their artists on the ’net, almost exclusively on Bandcamp by 2020, and thriving where in the mid 1990’s and until the early 2010’s they would not have succeeded.

In this vein, Bowie had been a very adamant proponent of the Internet during the 1990’s, saying that “the Internet represents a great opportunity for mankind,” and as for the music industry, it’s failure to adapt in spite of the previous century of market and regulatory capture led to its own failures in sales and marketing. Rarely anyone truly and and actively listens to much radio music as of the mid-2010’s and there are the same ten versions of the same ten songs by talentless musicians that won’t be relevant in two to three weeks, meanwhile the Art-Music, Underground music thrives like never before, with the sales, streams, and trends making it clear that music listeners actively desire authenticity, honesty, and creativity in their listening.

The innovations that came to form the basis of pop and rock, and the basis of the novelty of various experimental forms since the 1970’s have taken the place of ‘factory’ or standardized music. The standardization in Pop have led to its slow decline, same as with many forms. Rock’s initial success and revival today was in its ability to accept blending, combination, deconstruction and reconstruction, and turn various elements of other forms and styles into novel ones. The beauty in the underground is in its innovations in style and form, which led to a subcultural Renaissance that is overtaking the cultural dogmas in music culture. By leading the charge since the 1970’s, these experiments have brought music to a place where artists express themselves in unheard and multifaceted forms. The future will certainly bring many new forms and artists for decades to come and with the decentralized methods of distribution, marketing and sales provided by the ’net, no longer do only a few major labels control music culture.

(Originally written in early 2025.)

“What happens a million years from now? The majority of humans are more highly evolved, and the cutting edge of evolution are very very highly evolved, they may not have a physical body […] I suggest you would find them in the mental hospitals. They live in a different reality, naturally they can’t function very well, so the “safe place” would be the mental hospital, unless they could integrate their view of reality into another. It is the nervous system which is evolving, supported by bones and muscles and tissues, and so on, it gives us the picture of reality, we don’t see beyond UV and infrared, we only hear maybe 20Hz to 20kHz maximum. As we are evolving, this window widens and opens up more and more, we see more and more of the same reality, but we assume we see a different view of reality, but it is a different view of the same reality.”

Interviewer: “Before you were talking about the people in mental hospitals and they are geniuses, they have an expanded perception of reality, what is the nature of the reality they see?”

“Well, take for example, the boy who says “look mom, there’s our dead grandmother,” and is taken to a psychiatrist and is given medicine or electroshock therapy, and he no longer sees them.”

“In the olden days, these things used to be called a miracle. Now take this fellow, St. Paul, a ball of light lowers and Jesus says “leave our people alone,” and he changes his actions and the church is constructed and public relations is hightened. Now, take someone driving down the highway has the same happen, a police would pull him over and arrest him for having a psychotic break, but this is what we’re doing to the miracles, flattening them out.”

“It’s not that the body has a soul, but the soul has the body. It is the soul that is evolving, ultimately, carrying the body with it.”

G-d is light, energy, movement, life itself. Kelvin zero means no music, no vibration, light being a sort of upper bounds to energy speed. Mass is energy slowed down, energy is matter sped up. That movement can be characterized as music or vibration, each planet’s magnetic field is a different note, as are the structure of the fabric of space time (tritones). Earth and saturn are high and low A respectively.

Death could be more accurately described as “bad vibrations” or “no music” and this is where it gets a little weird. Quantum theory posits that merely observing something affects its form/outcome, and brain waves, spoken word, body movements, these are all languages, and the body is a big tx/rx antenna for visual vibration, sonic vibration, and other types of frequency…

Everyone has their speaking in a musical way, for the most part, including major and minor shifts, modes, keys, etc., and everyone picks up on subtle cues in these languages intuitively. This is what I would deem a soul’s “essence,” as in “essential”–the key and mode of a soul, their brainwaves impart a musical key and mode, and their movements and speech often match too.

Observing you through your sound and words, and you perceive me through mine, and we intuitively understand each other more easily even never having met face to face. The electrons are carried to you and in a quantum sense, I modify them and these musics, brainwave patterns, are stored in electronic storage in what is essentially FM synthesis, or radio waves, and they impart a small piece of me to onlookers.

Life is harmony and music and reduction of dissonance or negativity and phase inversions, and it is also vibration, attaining a higher state of consciousness involves becoming attuned to the energy and achieving unity with the world around us.

All of it is electrons or atoms. Subatomic particles are atoms. Atoms are atoms, planets and people can be atoms, spacetime is a weave of atoms moving back and forth, and attaining a higher consciousness involves taking in these atoms/electrons in and lifting them up with us.

There is only one of everything, ∅ = ∞ or (null set) = (true infinity) or all of the nothing is equal to all of the something. Nothing is something that has no music in it, no vibration, kelvin 0, frozen spacetime.

We are also spacetime, not simply atoms and electrons, and worlds live inside us, other lives, other planets, other earths, just like we are nested in a room, in a building, on a street, in a county, in a prefecture, in a country, in a world, in a solar system, in a galaxy, in a universe, these are all atoms and electrons and it is simply nested inside itself recursively.

“Even so must the son of man be lifted up” has a duplicate or triplicate meaning… To lift others up and generate harmony and melody and music for the world, to try and alleviate sickness, dissonance, disharmony, that is a noble goal I’ve been steadily working at little by little each day. I hope when I get to the pearly gates and talk to St. Peter, and my life is said and done, that I helped in some minorly significant way, whether I lifted them up through prayer and meditation, or if I was just merely good to people, I pray the mark I leave on the world is a harmonious melody of melodies, a song of songs…

I hope, holy fool that I am, that I’m understood and this resonates with you…

Heavy hearts, can you hold our hands? The planets help you understand that light and dark are wrong and all that’s left is us…

Black and white aren’t really present in someone’s true ideology, and blaming groupthink is more precisely an issue rather than blaming some group as hegemonic entity; “white and black are wrong and oft, all that’s left is us.” Prioritise things that are in your control is good advice, as is “worry is a terrible waste of the imagination,” and it’s certainly a waste of time creating problems and ignoring solutions…

Reaching across the aisle isn’t so impossible IMO; on the ground political opinion (i.e. not dissemanated through media or talking heads) is anti-big business, less taxes, anti-war, better taxation, anti “guantanamo-style” torture, anti pedo, anti toppling and then planting friendly regimes, anti CIA, FBI, NSA, DoH (alphabet soup), are against pollution generally, and are against mitary action broadly.

Colloquially the meanings are made useless and inaccurate and imprecise since the news media is a prescriptive ideology meant to take the place of using one’s brain… Ideology implies there is a foundational reasoning rooted in psychological, ideated, contextualised, conceptual series of paradigms and axioms holding it together; thinking about what things mean to oneself is part of being an individual and have one’s own opinions…

These days, that’s a rarity, as the news media prescribes a binary choice between two halves of a false dichotomy in black and white, and in highly speculative terms.. the longer something is in the news cycle means it’s controversial, and while they propagandise their opinions, everyone gets in on it, and so there’s more poison in the well and no one ends up agreeing, and yet, there is such a plethora of opinions that one drowns in it…

This is a highly divisive and aggravating feedback loop, and while we all fight there’s a very real small group of people who are responsible, even if not conspiratorially, they are called many things… anything from statistically or theologically, the “one-percent” or “the Illuminati,” respectively, the “elite,” and pretty much the whole world knows about Epstein and agrees on that subject, and that ties into big business, union of corporate and state, forever in wars, child prostitution and sex slavery, etc., and I’m wondering why it’s so hard to have productive discussions. Who knows?

I would blame “news media” some and yet, the onus also lies on the people obsessing over the trend/tokenism/murder of the week. Why do we keep watching? The commentators run their mouths incessantly, most people don’t read past the headline, they often have flawed analysis, if not outright lies…

Again, political and theological philosophies are downstream from personal philosophies and beliefs/axioms… The people in charge, the news media, they do not resemble the people on the ground so to speak, let alone do the talking heads even divulge their true philosophies.. So why argue a divisive and prescribed opinion that didn’t come from oneself, yet, instead came from some warmonger, or some billionaire, or some politician, or anyone else? Think for yourself.

There’s this ridiculous idea that we need to be engaged in international politics, and yet that’s a terrible waste of time to engage in what had no bearing on my life or decision making processes. There’s no purpose in getting involved so directly.. The news media tells you what to think and how to feel, and it’s hardly worth your effort, at all…

Hear, smith of the heavens, what the poet asks. May thy mercy softly come unto me. So I call on thee, for thou hast created me. I am thy servant, thou art my Lord.

G-d, I call on thee to heal me. Remember me, mild one, we need thee most. Drive out, o’ king of suns, generous and great, every human sorrow from the fortress of the heart.

Watch over me, mild one, truly every moment, most, we need thee, in the world of men. Send us good causes, son of the virgin, all aid is from thee, in my heart.

Hear, smith of the heavens, the poet seeketh. In thy still small voice mayest thou show grace. As I call on thee, thou my creator. I am thy servant, thou art my true Lord.

G-d, I call on thee for thou to heal me. Bid me, prince of peace, thou art my supreme need, ever I need thy city of the heart, generous and great, o’er all human woe.

Guard me, my savior, ever I need thee, Through ev’ry moment, in this world so wide. Virgin-born, send me noble motives now. Aid cometh from thee, to my deepest heart.

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re sinking? I do…

The technological and signals processing implications of the sines and oscillations emanating from within the crushing destruction of the subbass, ringing and droning show that remission of the signal is not possible. The circuitry and the tower blend together to mark a change in space-time itself, as space and time fold and strangle dark broods of painful catharsis. The echoing waves pour out of the tower and I drown in Her signal, o’Hera, relieve me of this mortal coil, living under ocellated eyes is not a way to live…

The new circuitry and the crushing signal flood out and entrap me, and all I want is to breathe. Her poison tongue glistens in the dark, what little light is carried is covered by a black swarm reigning down, with eyes greater than all the ocean deeps, the signal is received and guides us to our doom.

The subbass and droning chords capture a doom of a sludgy black mass, the contrasts between massive crushing signal and contemplative slow paced quietness reveal a solitude and catharsis most metal bands don’t show. The contrast between loud and quiet lend to the album’s themes, tuning in to the signal, remission is not possible, so we must accept being courted by a signal of gloom and death..

Hosannah! Hosannah! Your love fills our lungs, who, by your breath, guides us near by your song.

Hosannah! The joy of our hearts is a song, by your word, guides us near to your love, everlong.

The chariot! The chariot! It’s wheels roiled in fire, as the Lord cometh down in the pomp of His ire.

O’mercy! O’mercy! Look down from above, grant us peace, thy sad children, with love.

The rhythm of snowfall guides us growing tall, smothers us in white and gold, so I carefully harbor you. If the weight is too much to bear, your burden I will ease, I will share, between us, should you stop for air.

It will guide us, our loves, to the truth inside; we’ll be under the flight of doves, in lightness, of light. Intwined, we seek inward and we seek without extrinsic fears, intrinsic doubts, we worry, yet we are devout, in love, our faith resounds.

There’s a rhythm in our home, and in everywhere we go, whether fast or whether slow, it will guide us where to go–suddenly I see a light wrapping in around me, from the deepest darkest sea, and cloudy days, we meet.

A heartfelt laugh, a noble tear will cast us off all of our fears, and a sunshine bellows when it’s clear, and home, it beckons us so near.

Love, it waits for you and I, in the ocean deep, the sky so high, the deepest joys in the light, the ocean calm and the darkest night.

Will I feel you, rhythmic, too? will I address you by your tune?

The rhythm of the snowfall, growing tall, smothers us in a foggy white, so I harbor you, your light. If the weight’s too much to bear, I will ease it, we will share your burden between us, so please stop a while for air…

I will guide us, our loves, to the truth inside, we will smother that lightlessness in light. Intwined, we seek the other out, through extrinsic fears, intrinsic doubts, we seek so long, yet no matter how, ‘cause faith in love is fast devout.

Mouse On The Keys tone back the energy, yet a dark asceticism roils throughout the album, a very minimal approach this time around, but not lacking in technicality, a trancelike surreal sense of rhythm and melody carry the listener through the album. One Last Time and Fail Better are incredible pieces, where One Last Time sways in moody polytime, Fail Better cascades through its absurd polyrhythmic subdivisions to keep the listener guessing, bringing up the energy toward the end, but subtly so, not lacking in inertia, but yet carefully micromanaging each detail as the subdivisions grow in permutations.

The self titled track, however, sees a more immediately familiar sound of piano with some prepared samples and cello… It is more reminiscent of modern classical rather than jazz-fusion, even with the guitar harmonics and plucking; yet with The Dawn it has an arpeggiation that entrances, and the drummer keeps time so particularly, adding a hihat variation or a steady bass drum pattern here and there, where a piano melody rings out.

This particular brand of minimalism is more like guided meditation as opposed to the high energies of previous works, and there seems to be an improvisational element too. A gorgeous minimalist approach to layering comes forth on these tracks, adding phrasing changes that build coyly, and it’s surprising to hear them in such a minimal balance, yet not that surprising considering their approach and attention to detail on previous works.

In the turbulent cascades of the infinities’ breath, the duration of time stretches onward toward and past languid moments of breathless plein air, the further beyond dances together with the present moments in oscillations that onwardly, forwardly, and backwardly, express changes through revelatory tones and sinusoidal reverberance. In the skies and heavens themselves, and a new world will form from the emptiness… Oh what beautious reverberance…

This is a pensive, exploratory piece that sits neatly into the background if need be. Oscillations are interwining into a droning sense of dark ambiguity. The pieces here are the combination of part art exhibit, part live performance, part field recording, part electronic, part ambient-drone. The tracks are performed in “sky chambers” modeled after aristotle’s own work.

There are little details like a bird chirping, or a police siren, or a faint conversation… These details do quite a lot to the piece, they really are nice field recordings, and the sound takes new form.. A bird chirping becomes swollen with resonance; a police siren echoes unnaturally through the chamber; that faint conversation masked through its own resonance…

There are many ways to describe music, yet Climata refuses to be labeled so easily, or attract too many labels to render the piece indescribable until heard. The thoughtful caretaker of these sounds is subtly oscillating oscillations, through oscillations, it’s a special brand of minimalism that I don’t want to pin down, and yet, Climata shows a careful listener what lies “more beyond”

The MASH Theme brought me to “You Must Believe In Spring,” I heard that there wasa rendition of the show’s opening and I listened to it a few times before demoing the entire album.. Suicide Is Painless is a gorgeous piece that bounces back and forth from this emotionally charged theme and a danceable series of thematic variations that keep returning to the original, but more uplifted as it goes on.. Continuing the album I was rewarded with tracks that never stopped giving quite varied and nuanced expressions of love and wistful melancholy, and the melancholy isn’t so deep blue, yet is more of an aqua-green. Gary’s Theme has a melody that, upon opening the track, it is a reminiscent, nostalgic track that holds the listeners hand and says goodbye – a warm final emnbrace in punctuated chords and a wonderful interplay between bass and piano, the drums take a mild approach, leaving the bassist most of the space between. My Foolish Heart is also a goodnight slowdance with an enraptured lover, a slow build to a slower conclusion. It feels like dancing, rocking back and forth in love; as well whatbfollows is an upbeat piece, that title track, two versions, with the second featuring a prominent bass solo that has such a lovely swing. These two albums are full of tracks like these, and they are Evans’ specialty, wistful solace and a tinge of sadness, reminiscing on some other past time… There’s even a song called Some Other Time that has this exact mood and atmosphere.

I won’t be ignoring anything from Evans’ career anytime soon, and his aptitude to express a theme continuously through his improvisations continue to amaze me.. He was a man fascinated by beauty, what he wanted to express was a belief that things will get better, that spring will come and light will join us in our lives again after a painful winter.. When I think of Jazz as a genre, the quintessential sound of a piano trio comes to mind, and Evans always knew how to pluck the notes to turn melancholy into an upright, uplifting conversation between members. He is so particularly well spoken and his phrasings tend to link together from track to track, a wonderful tendency of divine proportions, I wonder how many more albums he will release on Bandcamp. I’m on the hunt for more Evans whenever I’m in a record store now…

The Highest Praise for Mother Mary, who art in Heav’n, who defined and wrote the code of life unto the books of life, and from the deeps, the Holy sea, the Ocean of Light outpouring from void, bringing something from nothing, uniting the divided, unifying the black and white, with a holy word, a holy need, a name and a song. The lyrical melody, the sanctimonious harmony of the spirit’s sumbission written on your page is written in a song unknown to man, and Her Azure-lit face reveals the plight of Man. The Son of Man must be lifted up, and the Son of G-d reveals the son and the daughter to the Mother and Father, and from the abyssal void, the nullification undone, the chaos and division given form and unity, the form given to the formless, the spirit outpouring from the formless! Give the highest praise to the Mother, the light, the guiding star, the truth Herself! 3. 14. 7. 21. 9. 10. 7. 11.

Time is a series of echoes in multitudinal points of intersecting asymmetrical vibrations and reverberations through itself to form a non-linear floe, like oceans, lakes, puddles, clouds, rainfall, snow, forming a water cycle…

We all want to know ourselves. Break my bones, I don’t need them where I’m going. I’m not who you think I am, but even if I thought you’d known, I never would have told you so–but more alarming, I would have done the very same, would’ve stole more than your name, would’ve cursed and brought the world on your shoulders…

You were in the wrong place at the right time.

1. Fix Your Face
2. Lurch
3. Black Bubblegum
4. Sick On Sunday
5. When Acting As A Particle
6. Nong Eye Gong
7. When Acting As A Wave
8. 82588
9. Milk Lizard
10. Party Smasher
11. Dead As History
12. Horse Hunter
13. Mouth Of Ghosts

Fix Your Face

You want a vision you can’t have, a line you can’t walk. Writhing around on the floor, you won’t be aware until it’s too late, because you never look around, you’re like a deer in the headlights, baby. Queen of delusion, you will never learn compassion–start a fire, when you can never put it out. You’re burning up in the blaze you started. I want to see you face down, because I know that you play that part so well.

Wide awake the casket is ready for the viewing, but we are still moving… Already we smell of rot, there will be no come back, no coming back for any of us now. Don’t you realize there is nowhere you can hide? Where I’m from, there is never a rest for the hunted. No way you and I will ever be done, we’re never apart. Whatever you’re doing, we will always cross your mind. You were nothing, now you’ll pay the price for her.

Lurch

I don’t know your name, but I know you. Do you lust for fame or forgiveness? Well, I’ll give you everything you want. Well, I’ll give you anything you need. You won’t be perfect, so best to freeze you in this state, go on home, you shouldn’t be walking around on this day.

Now you’ve stuffed your throat, you’ve walked on your burial ground. Oh, you’ll draw the crowd, with honey porcelain skin, and crystal baby blouse. Your picture in my pocket, I’m obsessed with you. Oh sweetie, there’s no sense in crying, you’re above them all. Barricade the door, you can hold my hand for comfort when you fall. You wear your skin so fresh, your smell intoxicates. Little scarlet.

Black Bubblegum

Got so much salt from your lies poured into me. You didn’t see yourself dead already, so full of air with every breath you breathe, but you forget that in your fairy tale, I’m the wolf. All this attention got you thinking that you’re a queen, you think that everything you’re doing isn’t a dream–so long as it feels alright.

I had gotten frozen by the way you walked, by the love that you gave, by that look on your face–it’s a cover up. I know everything. You’re made for letter fame, regret is part of your name. There’s something you couldn’t tell, it’s what you wanted to feel, it’s what you’re dying to feel.

Check out your face on the wall… Like what you see? I’m sure you see yourself, oh, so unique. You’re just a sucker for the flame of the week, but you forget that in your fairytale, I’m the wolf. All this attention got you thinking you were a queen. You thought that everything in life you want should be free. Nothing is what you think.

Sick On Sunday

I could never have. Standing here with you–one regret, one mistake, nothing we could do… After this is done you can go your way. Don’t forget, this is how everything should be… Don’t you ever go, don’t you ever go.

When Acting As A Particle

Nong Eye Gong

When Acting As A Wave

Now, you live forever, you laugh. The winner and the best man. Corrupter. Shapeshifter. Your voice is the sound of nothing–butcher of every art form, peddler of deceit. Watching the hour hand drag, destroyer of the past.

We’re smart enough to say we’re sorry, not smart enough to start again. Betraying death’s illusion, don’t blame me for the fall, the pride before the fall… Running for the exit, there is no way out.

82588

Fallen angel, how you’ve changed, poison runs through your veins. You were never a saint, but now you’re a sin, spoiled rotten from within. Who clipped your wings? So useless… Can you cut them yourself? Chewed off your own? Good thinking….

You were coming apart and I thought I could help you hrough the fever. Not the first one, not the last one, I’m not sorry for you.

I remember a time when everything that you knew, I thought I already knew in my mind, and I thought you knew the same. I know truth will set you free. Cracked and crazy, baby. I know truth will set us free.

Milk Lizard

My thick tongue hangs down low to the ground, licking up the sweat coming off of her heels. She wants my teeth to wear. She wants my hell to bear. Well, missy, it’s a lock for load, if you wanna grind hips, don’t do it alone. Don’t save no dance, no, not for me, just cut me out.

You crept up like a disease, looking like a girl who would try to deceive. Your heart was trying to bleed, and this can be the right road if you’re talking to me. Well, you thought you’d tear my skin from bone just ‘cause it was cold and you needed a coat. Don’t tease me, just start digging the hole. Start digging, now.

Oh you’re getting so sleepy tonight, when you wanna go home but you don’t have a ride. No time, just taste, won’t touch for free. My salt your sweet.

And you were there, and I asked every question that never had an answer. I see right through you. We never even noticed that there always was a reason that we were never meant to be left alone. This feels like neverending.

Party Smasher

You are only the faded star of my design, shut down, lost potential, crazy from your questions answered. Walk forth, you’re the fulfillment of a fallacy, creature from fantasy–don’t think that you ever knew me. Don’t you ever change? Won’t you ever change?

We are forever entwined stuck in a play we can’t get out of. Don’t you ever change? Won’t you ever change…?

You and I will never be able to end this, we are forever entwined, stuck in a play we can’t get out of. You say, “someday, we can start up again, without a plan, no sign of the pressure,” I say you’re crazy. I hope you see my face in the mirror, you will never learn. You’re forever dead to me. Won’t you ever see your shadow?

Dead As History

I made a big mistake with you tonight, the way our insides burned like moths flying to light, as the sun begins to set, I cannot find my way back. Walking with my eyes on fire, I never found the way back.

We’ll never feel like anything is wrong, but the tragedy is not to start a sad song. I know the games we play give us away, a way for us to see if we still feel alive.

As the sun begins to set, I cannot find my way back. Walking with my eyes on fire, I never found a way back. We’ll never feel like anything is wrong, but the tragedy is not to start a sad song. I know the games we play give us away, a way for us to see if we still feel alive. Walls we have built and bridges we have burned, deep through the heart, the further we feel from harm.

Time is always right behind us, like the lamb under the moon. I’ll hold on to this forever–that is never long enough.

Time is always just behind us, like the lamb under the gun. I’ll hold onto this forever–there is never long enough.

Horse Hunter

Stumbling over dead, forgotten. Catch you and the secret falls away. You were drunken from delusion, slipped and so the secret fell away. I see tears in your eyes. This party is a bore and you’re the joke. Me and you, we are the light, say it with me, give me your hand. You should go your way, you are no friend of mine. Must you live those lies than see inside these walls?

Commerce is your god, cannibalistic flies, monarch of your womb, messiah of your thighs. How sacred is the web that must be spun? Your taste is on the tip of every tongue.

Now, lets lay down, take me all the way, all the way down. Shout, shout out loud, make us proud for days, all the way down, let’s lay down, take me all the way, now let’s lay down. Now, give to fire, beyond the soul’s desire.

Mouth Of Ghosts

Our trust runs out tonight, and everything we said dissolves, and now we say our last goodbyes, with nothing to resolve. I never imagined you’d turn into this, but then the end was always close, we could feel it all along.

Don’t you know where we could hide all the lies?

You were a mouth without a heart, an action without meaning, and you walk afraid, reaching for the hands that turned closed.

The idea that a work of art must be totally and utterly flawless and without errors, such as a spelling or gramarrical error, performative error, misdelivered line, or any somewhat incorrect aspect or err is a misconception that has come from not only an over-saturation in recorded works, but an over-abundance of highly polished yet structurally, formally, and formatically lacking, they are corporate “factory” media. If one hears a voice crack, or some few sharp notes, or if a painting is unrealistic, or some plot leaves a detail unexplained, these are often regarded as legitimate issues or discussed as criticism. The reality of these discussions is that they are often off-topic on the subject of if some issue can truly be considered detrimental to form, or if it can still be considered good art. The voice crack or sharp notes might be considered emotive, evocative, the painting is not ‘unrealistic’ but is using an exaggerated expression of form to say something beyond what realism would offer, the topics left ambiguous in a story may be better left implied or ambiguous, the plot detail wasn’t important enough to make the story falter, the ad lib was offering something useful to the plot… These mistakes can be useful and they can be leaned into in order to express some new idea.

One’s idea of perfection, or beauty, could be different than someone else’s, and some styles or performances may be good for one and not for another. Some idea of beauty may be too high-brow, too saddening, or too uplifting or emotive. Maybe a work is in a style most don’t appreciate, or a form that is unknown or some regard as trite. One form of beauty is in the concept of ‘perfect harmony,’ when the reality is that an abundance of harmony and harmonic resonance causes dissonance itself, and that a nominal amount of dissonance in harmony is to be expected and desired, innate, natural, and inborn. The balance of harmony and dissonance is beautiful because it lends itself to the ups and downs, the arcs of the stories of life, and our lives. Therein lies the issue, for if beauty is informed by ugliness, then there is no penultimate beauty, and if harmony is informed by dissonance, then there is merely optimal resonance, since dissonance leads to harmony being more beautiful than harmony alone… Is there something that can truly be called a penultimate perfection, and does perfection really exist in that form?

The purpose of pointing out that imperfection may be beautiful, as in harmony and dissonance, is such that it must retain its humanity, or the elements that come from the artist. Some work of art, any work should be polished and practiced and an expression of skillful artistry, but yet, the concept of penultimate perfection is simultaneously impossible, misrepresentative, and contradictory. Not only is it totally impossible to combine structure, style, and form to create some penultimate work, or yet have many others agree on its perfection, but yet, if that were attainable it would quickly be rendered imperfect, or irrelevant, since many other artists would strive to create that very same level of perfection, in that same form, style, or structure. When the unattainable desire for and pursuit of perfection is held over the desire for and pursuit of enjoyable works, then an artist’s art and sometimes art itself will suffer. If an artist focuses their motivations and creativity on creating something enjoyable that conveys meaning and inspires people, an artist’s art will invariably be better than if some impossible goal of perfection is prioritized.

Creativity, expression, and novelty go together, such as with creating or expressing in novel ways and forms, and thus penultimate perfection counters and counteracts these concepts. Art should retain its humanity and some small level of imperfection, as they are innate characteristics implied by form, imposed by form, and combining those with the tendencies and motivations an artist assembles to create art is, in itself, the artist’s humanity and truth to style. These inborn characteristics in expressions of art are not imperfections, but yet, when understanding the nature of expression through the creation of art, we comprehend the beauty of imperfection, just the same as with harmony and dissonance. In fact, the concept of ‘perfection’ and the meaning it implies with regards to artworks should not mean something is absolutely flawless down to the finest degree, but yet it should be understood to mean that it is reasonably as good as it can get given the limitations imposed upon and implied by style, structure, and form.

The nature and expressions of art, through genre, style, form, format, which tools and instruments are used, these make up an artist’s primary modes of artistic conveyance. Expressing ideas invariably lends itself to and is lent to itself by the author’s inherent tendencies, no matter the style or form. These tendencies can be broadly applied as a form of philosophy of art, and color everything an artist does. A style and a form are less some mechanism intended for repetitive reproduction, but yet, is an ever-changing flow that should involve growth and introspection.

In terms of artistic input and output, perceiving some work may inspire one to employ a new technique of stylistic proclivity. The intake of some work also invariably affects one’s art in style, format, form, and structure. In terms of considering a body of work the artist’s growth should be apparent. The pursuit of improved skills and forms and styles, they are noble pursuits, yet the pursuit of perfection is a weight on an artist’s back if anything. Pursuance of an absolutely flawless work is a suffocation of the artist and their work, it suffocates the creative flow completely.

The artist’s accidents, flaws, imperfections, they can very often be seen as a part and parcel of an artist’s style, and yet, still be regarded as good as it can be, despite the circumstances. Perfection is unattainable, moreover, the connotations of penultimate flawlessness tears the heart and soul out of a work, fogs the mind in a failing effort, and blocks rationality of the work itself out. The pursuit of improvement in one’s form with their instruments and tools, their form with regards to style, these are noble pursuits, yet many get lost or lose their drive trying to attain the unattainable. Fatigue arising from perfectionism is the killer of the artist’s art, so simply enjoy the ride and create and convey concepts, ideas, emotions, moods, atmospheres, etc., there’s something there, too, that when an artist enjoys making their art it shows, even in subconscious and unspoken ways.

Melody, “one notes”
create harmony, a song
of songs, a music.

Genesis of an
art, together, light the dark,
bon voyage, midnight.

Morning. Salmon and
purple rise, with indigo
chords, we’re in those hues.

Tomes and shades of love,
Harmonic resonance,
a balance of our hearts.

Sun chased around the
horizon, night is short, the day
is long, spring is here.

Sweet floral smells of
hibiscus, lavender, and
fruit, with tea brewing.

Honey and sweetness on the lips, bees dance.
Birds sing, softly enraptured into spring.

Fish swim in deep blues,
while, in contrast, the deeps are
inside of the fish.

From boundless emptiness comes unbound light, truth.

The writings of one-thousand generations cannot comprehensively explain… With all the words in the world, I am struggling to explain, with all the pens and with all the paper in the world, I’m trying to define the indescribable.

Fish swim inside of the blue, but
in some certain understanding, the
ocean is inside of the fish, too.

From a limitless emptiness,
comes a boundless unlimited
light, hope and truth.

G-d, Family

          logic, reasoning,
       mathematics, heuristics
        /                    \
       /                      \
    Hope   Family, G-d,  Love, respect
    Faith     Goodness   true emotions
       \      itself          /
        \                    /
    Light, Dark,       Expressions of
    Nothingness, _____ true emotions,
   Somethingness,       art,  music,
 Harmony, Dissonance   oration,  etc.

Art, expressions of G-d

          logic, reasoning,
       mathematics, heuristics
          /              \
         /                \
     visuals     Art-    musics,
     shapes.     Ars     sonics.
        \                   /
         \                 /
     symbolism __ language, narrative
   sign, signify    lingu-,  logos-

Logical Mind

         logic and reasoning
           /             \
          /               \
    memories   ideas   awareness,
    synapses   logos   perception
         \     lingu      /
          \              /
       feelings,      sensing &
       emotions. ___ physicality

Senses

            sight, vision
            /           \
           /             \
        taste   sense   smell
           \             /  
            \           /
           touch ___ hearing

Identity

         logic and reasoning
          /               \
         /                 \
    memories    id-     awareness,
    synapses  identity  perception
         \                 /
          \               /
       feelings,      senses &
       emotions. ___ awareness.

Atomic

         transmit, frequency,
        radiation, wavelength.
          /               \
     gravity    atom-    warmth
    attraction           energy
          \               /
         electro ____ atomic
        magnetism     quantum

Radiation

         transmit, frequency,
        radiation, wavelength.
          /               \
     gravity    radio-   warmth
    attraction           energy
          \               /
        electro _____ atomic
       magnetism      quantum

I built myself a home, and a deep well of inspiration came forth, and my heart healed, inverting from its
brokenness to wholesomeness.

Too much, too little to say, soft-spokenness tends to be the ways we speak, and the stillness in our motion keeps our movement light and our stillness tempered.

More and more, every day, I bear witness to the answers, unfurling out of a darkness swallowed by the light at the bottom of the oceans in our eyes…

I try to describe the indescribable, define the nondescript, yet the languages of the heart express it without words.

Still there is too-much and too-little to say, and so we whisper…

Our quiet musing on the ineffable…

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery–celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from–it’s where you take them to.

This quote from Jarmusch is so perverse, wrong, artistically fraudulent, deranged; such a fragrant thievery of the spirituality and language of the heart that it is a bastardization of the creative process, turning it into a fasicimile of nothing itself. Uselessly braindead and hopelessly lazy, nothing can come from such a so-called “artistic” “ideological bent.” A sickening and sickly neurosis of the soul, and beyond plagarism it pretends plagarism is fashionable and hip. Worse than a waste of words: it’s a cognitohazard so blatanly perverse and deranged that even the MKULTRA and population and culture control schemes–.and schemers, of the cultural and medical eugenics eras can get behind them. Here’s another perverse and deranged cognitohazard: “just let people enjoy corporophagia, it’s not hurting anyone.” Yet another somatic cognitohazard: “it’s all relative, everything is subjective, so it’s a matter of taste, there’s no such thing as good or bad.”

He acts like he is commenting on art widely, and as if he is speaking figuratively, or ironically, ending with using “l’pisser” creator’s hopelessly inane words to play coy–.when he was blatantly post-Lynch anyway; yet, he directly states “you don’t even have to credit it, just steal it,” and after watching the first thirty minutes of two of his decried “masterpieces” I decided he was not only terrible at writing a script, but he doesn’t even know what a story is, let alone a narrative. I can see he was “inspired” by Lynch so he thought “oh, I’ll do something surreal and weird and quirky, I’m not like the other movie makers, I’m different,” and had his stolen style branding from someone who was better–.all while directly stealing, all while not taking credit, all while he did what he says directly in this quote, all while claiming he’s artistic for framing blatant plagarism as honorable because “all art is derivative,” so, “nothing can be posited therefore nothing is true” dialectic crap.

As for the inescapability of pretentious snobbery in film and art and the ideation of novelty versus derivation, there’s a careful balance.. Familiarity is key, but novelty is crucial. Yet, an inverse counterexample, an obvious one, why don’t people watch Captain Superheroman movies anymore? Once you’ve seen any two, you realize you’ve seen them all. Marvel tried to market a convoluted mess of disparate narratives into a series of movies that simply wore itself out on its own oversaturation. People weren’t following the narrative because it simply wasn’t there, it wasn’t important to Marvel or Disney to make the movies’ many disparate stories make sense, so you have to go outside the movie and talk to some comic book nerd that’s been waiting all his life for this moment and even he hates the movies by now. There’s the same two romances and the same five fight scenes in each film. With Marvel heading the films you’d think they care about differentiating the characters in combat, let alone in personality or development, let alone let the overarching story make sense.

On a more serious note, most sensible people would see 2001: A Space Odyssee as a non-derivative work due to the absurd amount of liberties taken with the plot, scenes, characters and development, as well as the high level of detail, and the completely novel imagery and rewriting of the plot by Kubrick. The same is true for Fennesz –. Plays and his ‘covers’ there. The rights societies, lawyers, and legal system cannot categorize them as covers due to their sheer novelty. One simply cannot paraphrase or rewrite a song or transpose anything into another song and it is a new song, as Jim says–.in the case of Fennesz it’s quite literally a completely different song; Fennesz plays simply two notes to comprise the theme–when the original song had at least 4 in its theme! An interesting ’less is more’ stylistic and formattic choice.

Novelty almost always translates into authenticity, but plagarism and derivation almost never do, and that’s the thing, this proves Jim’s argument dead wrong, whether interpreted literally, figuratively, ironically, or even self-depreciatingly. Unfortunately for him, it’s literal, yet he pretends it’s figurative, and the ironic part is he doesn’t realize how self-depreciating it truly is. Paying homage to inspiration and direct bastardization of conceptual elements in other art are completely different things, and this is obvious to any sensible person.

To return to dialectics, “nothing can be posited, therefore nothing is true” is practically the root of dialectics in cultural eugenics. To say “everything is subjective, so there is no such thing as objective measure,” or “nothing is truly original, so originality doesn’t exist,” arrogantly suggest that every thought, every possible word, every possible sentence, every possible concept, every possible book, narrative, arc, tone, tambre, instrument, philosophy, form, format, etc., every possible art or expression is already unoriginal before it even comes into cognition, let alone creation and publication, since it definitively had to exist before the art’s creation–.this truly is absolutely absurd. Many people do espout and believe these false axioms, and I’m 200% certain Jim means it literally, not figuratively; but irregardless that’s the same exact framing as “everything can be posited, therefore everything is true” or “nothing can be posited, therefore nothing is true,” and yet any preschooler can tell you 2+2=4 and 2+2=/=5, proving both wrong definitively. Unfortunately for those of middling ability to conceptualize, if one introduces the concept of the subjective lens along with the cognitohazard of “everything is subjective so nothing can be measured objectively” the reasoning is reduced to an apathetic willful ignorance: “let people enjoy terrible art, philo, science, cultural diarrhea–.taste is subjective anyway, it’s all a matter of taste,” and people really believe this trite–.they live and die by it.

Imagine a piano keyboard, eighty-eight keys, only eighty-eight, and yet, hundreds of new melodies, new tunes, new harmonies are being composed upon these keyboards every day im Dorset alone. Our language, tiger, our language–.hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of legitimate new ideas, so that I can say the following sentence and be utterly sure that nobody has ever said it before in the history of human communication: “Hold the newsreader’s news squarely waiter, or friendly milk will come to mark my trousers.” Perfectly ordinary words but never put in that precise order. A unique child delivered of a unique mother. And yet, and yet, all of us spent all of our days saying the same things time after weary time: I love you, don’t go in there, get out, you have no right to do that, stop it, why should I, help, Margorie is dead. And surely it’s a thought to take out to tea on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie on Linguistic Elasticity on A Bit of Fry and Laurie

The cultural eugenics movements uses Hegelian dialectics to destroy true axioms and replace them with one half of an extremely disparate false dichotomy. It’s a way to reduce art, to reduce language, to bastardize culture into a sickening mass of perverse false axiomatic dichotomies and distort perception of culture to make it more malleable.

The way out is up and through and inward: introspection, self-reflection, identifying one’s identity, looking outward inwardly–.not inward ourwardly, taking account of one’s own drives, needs, wishes, dreams, thoughts, reasonings, loves and hates, likes and dislikes, and so on, and to temper these into a coherent set of constructs of axioms and dichotomies and dualities, and so on, and compose a comprehensible ideology of one’s own.

I’ve been calling medical science, and the modern application of the scientific method, The Dogmatic Institution of Science.

The reason this statement is aptly true, that “science is just another religion” is because of how politicised science has become–because people hold it true in their heart of hearts, as a belief, that science and its methods are the only way to derive any form of truth. Yet, they seem to forget that Facts and Truths are different things, that Facts can be politicised very easily, and that science does not deal with Truths, only Facts. As well, they seem to forget that science today, and most importantly its methods today, are dependent on something being physical in order to understand it, thus ignoring many other non-physical, metaphysical, or otherwise otherworldly things–such as abstract concepts, the collective unconscious, the spirit/soul, etc. … This is not to mention the common problems facing the laboratory environment, and the limitations of the experimental process, as well as ignores the errs and bad intentions on part of the scientists themselves–or the people who have paid for the research.

Religion is better equipped than The Dogmatic Instutution of Science to handle the actuality of this world. At minimum it’s willing to acknowledge some things as possibility sooner than Science ever will–and that is the point: the very second an entire group of people is writing something off despite overwhelming evidence and rationale, they’ve become dogmatic.

To start off on a much simpler foot, instead of bringing up the metaphysical, spiritual, etc., here is a good example: Sugar of any kind. In the 1970s a scientist published findings that proved all forms of sugar are poison, that they process exactly as alcohol does in the body and thus is as addictive, and that it is the primary cause of weight gain, not fat, carbs, or proteins–all three of which are necessary for survival, and he was promptly laughed out of science. For the next sixty years, our nutritional “science” was torn left and right by various companies who swore up and down that sugar is completely safe and even part of our natural body’s processes.

We are still feeling the effects of one quite simple thing that was politicised, drowned in false research and false claims, and was attempted to be wiped from history. This is not racial science, this is not gender studies, this is not remotely political, it is sugar–and yet this massive backlash was launched by every multinational with a stake in sugar for decades to come. Many different, seemingly healthier options have come about, or at least options that are advertised as healthier, where they are just as bad or worse for people. Artificial sweetener still triggers an insulin response, and fructose is not much better than any other sugar because they’re all so similar chemically in addition to heavy food processing. These are basic facts that took science over sixty years to figure out that they were wrong, but the damage has been done and the truth has come out much later than it should have–and the wrongs have not even been attempted to be corrected yet.

This says nothing good, hence why I call it The Dogmatic Institution of Science.

The other sad part of this story is that honest, respectable work and discovery is not being done because those people with ambition to help the world with some great contribution see where their contributions go, and it’s not to benefit society or the global community at large, it goes into the pockets of the few. It was not always this way, it was not always this shut off, was not always looked at with only one of two extreme points of view: extreme trust or extreme distrust. A healthy amount of skepticism is well and good, but so is a healthy amount of trust. Just as trust should not be innate, skepticism should be. When considering something that shakes our viewpoint on something, don’t write it off completely, or worse, trust it outright simply because we don’t like our current paradigm.

Sam Means returns with a format that’s a bit catchy, fun, emotive, yet a bit sad–forgive the puns. The songs are concise, leaving a little room for wanting more… The album starts off immediately reminiscent, melancholic, and yet with a groove and melody that gets into one’s head, the horn and piano blending into a lovely tune on How To Sing. The next track, We’re Alone, has a much more downtempo mood, “we’re alone when the lights come on (take me down to the river)” says all it needs to say, a simple chorus that evokes everything it needs to evoke. Listening to The Format so long and wondering what happened to Sam after Nate separated and went his way, I wondered if Sam would ever make music again, I just feel bad that I missed it by a few years… It’s reminiscent of The Format in a lot of ways… Especially with the dancy and groovy Other Side Of You, it’s contrasting highly with We’re Alone, and has a much more upbeat tone and cynical “it’s a whole lot brighter on the other side of you” chorus line…

The album is looking backward, wondering what went wrong, wondering what could’ve happened differently, and with lyrics that hit, the emotional pangs are strong with this album. The dancy tracks, Other Side of You, Calina, and All I Ever Wanted are fun and enjoyable, with the same cynical lyrics, contrasting the happy with the sad–a rare quality. Means succeeds at continuing his original sound refined with The Format, yet hearing him still so dang sad after all these years makes me sad, I hope the best for him…

It’s the only road to travel on,
so much easier than sitting home.
Any way you wanna go, you go back home.

This was my first foray into Christian Fennesz’s music, and it’s probably still my favorite of his. The electronic and glitchy tones contrasted with the natural guitar tones, the moody melodies, the structural strangeness–it was all very new to me. I enjoy the opener quite a bit, with its noise build-up and soft synth pads leading into a downtempo acoustic guitar chord structure, the melody contrasting the earlier segment quite a lot, resolving the chaos with a serene and emotive plucking and with synth textures hiding in the background. When they come out, trading the acoustic guitar for a wash of noise, the contrasts increase and it resolves in such a curious way, leading into the rest of the album as opposed to finalizing anything–the haze of noise and glitched guitar building up to its close. I don’t often hear such compelling music as the opener here…

Fennesz continues his sonic exploration for the rest of the album, contrasting between acoustic guitar and electronic glitching to great effect as with Grey Scale, its soft acoustic plucking, sad, yet with a tinge of hopefulness. This is directly contrasting the next track Glide, which builds over nine and a half minutes from an ambiguous “underwater” tapping and noise-drone into a noisy, glitchy crescendo of melancholic and cathartic synth-fuzz guitar tones. I very much enjoy the contrasts Fennesz uses here, it’s especially powerful to go from moody ambiguity to cathartic noise, or vice versa. The tambre and tones he uses on this album are melancholic on their own, with a hushed yet percussive performance, loud at times and soft others, it’s a lovely work of atmospheric mood-setting and one of my favorites.

Black Sea is available officially on bandcamp

A larger than life sound with a homeliness that resonates deep, Do Make Say Think starts off You, You’re A History In Rust quietly, building gradually into a large expanse of guitar and horn on the song Bound To Be That Way. The two drummer’s interplay can be syncopated in rhythm some times and locking in for a large sound other times, the guitar plucking away at homelike melodies while the horns apply an emotive touch.

A With Living immediately ramps up the emotion with lyrics expressing a search for meaning and oneness in the chaos of the universe, which is odd for them since this is–as far as I’m aware–the first time they used vocals in an album to this point. I enjoy the makeshift choir of friends and family they used for the vocals on this song, it really adds to the theme of the song and album which seems to be to cherish one’s loved ones. “And all that’s left is us” seems to sum it all up there, drawing to a close with a bridge/outro that leads with mainly electric guitar melodic work, “ahh” vocals, and soft acoustic guitar accents…

I really enjoy the tambre of this album, like I mentioned before it’s got a homelike-yet-larger-than-life sound that resonates with me a lot, it’s “rusty” like the title implies, like the cover it’s like a piano in a rundown condition.. It’s got a natural emotive tinge that carries through the entire album. It has a nice variety of sounds like the high-energy The Universe! and the more down-to-earth A Tender History In Rust and these two being so different from each other. It’s nice to hear the laughter on the latter track after the punctuated humming, it adds to the homeliness quite a bit.

With You, You’re Awesome it comes off somewhat like a vignette, but yet conveying that same homeliness. Then leading into Executioner Blues’ syncopated beat and overdriven guitar chords, it’s quite a mood change and dynamic shift that lends to the band’s sound and as well the atmosphere on the album. As the song progresses it goes through a series of moods, transitioning first into a slow decrescendo which then builds into quite a loud segment, closing on a minor guitar and bass segment… The transition into In Mind from here is another sudden shift, acoustic guitar and finger-snapping, distant drums and electric guitar accents, banjo and horn–they all build together to color the song that’s taking form, it all leading into a noisy fuzzed-out master-track… The lyrics are straightforward and poignant:

When you die you’ll have to leave them behind,
you should keep that in mind.
When you keep that in mind
you’ll find a love as big as the sky.

A granted wish
    is a happy thing
    only G-d can give;
      a great work
      turned inward,
        then outward.

After he knew that he had fallen, outward & down, away from the fullness, he tried to remember what the fullness had been…
  He did remember, but found he was silent, & could not tell others…
  He wanted to tell others that she leapt furthest forward & fell into a passion apart from his embrace.
  She was in great agony, & would have been swallowed up, by the sweetness, had she not reached a limit, & stopped.
  But the passion went on without her, & passed beyond the limit.
  Sometimes he thought he was about to speak, but the silence continued.
    He wished to say: strengthless & female fruit.

I only wished upon a star
when times were bad–-
when times were good,
there was no need
for wishing.
  I had what I needed,
    and in that moment,
      all was right.

“Earth has not anything…"[1]
“Earth has nothing…"[2]
“The river glideth at [her] own sweet will."[3]

[1] Chaucer’s Tales
[2] Speaker’s Corner Anthology
[3] Speaker’s Corner Anthology, Father Soper

Some very experimental Davis here, He Loved Him Madly is a wonderful and calming, yet paced track. Only missing the OBI strip to complete the JP reissue aesthetic…

It’s nice to have something other than Bitches Brew and ‘Round About Midnight in my collection, and a friend suggested I listen to this album, Get Up With It. Upon noticing the first track’s length, and the length of the album in general, I looked for it on streaming services, and upon hearing that first track online I had to pick it up. I was never too fond of Davis’ drummers, but the relaxed nature of He Loved Him Madly is just perfection, great bounce and groove.

Four CDs from The Chariot

Ahh, the 00’s trend of Christian metal, hardcore and post-hardcore, and in that vein, The Chariot is a bit of an enigma, sort of mathcore, sort of metalcore, sort of post-hardcore–but not exactly any of these things. I’m ashamed that I never owned these CDs before, but I saw them on their final tour, and it was a great show. So energetic, so wild, so much energy… Now I consider most of the bands that survived the 2010’s and a lot of them either burned out or ended up playing tired and stale versions of metalcore that had been done so many times before…

Christian Fennesz on the album Venice (Front Cover)

Fennesz… Not much I can say here, since words wouldn’t do his music justice–yet I’ll try. A melancholy runs through the album, and the thoughtfulness it brings to the listener is quite an effect. I’m not exactly versed in his earlier music, and I didn’t enjoy Endless Summer as much as I feel I should have, enjoying Black Sea quite a lot more. This album was a lot more reminiscent of the Fennesz I tended to like, the sad and slow and pensive tones, washed in static and processing… It’s quite the experiential album…

Christian Fennesz on the album Venice, inside cover

I recently added a custom pure-CSS gallery based on this post here, which I adadpted slightly to my needs, adding a description and adding a plus sign hovering over the thumbnail. I also added image processing in hugo based on this post here.

Here is the hugo shortcode for the CSS image modal and thumbnail. It resizes the image to within 1200x1200 pixels and crop-fills the thumbnail to 400x300 pixels. Here are the hugo docs on the topic of image processing, in case you wish to edit the values–you probably will. I initially had trouble getting the filename to be anything but a hideous mess of hash+quality+settings.jpg which resulted in a very, very long filename,

{{- /* look for filename passed in first field */ -}}
{{- $src := $.Page.Resources.GetMatch (printf "*%s*" (.Get 0)) -}}
{{- if $src -}}

{{- /* add edited images to scratchpad */ -}}
{{- /* with the default image settings */ -}}
{{- $.Scratch.Set "thumb" ($src.Fill "q70 600x400") -}}
{{- $.Scratch.Set "large" ($src.Fit "q85 1200x1200") -}}
{{- $th := .Scratch.Get "thumb" -}}
{{- $lg := .Scratch.Get "large" -}}

{{- $ext := "jpg" -}}
{{- if (strings.HasSuffix $src ".png") -}}
  {{- $ext := "png" -}}
{{- else if (strings.HasSuffix $src ".gif") -}}
  {{- $ext := "gif" -}}
{{- /* add edited images to scratchpad */ -}}
{{- /* with the default image settings */ -}}
{{- $.Scratch.Set "thumb" ($src.Fill "q70 600x400") -}}
{{- $.Scratch.Set "large" ($src.Fit "q85 1200x1200") -}}
{{- $th := .Scratch.Get "thumb" -}}
{{- $lg := .Scratch.Get "large" -}}

{{- /* rename files to original basename  */ -}}
{{- /* and rename extension and thumbnail */ -}}
{{- $a := path.BaseName $src | anchorize -}}
{{- $ext := "jpg" -}}
{{- if (strings.HasSuffix $src ".png") -}}
  {{- $ext := "png" -}}
{{- else if (strings.HasSuffix $src ".gif") -}}
  {{- $ext := "gif" -}}
{{- end -}}

{{- /* generate filenames */ -}}
{{- $thname := printf "%s%s_th.jpg" $.Page.RelPermalink $a -}}
{{- $name := printf "%s%s.%s" $.Page.RelPermalink $a $ext -}}

{{- /* finally, copy the files into place */ -}}
{{- $th := resources.Copy $thname $th -}}
{{- $lg := resources.Copy $name $lg -}}

{{- /* here is the template HTML code */ -}}


    
  {{- /* if description is present, then display it */ -}}
  {{- with or (.Get 2) (.Get 1) }}
    
{{ markdownify . }}
  {{- end }}

{{- end -}}

This renders the following HTML:

    
    
Image caption/description or
      alt text which displays below
      the image in the modal.

That image shortcode goes into your themes folder, under layouts/shortcodes/img.html.

Here is the thumbnail CSS, including the floating ‘+’ above it:

.thumb {
  z-index: 1;
  display: block;
  width: fit-content!important;
  text-align: center;
  margin: 0 auto;
  padding: 0;
}

/* this is the '+' */
.thumb a div::before {
  content: "+";
}

.thumb a div {
  background: rgba(27,10,25,.7);
  width: 52px;
  height: 52px;
  line-height: 52px;
  margin: .1em 0 0 .1em;
  padding: 0;
  vertical-align: top;
  text-decoration: none!important;
  font-size: 52px;
  position: absolute;
}

/* the thumbnail image */
.thumb img {
  max-width: 100%;
}

Here is the CSS for the overlay/floating image:

/* container and background */
;.overlay {
  z-index: 3;
  position: fixed;
  top: 0; left: 0;
  width: 100vw; height: 100vh;
  background: rgba(25,25,25,.7);
  text-align: center;
  visibility: hidden;
  text-decoration: none!important;
}

/* toggles visibility when clicking anchor */
.overlay:target {
  visibility: visible;
  outline: none;
  cursor: default;
}

/* container to center image and description */
.overlay div {
  position: relative; top: 50%;
  -webkit-transform: translateY(-50%);
  -ms-transform: translateY(-50%);
  transform: translateY(-50%);
  width: fit-content;
  margin: auto;
}

/* full-size image */
.overlay img {
  max-width: 90vw;
 ; max-height: 80vh;
  width: auto;
  height: auto;
  margin: auto;
}

/* optional image description */
.overlay p {
  max-width: 100%;
  margin: 0 auto;
  padding: .5em .8em;
  font-size: .9em;
  overflow-y: scroll;
  width: fit-content;
}

/* fixes links inside image description */
.overlay p a {text-decoration: underline !important;}

Once the shortcode and the CSS is added, to call it up is simple enough (removing the spaces between the brackets):

I hope this helps someone make a CSS-only image modal/gallery, maybe also helps someone with hugo shortcodes…

This song reminds me of divinity. For me it’s sort of hard to express, but, there’s oscillations that occur when the harmonic notes are ringing out, these distinct subtle oscillations, and the source of them, along with the light chorus effect, is actually very hard to describe if you’re not familiar with the nature of harmony and dissonance. I will try to explain for those who don’t understand the minutae of harmony and dissonance, or maybe just never noticed these things.

When two highly-correlated waveforms meet, they amplify each other, making them louder, and they also sustain longer, in reverberance of the room or, in the case of a stringed instrument like a guitar, or piano, in reverberance of the string. For instance, with any given major triad chord. On guitar, try an Emaj triad with the rest of the strings open on the 7th fret. When two highly-uncorrelated waveforms meet, they cancel each other out, resulting in a quieter and shorter resonance, in the room and in the strings themselves. For instance, with an ambiguous chord, maybe putting these notes together: D# G# C# F#.

Now, this is where things get interesting: with digital pianos and other digital instruments, they often have quite literally perfect intonation aimed at matching the frequencies and ratios that the instruments are called for as exactly as possible. I know that tuning these intervals “exactly” would result in aharmonic and slightly dissonant notes, but let’s just for argument say that for somesuch chord, the resonance is perfectly correlated between the notes, ignoring other chords/notes. What happens is the note is too “perfect,” and while I don’t have the functional math/physics explanations to describe why this is impossible to achieve with the whole instrument, digital or otherwise, I can say it has to do with the note intervals, and I also don’t have the math/physics explanations to describe why it’s harmonically displeasing, but I can describe it loosely.

To my ears, the reason why perfect resonance isn’t as good as slightly imperfect resonance is that there is an oscillation that occurs when notes are only slightly off in their intonation, and anyone who has tuned a guitar or instrument using harmonics or an instrument with a pitch fork has heard these oscillations. When a symphony plays, when a choir sings, or even when a band is playing, the players are not all in the same exact intonation, no matter how much they want to be or try to be, and that’s okay, because it’s better to hear it all together. Again, if all of them were in perfect intonation–impossible mind you, it would be uglier, and furthermore, when a piano is playing, guitar too, moreso piano, due to the note intervals/ratios the frequencies of each string have to be approximated to allow for the highest amount of harmony with the least amount of dissonance. What happens naturally since perfection in any case is impossible is the strings vibrate with these oscillations that lend to the instrument’s beauty, and piano tuners will tell you all about how some notes tend toward accepting that slight amount of dissonance more, and some like to harmonize more, and furthermore, a lot of blues guitarists enjoy tuning their G a bit sharp or flat, personally I like it a tiny bit sharp, around 1 to 2 cents or so.

To return to the song, the mode of listening to and appreciating it, in my opinion, is fundamentally based on these oscillations, which are very gorgeous and wonderful. Through the shifts of the notes, with the harmonic and dissonant notes layering with strong artificial sustain, the oscillations become quite heavy compared to a completely unaffected tone, along with a light chorus effect on it that adds even more to this effect, giving even more oscillations.

I have a very strong opinion that not only is perfection unattainable, it’s not even desirable or good. I think, naturally, humans aren’t supposed to be perfect, even if we strive for it, and at the same time, some “dissonance” is not only acceptable, but helps us see what really matters. In a way, this song is an accidental commentary on humanity, goodness, and divinity in my mind, but I won’t explain my thoughts on that any further.

Another nice thing about this song: as it plays, it goes from curiously positive with a melancholy undertone, and gradually as it reminisces and reminisces on those notes, the melancholy gets stronger, turning to an overtone, and around the 6.5m mark, it starts to become quite a bit sad for such a major song.

Guitar loop is my life on bandcamp.

Divinity is often coupled with a dark shadow cast, and to excise the shadow means excising the Self, getting close enough to burn and ignite in the flame itself… Would you rather cast a shadow? or rid yourself of that which casts it, burning up in totality? I’m left with a choice, I suppose…

A song for the moment: ISIS - Garden Of Light from In The Absence Of Truth

I fell asleep in a world dressed in grey, only to awake in a garden divine. There was song and dance and untarnished flesh, a feast for the body and eyes… It was you who brought me here. Yours, whose face greeted me, in the garden of light. You are the face of G-d! You are my light, my breath, my life, my death.

Another song: mewithoutYou - The King Beetle On A Coconut Estate, from It’s All False! It’s All Crazy! It’s All A Dream! It’s Alright.

The father explained: You’ve been somewhat deceived… We’ve all called me your dad, but your True Dad’s not me, as I lay next to your mom, and your forms were conceived, your Father is the Light within all that you see. He fills up the ponds as He empties the clouds, He holds without hands and He speaks without sounds, provides us with the cow’s waste and coconuts to eat–giving one that nice salt-taste and the other is sweet. He sends the black carriage the day death shows its face, thinning our numbers with kindness and grace–and just as a flower and its fragrance are one, so must eac of you and your Father become.

Now distribute my scepter, my crown, and my throne, and all we’ve known as ‘wealth’ to the poor and alone… Without further hesitation, without looking back home, the King flew headlong into the blazing unknown! And as the Smoke King curled higher and higher, the troops, flying loops ‘round the telephone wires, they said: your beloved’s not dead, but His Highness instead has been utterly changed into Fire!

Why not be utterly changed into Fire?…

– Aaron Weiss of ‘mewithoutYou,’ The King Beetle On A Coconut Estate

1. Messes of Men
2. The Dryness And The Rain
3. Wolf Am I! (And Shadow)
4. Yellow Spider
5. A Glass Can Only Spill What It Contains
6. Nice And Blue (Part 2)
7. The Sun And The Moon
8. Orange Spider
9. C-Minor
10. In A Market Dimly Lit
11. O, Porcupine
12. Brownish Spider
13. In A Sweater Poorly Knit

Messes Of Men

“I do not exist,” we faithfully insist, sailing in our separate ships, and from each tiny caravelle. Tiring of trying, there’s a necessary dying, like the horseshoe crab in its proper season sheds its shell.

Such distance from our friends, like a scratch across a lens, made everything look wrong from anywhere we stood–and our paper blew away before we’d left the bay, so half-blind we wrote these songs on sheets of salty wood.

Caught me making eyes at the other boatmen’s wives, and heard me laughing louder at the jokes told by their daughters. I’d set my course for land, but you well understand, it takes a steady hand to navigate adulterous waters. The propeller’s spinning blades held acquaintance with the waves, ‘cause there’s mistakes I’ve made no rowing could outrun. The cloth low on the mast, as to say I’ve got no past–I’m nonetheless the librarian than the secretary’s son.

With tarnish on my brass and mildew on my glass, I’d never want someone so crass as to want someone like me–but a few leagues off the shore I bit a flashing lure, and I assure you, it was not what I expected it to be! I still taste its kiss, that dull hook in my lips, is a memory as useless as a rod without a reel, hooked to an anchor, ever-dropped, seasick yet still docked, the captain spotted napping with his first mate at the wheel!

Floating forgetfully along, with no need to be strong–we keep our confessions long and when we pray we keep it short.

I drank a thimble full of fire and I’m not ever coming back–Oh, my G-d!

“I do not exist,” we faithfully insist, while watching sink the heavy ship of everything we knew. If ever you come near, I’ll hold up high a mirror, Lord, I could never show you anything as beautiful as You.

The Dryness And The Rain

First came a strong wind, rippin’ off rooftops like bottlecaps, and bending lampposts down in the ground, then came the thunder shattering my windows–but you were not that strong wind, nor that mighty sound that left the barn in shambles, the rabbit hutch in ruins, the split-rail fence splintered and the curtains torn, all the cows out from their pastures trampling on the pumpkins, and the horses from their stable ambling in the corn.

Isa ruhu-lah ‘alaihis-salat was-salam [1]

(Translation: Jesus Christ, peace, we pray, be upon you) [1]

And I’ve flown unnoticed just behind you like an insect, and I’ve watched you like a falcon from a distance as you passed, and swooped down to be nearer to the traces of the footsteps, to pick the fallen grain from the pressed-down dirt and crooked grass–and I’m gonna take that grain, I’m gonna crush it all together into the flour of a bread as small and simple and sincere as when the dryness and the rain finally drink from one another, the gentle cup of mutual surrender tears! C’mon!

A fish swims through the sea while the sea is in a certain sense contained within the fish! Oh, what am I to think! What the writings of a thousand lifetimes could not explain if all the forest trees were pens and all the oceans ink.

Nastagh-firuka ya Hokan, ya Dhal-Jalah wal-Ikram Isa ruhu-lah ‘alaihis-salat was-salam, ya Halim, ya Qahhar, ya Muntaqim, ya Ghaffar! La Ilaha ilallahu, Allahu Akbar![2]

(Translation: We ask for Your forgiveness, O Judge. O Lord of Majesty and Generosity. Jesus Christ, peace, we pray, be upon you. The Patient One, The All-Compelling Subduer, The Avenger, The Ever-Forgiving. There is nothing worthy of worship except G-d, G-d is the greatest!) [1]

• [1] Sources of the translations of the Arabic prayers in this song come from this blog.

Wolf Am I! (And Shadow)

It’s the smell of hot summertime trash, it’s the city noise of a busy street, it’s a train derailed and a two car head on freeway crash each time we meet.

“And if it comes as some sort of surprise,” she said “that I seem so composed, I’ve kept this moment closer to my eyes,” she said, “than the glasses resting on the edge of my nose.”

Shadow am I! Shadow am I! A question of a person with no sent reply. Wolf am I! Wolf and shadow cast on the sheep as I pass by. Shadow am I! Shadow am I! Or like a wearing-black-socks-and-white-woolen-locks, wolf am I, and shadow.

She was graceful and green as a stem, and I walk heavy on delicate ground, and oh–there I go showing off again, self-impressed by how well I can put myself down!

And there I go again, to the next further removed level of that same exact feigned humility–and this for me goes on and on to the point of nausea.

Shadow am I! Like a suspicion that’s never confirmed–but it’s never denied! Wolf am I–no, “Shadow,” I think, is better, as I’m not something but more like the absence of something, so Shadow am I!

The whole material world seems to me like a newspaper headline, it explicitly demands your attention, and may even contain some truth–but what’s really going on here?

One day the water’s gonna wash it away! One day the water’s gonna wash it away! One day the water’s gonna wash it away, and on that day…

One day the water’s gonna wash it away! One day the water’s gonna wash it away! Nothing clever to say–one day… There’s nothing else to say.

Yellow Spider

We took the twine we used to use to tie up tight our tattered shoes, twisted twigs, a crooked cross, a necklace for the deeply lost.

The builder with the broken bricks, mother to the baby chicks, you made this world to look so nice–I wonder what the next one’s like?

Yellow spider, yellow leaf, yellow spider, yellow leaf, yellow spider, yellow leaf: confirms my deepest held belief.

A Glass Can Only Spill What It Contains

A cat came drifting to my porch from the outside cold, and with eyes closed, drinking warm milk from my bowl, thought, “nobody hears me, nobody hears me, ‘cause I crept in so soft, and nobody sees me, nobody sees me, as I watched six steps off.”

Like the peacocks wandering the walkways of the zoo who have twice the autonomy the giraffes and tigers do, saying: “No one can stop me, no one stop me, no one clips my claws! Now everyone watch me, everyone watch me, scale these outside walls!”

Oh, you pious and profane, put away your praise and blame! “A glass can only spill what it contains!” To the perpetually plain and the incurably inane: a glass can only spill what it contains!

What new mystery is this? What blessed backwardness–the Immeasurable one is held and does not resist! Struck by wicked words and foolish fists of senseless men, the Almighty One does not ascend!

I was halfway listening to what she thinks she knows. We’re like children dressing in our parents clothes, saying, “nobody knows me, nobody knows me, no one knows my name! Nobody knows me, nobody knows me, nobody knows me…”

I half-heartedly explained, but gave up peacefully ashamed–a glass can only spill what it contains! We went through Portugal and Spain, and in her mind the entire time it rained–a glass can only spill what it contains!

What new mystery is this? An overflowing emptiness! The invisible is seen among the shadows and the mist, before my doubting eyes, the infinite appears this time… The unquestionable remains questioned but makes no reply!

What new mystery is this?

“My rabbi,” my lips betray with a kiss…

What new mystery is this?

Nice And Blue (Part 2)

You were a song I couldn’t sing. Caught like a bear by the bees with his hand in the hive, who complains of the sting, when I’m lucky I got out alive! A life at best left half-behind–the taste of the honey still sweet on my tongue, and I’d run–Lord knows I’ve tried– but there’s no place on Earth I can hide from the wrong I’ve done.

Then I saw a mountain, and I saw a city, steadily sinking but suspiciously calm–it wasn’t an end, it wasn’t a beginning, but a ceaseless stumbling on. There, strapped like a watch on my wrist, that’s finished with gold but can’t tell time! Was all or what little pleasure exists seductively sold and uselessly mine?

(I was once the wine, you were the wine glass. I was once alive when you held me)

Our horse was fast and first from the gate with the lead of a length at the sound of the gun, and the last of our cash laid down to fate–at 17 to 1. But by the final stretch in the rear of the pack, that nag limping bad in the back, we reluctantly gave all the money we’d saved… A fifth to the commonwealth and the rest to the track!

Then I saw a forest grow in the city, and a driftwood wall of birdhouse gourds–and I’m still waiting to meet a girl like my mom who’s closer to my age… The true light of my eyes is a pearl: equally emptied to equally shine, and all or what little joy in the world seemed suddenly simple and endlessly mine.

(I was once the wine, you were the wine glass. I was once alive when you held me.)

G-d became the glass, all things left are emptiness. Oh, little girl, you’re just a little girl. If you look out and see a trace of a dark bed that was once my face, in the clarity of such grace, you’ll forget all about me.

The Sun And The Moon

Daniel broke the king’s decree, Peter had stepped from the ship to the sea, there was hope for Job like a cut down tree– I hope that there’s such hope for me.

Dust be on my mind’s conceptions of anything I thought I knew, each word of my lips’ description, and all that I compare to You.

The preference of the sun was to the south side of the barn–I planted to the north in a terra-cotta pot. Blind as I’d become, I used to wonder where You are–these days I can’t find where You’re not!

Mine’s a yard surface-tended, foxes burrowed underground. Gardening so while self-recommended–what could I have done but let You down?

The sun and the moon, I want to see both worlds as One! The sun and the moon, I want to see both worlds as One! The sun and the moon, I want to see both worlds as One!

Mine’s a story dimly remembered, and by the time it’s told, halfway true, of bad behavior, well-engendered… What good is each good thing we think we do?

Daniel broke the king’s decree, Peter had stepped from the ship to the sea, there was hope for Job like a cut down tree– I only hope that there’s such hope for me.

Find a friend and stay close and with a melting heart tell them whatever you’re most ashamed of–our parents have made so many mistakes, may we forgive them and forgive ourselves.

The sun and the moon, I want to see both worlds as One! The sun and the moon, I want to see both worlds as One! The sun and the moon, I want to see both worlds as One!

The Sun and the Moon are my Father’s eyes.

Orange Spider

A note we wrote the other day to any mice who pass this way, “on crumed and sugared countertops we must insist your traffic stop!” In their defense, they don’t refuse, but nonetheless we’ve come to use snapping traps and poison beans–far less diplomatic means.

Orange spider, orange leaf, orange spider, orange leaf, orange spider, orange leaf, confirms my deepest held belief.

C-Minor

Our house wrapped in disrepair, a small mouse peeked out from a hole beneath the stairs, nearby, to where my dad sat in his favorite chair, thinking about the government and muttering a prayer. I scattered some oats in hopes she’d stay, then sat still to stop from scaring her away–but she hurried on her little way, and scurried around my mind ever since, every day.

Open wide my door, my Lord, my Lord, to whatever makes me love You more, while there’s still light to run toward.

I’m water, you’re the dry wood, equal parts misguided, misunderstood. All the neighborhood watched the fire burn from where they stood, as the smoke said “We’re not half as bad as G-d is good.” Still, there’s a whisper in my ear, the voice of loneliness and fear, and I say: “Devil, disappear!” I’m still technically a virgin after 27 years–which never bothered me before, what’s maybe 50 more?

Open wide my door, my Lord, my Lord, to whatever makes me love You more, while there’s still light to run toward.

She came back for the oats but she brought along a “friend.” The harder the rain, the lower the flowers in the garden bend. I’d rather never talk again than to continue to pretend that this never ends.

In A Market Dimly Lit

The bird that plucked the olive leaf has been circling like a record ‘round the spindle in my mind, where the needle’s worn the grooves too deep, and scratched the wax that’s blistered from the heat, besides, from any movement in the room–if my cat walked by the arm skipped, but to my surprise, my interrupting cat improved a sound already so severely compromised.

The needle’s worn the grooves too deep.

I’m a donkey’s jaw on a desert dune beside the bush that Moses saw that burned and yet was not consumed. She’s the silver coin I lost, I’m the sheep who slipped away… We pray with fingers crossed–yet you listen patiently, anyway.

I wrote a little song for you, with a melody I’d borrowed put to words that didn’t rhyme, to repeat what you already knew, as the stones thrown at your window tapped in syncopation. You kept a distance out of fear you’d break, but what good’s a single windchime hanging quiet all alone? The music our collisions would make is the sound that turns the road-that-leads-us-back-home into home. The music our collisions make! The music our collisions could make! The music our collisions would make! The music our collisions’d make!

I had a rusty spade, but I’m not the fighting sort, if I was Samson I’d have found that harlot’s blade and cut my own hair short! Then in a market dimly lit I come casually to pay. You see my coins are counterfeit–yet you accept them, anyway.

So spare me your goodbyes, your waving-handkerchief-good-byes! Given my tendency to err, so, on the sentimental side, I’ll spare you my goodbyes, the truth belongs to G-d–the mistakes were mine.

O, Porcupine

Without a queen the locust swarm turned the ground to black, descending, like a shadowy tower on a fish’s back, and scattered the sticks who crawled like snakes in the sand, as the red clay took the form of a lizard who rushed like a moth to the flame of my open hand.

In my little world, in my sad, little world…

Then a speckled bird, humbly inspired, ran across the road when it could have flown, and it made me smile–and at the water’s edge, Babylon, as we lay and slept, the river wept, it wept for you, O’Zion! The stones cry out, bells shake the sky, all creation groans…

Shhhh!!!… Listen to it!

Messes of men in farmer poverty… Not much for monks but we pretend to be. We share a silent meal and a pot of chamomile–gypsies like us should be stamped in solidarity. And I held you in my fond but distant memory while waiting for the Mother Hen to gather me, who regretfully wrote, “you have a decent ear for notes, but you can’t yet appreciate harmony.”

O’porcupine, low in the tree, your eyes to mine, “you’d be well inclined not to mess with me.” And at the garden’s edge beneath a speechless sky, as his friends slept, Jesus wept–maybe it’s no wonder why… You wanna be set free? You wanna set me free? Well, that can only come from a union with the One who never dies.

In my little world, in my sad, little world, I patched a plaster wall in my little world. In my little world, I was waiting, just dying to take offense at something in my little world. In my little world, in my sad, little world, this is all there is in my little world…

In darkness the light shines on me. In darkness the light shines on you.

And I never gathered figs from off a thorny branch, and I never picked a grapefruit off a bramble bush, but for the past five–almost six years now–you know, you haven’t once looked at me with kindness in your eyes, and you say Judas is a brother of mine? Oh, but sister, in our darkness the light shines! And all I ever want to say for the rest of my life is how that light is G-d, and though I’ve been mistaken on this or that point, that light is G-d.

Brownish Spider

Every thing I thought I’d learned, ambition, and illusion turned to drawings on a loose-leaf sheet of figs and fruits I couldn’t eat.

What in her do I require? The face of gratified desire–so, what in me does she require? That face of a gratified desire…

Brownish spider, brownish leaf, brownish spider, brownish leaf, brownish spider, brownish leaf, confirms my deepest held belief.

No more spider, no more leaf, o more spider, no more leaf, no more spider, no more leaf, no more me, no more belief…

In A Sweater Poorly Knit

In a sweater poorly knit and an unsuspecting smile little Moses drifts downstream in the Nile. A fumbling reply, an awkward rigid laugh, and I’m carried helpless by my floating basket raft. Your flavor in my mind swings back and forth between sweeter than any wine and as bitter as mustard greens, and it’s light and dark as honeydew and pumpernickel bread–the trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead!

As you plow some other field and try to forget my name, we’ll see what harvest yields, and, supposing I’d do the same. I planted rows of peas, but by the first week of July they should have come up to my knees, but they were maybe ankle high. Take the fingers from your flute to weave your colored yarns and boil down your fruit to preserves in mason jars, and the books are overdue, and the goats are underfed–the trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead!

You’re a door-without-a-key, a field-without-a-fence, you made a holy fool of me and I’ve thanked you ever since. And if she comes circling back well we’ll end where we’d begun, like two pennies on the train track the train crushed into one. But if I’m a crown without a king, if I’m a broken open seed, if I come without a thing, then I come with all I need. No boat out in the blue, no place to rest your head–the trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead!

I do not exist, I do not exist, I do not exist…

I do not exist, only you exist, I do not exist…

The split album starts with Still, expressing movement and stillness together, a lovely contrast, with the soothing sound of waves, a nice stereo effect, a thick, saturated, bass-heavy synth line washes over the mix while distorted guitar harmonics add a tonal shift that lends even more to the melancholia. Endless Melancholy eponymously tugging the listener’s heart strings… Opening the album with a tone of longing, pain, and the sounds of the ocean. As the song ends, the listener finds themselves walking along the shore, thoughts and memories seem to come in with the tide, and more distorted guitar for the contrasts. Endless Melancholy’s side is paced in its development, taking steps slowly, working through the tones slowly, pensively, almost waiting for something to come… It carefully builds from a “desolation” into a more hopeful “melancholy,” a sadness in memoriam–and the artist works well going into the second half of the split. With Like An Old Memory We Are Washed Ashore it is very fitting for it to end the first half this way, as Desolate Horizons’ style tends to be more droney and less emotionally heavy. I can’t really stress enough how well the first half leads into the second, and when I had first listened to it, I hardly noticed that the artists had changed since each track leads seamlessly into the next, in addition to the 5th track’s hopefulness.

With the second half, it comes as an answer to the despair of the first half, and with titles like Your Echoes Drift Through Me Like Waves Caressing The Shores, it’s a very hopeful sort of wistfulness with the titles of the tracks telling a story as they progress. The ocean theme is very well-represented here, the deep and the unknown clearly on display… The imagery of The World Slips Away As We Dance In The Fire: a bonfire on a dark night, forgetting all that’s around with the one you love, dancing into the flame to be purified–it’s heavy symbolism that lends itself to the hopefulness, a contrast to the beginning five tracks. Noisy, static hiss and synth-pad drones close out the album with a relaxing, yet movement-filled drones, listless and on the waves, lost at sea–and yet, We’re Coming Home Now, the final track states. It ends on such a lovely note–an ending tied to a beginning…

Here is the album, available from Hidden Vibes.

Also available from Endless Melancholy’s bandcamp and [Desolate Horizon’s bandcamp]https://desolatehorizons.bandcamp.com/album/deep-as-the-dark-blue-sea).

Fire in the sky

Some crimson hues across the sky, it’s really a lovely sight

I’ve been getting an image gallery and image modal working, I may as well show it off, right? Inspired by this post showing processing images on hugo, showing a pure-CSS image modal, so I implemented my own since I didn’t want four sizes, only two, and I wanted to add a visible image description to the pop-up. At first I was a bit confused on how to do things, but going through the motions of setting this up really helped me understand hugo a lot better.

Kaine from the front cover of the NieR: Gestalt & Replicant soundtrack.

2B, from the front cover of the NieR: Automata soundtrack.

I recently listened to the entirety of the NieR Gestalt/Replicant and NieR Automata soundtracks. I enjoy how dynamic and emotive they are, with very strong rhythms too, and yet, on songs like Mourning there’s a slow, pensive, mournful air… Without the soundtrack, I wouldn’t have enjoyed the game nearly as much as I did, and I think I may enjoy the OST more than I do the game itself.

Eat, Sleep, Repeat by the band Copeland

Copeland’s Eat, Sleep, Repeat., a gorgeous work. Eat, Sleep Repeat is an album I’ll probably never let go, and Copeland is one of those bands that left at their prime, and came back lesser known.. Eat, Sleep, Repeat released quite a long time ago… It’s emotive, longing for love lost… They came back sometime ago, I should really pick that other release up.

Copeland’s You Are My Sunshine, the latest of theirs I have, a very sad work that tries to look forward while looking down…

You Are My Sunshine is both not as sad on the first disc, and yet, its second disc tends toward a hopeless melancholy at the start of the C-side, with lyrics like “you can never tell if you’re center stage, it’s thin as glass and never meant a thing, and you never feel good or bad, only strange and unprepared, ‘cause I never see it coming or you leaving.”

Spiritual Jazz Japan volume one.

Spiritual Jazz Japan vol. 1, a lovely Japanese Jazz compilation of some very vintage tones and styles, with not a bad song on it, I really enjoyed it. Kumo No Ito is a fantastic opener and sets the mood for the rest of the album perfectly, Spanish Flower is a sprawling piece with quite the arrangement of moods, and Minoru Muraoka’s The Positive & Negative with its big beat has a groove that doesn’t let go… Many of the songs are quite longform, utilising Japanese instruments and strange modal shifts.

That’s all for now, I’ll keep this better updated if I can.

Your eyes, your eyes
Bolded inspire, sable desire
Your smile, your smile
Lay down beside, open our lives

See the whole frame, solid gold
I’m not afraid, just absent gold
This is not free, this I want to take hold
Semantic minds, I want to grow, and grow, and grow.

This is the longest way I know
(This is the longest way I know)

Meditate on soft ground
Wrap yourself ‘round your home

Make it small, make it tall
Want it all, the silent wave.

A birdsong is a lovely thing to behold, not only, if taking the notes apart, do you get a melody with major and minor shifts, but also a key, but not only that, you have a lovesong, and this is all coming simply from springtime coming, and deep inside the bird, it wants to sing–and so it does. Different birds may sing in A, or C, there are even common themes, maybe some will be longer or shorter, some will repeat more, some will have more novelty, but they all tend to harmonize as they sing to each other–and yet, the music is there.

When humans speak, they also have a cadence, a flow, and a melody, complete with key, intonation, beginning, middle and end. When someone says something in an up-turned intonation, or when they say it quickly, or more slowly, it communicates something other than the meaning of the words, but a synthesis of expressions. Most people, just like the birds, also have their own variations on “common themes” in their expression of language–and yet, the music is there.

A song’s most common structure is in the form of maybe an intro, some verses, some choruses between, maybe a bridge and/or an outro. There is a cadence to it, with ups and downs, the intro sometimes very patient, or maybe rushed, the verse telling the tale while the chorus provides the theme, concept, or thesis of the song, with the bridge usually used as a commentary on another section. In a fantasy tale there is, of course, a beginning, middle, and end: the kingdom, the knight, and the princess are revealed, an evil wizard wreaks havok on the kingdom, and at the end the evil wizard is defeated, the knight is reunited with the princess, and the kingdom is safe again…

When someone is in need, or hurt, that is written on them, and seeing the writing resonates when we see that. A child could see something so simple and fundamental. An innate need runs through us for love and justice, sympathy and compassion, it binds us together, ultimately. A song about a failed relationship tugs at our hearts, a song about a wonderful person the artist admires tells us about the beauty of love, a story of daring and justice prevailing plays to our hope for the future, something with a heavy thumpy bass gets a crowd moving, a shrill altissimo on an alto saxophone pierces and shrieks, a violin weeps and weaves.

A song tells a story, and a song has its ups and downs, and its cadences with its own stories to tell in the melodies and harmonies, and a humanity runs through it all. A song of songs, an album, a song, a section–a story of stories, each within each other, a story has a tale of a prince saving a princess, with complicated rescue scenes, with a tale of a battle between good and evil, that has its own battles… An act has lines delivered within sections, within scenes, within sections, within films, plays, or performances. A book has words in sentences, within paragraphs, within sections, within chapters, within sections, within pages, within bindings, within books/volumes/collections. Tales of humankind and stories within stories, songs within songs, are expressed in logically coherent manners that are intended to be understood as having beginnings, middles, and endings, within beginnings, middles, and ends, notes within chords and melodies, melody within harmony, harmony within harmony, performers on certain instruments within performances, tone, tambre, arcs, cadence, major/minor, sustained/diminished, 7th, 9th, 5th 4th, 3rd–notes within sections within movements within works within collections or albums, all to show the beauty of love, life, experience, tales of bravery or beauty, ugliness, shame, pain, sorrow, happiness, joy, romance, delicacy, indiscipline, meditation, etc., etc., and these many stories and songs move within us and resonate with us and they can show us ourselves and help express our internal state or find enjoyment in merely the rhythm or melody, but these are languages within languages, songs within songs, stories within stories, memories within memories, thoughts within thoughts…

The natural state of mankind is not conflict, but yet, resolving as much conflict as is reasonable, or a state of flux between both, for lack of better terms, peace and conflict, conflict and peace. Balancing harmony and dissonance blesses us with insight into our lives and the world around us. May we receive these blessings.

Edit 2023-12-16: I’d like to tell the inspiration for the writing. I was walking outside, simply lost in thought, a hummingbird was flying toward me, I looked up and it was flying with another. Passing by, it chirped back and forth to and from the other bird, and the other bird said something, maybe “Come quick! Follow me!” I saw another bird, a sparrow, fly down and peck at something on the ground near some flora. I paused for a moment at the scene and considered what had just happened. The sparrow was chirping happily, pecking meanderingly, and another bird flew down. The songs of those four birds harmonized quite well, and I began to analyze the harmonies of all the other birds, amused atthe thought that birds sing to communicate.. Well, of course we know how birds communicate, and I have tried to communicate not only something beautiful, yet true and good. I am trying to tell something about the nature of song and story. I hope this makes sense here with these final two paragraphs, because without them, this would not be coherent.

It’s very sad to see great artists reviewed by pretentious people who act like they know it all, but then showing in all-too unsubtle ways that they are remiss with misrepresentation, colored by their innate preconceptions, almost like they never even listened at all–only heard. Concocting a vile flatulencethat proves indigestion, yet, back stretched over their abdomen, legs up, they revel in it. It’s obvious why, then, when an artist sees this and avoids journalists, and yet, greater when one reveals wit toward journalists. For example, Tim Hecker, when interviewed in Pitchfork numerous times, had made a lot of attempts to avoid directly discussing many topics, and they keep asking, repeatedly, questions that he is making perfectly clear that he doesn’t want to answer. It’s very frustrating. I could be seeing a good interview, and instead I see some drooling snotty journalist completely missing the signs that say loudly, “don’t ask me anything like this,” and yet they ask, and then assume the answer, and then publish their trite as fact… So instead of answering the idiodic question with something serious like this:

I feel like I was inspired by church music, the reverence, and the beauty in praising god, and in contrast, common perceptions of religion like Kanye “Yeezus”/“Ye” West and his “I am god” things, as well as other common elements of pop music that stand to elevate the individual or performer(s).

Instead, he will say “liturgical conceptions post-Yeezus,” and that is a troll, honestly, they didn’t even get it, they didn’t say anything about the concept of the album, they leave it completely and totally out of the equation, mindlessly running that quote “liturgical conceptions post-Yeezus” with each new press release, which, the fact he kept releasing singles after giving that quote, is phenomenal, very clever.

And seeing things with O’Rourke and Pitchfork in the early days of Pitchfork–it was very sad to see that, I can’t help but feel like journalists are predatory and narcissistic, grimy and illogical, vile and base. It makes perfect sense why artists turn to irony and satire, even self-satire. To be honest, it’s one thing to not understand something, it’s another to not even try, and to continue to espout your opinion when you’re completely wrong in every way, that’s another thing entirely. Then to do that, all while essentially masturbating to your own idea of yourself, to defecate all over his art, is just–well, how do I say this… The lowest of the low in music journalism? It’s vile and disgusting? It’s a sickening sight? I’m without words, and to be completely clear, I wish I could say more.

So I will. It’s sort of a peculiar thing, to have someone think highly of your opinion, to be able to sway people, to be able to tell people what to do or think–that’s a big responsibility. I think these media types who do this are power-hungry and self-centered. They do this because, well, they think they’re smarter than the readers, they think they can just say something, anything, and it becomes true, or it doesn’t matter, but there is objectivity in art, and it’s perverse to distort the truth, or eschew it, or both, and it’s antagonistic to talk with someone, with the direct intention of talking with someone, and then not only avoid listening, but make up your own version of what happened, distinct from reality, and it’s not just O’Rourke, and it’s not just entertainment journalism, this has been a running trend in things for a while, for journalists to eschew their responsibilities for short-term gain.

The full lyric section I find relevant here:

Two sips, instant drip, Sanka mud
New corpus publicist, thanks ya bud
As hundred bucks worth of wordy bloggerthugs
Come forth forthwith to four seasons aflood
To morbidly orbit your toilet like hornets abuzz
Forming above like buzzards in love

– Why? (with a question mark) / Yoni Wolf

Andy McKee, he speaks so naturally with his guitar that words would only muck up one’s perception of the work. No pick, instead, he’s finger plucking, strumming, slapping, hitting, or otherwise playing with a very layered style of his invention based on other guitar legends like the percussive elements of Michael Hedges and the layered folk fingerwork of Preston Reed.

It’s a wonderful thing to hear it “in motion,” and the timing on the opener Art Of Motion is tight, but loose when it needs to be, building on multiple paces, swings and accents to set the tone. In a fast but steady pace it continues, building up to a cadence that comes as a dynamic drop. What a wonderful phrasing technique, a technique he uses for transitions, like on Practice Is Perfect, but yet on Into The Ocean it seems he’s taken the water element into the dynamics and structure of the rhythm: loose and flowing, patient, but waves come in and out, waves of rhythmic cadence, swing, dynamics, mood–it flows like water. It is a marvelous and evocative effect, and proves his mastery of structure and his instrument.

The tapping leadwork in Shanghai sounds as effortless as the single bass notes in Into The Ocean sound controlled and deliberate. The 3 rhythms at once in drifting sound as melodically structured as a full group, yet technical proficiency isn’t the point here, as evidenced by the emotions in Heather’s Song or Rylynn.

It’s not quite the feat to play well, music is a language, one that McKee speaks well, and understands better than most, I would wager. To speak the language of music one has to speak the language of the heart, which Art Of Motion speaks clearly with Rylynn, with its meandering rhythmic accents, often falling behind and ahead to create such a wistful swing and bounce, not to mention its instantly emotive melody, concluding minor for the beginning half of the theme, then turning major for the end, again with the dynamics building louder to drop into a quiet closure. To close the song and the album out the listener is treated to a lovely harmonics and tapping melody.

This is an instant classic, a remarkable work of skill and emotion, exciting the first time and rewarding to reaudition. Little details will jump out at you from a vector of energetic building, carefully descending into a delicate melancholy, just to play with structure and tug on your heart strings over again.

I urge you to listen if you at all appreciate guitar, melody, beauty, or skill. Here is the video for Andy McKee - Into The Ocean. Oh, and of course, you can buy the official album at candyrat.com

I was changing a bunch of formatting, some editing, updating some things, moving stuff around, adding links, optimizing code and resources, fixing RSS, immanentizing the eschatron… The front page is under 20KiB, and the site in total is around 520KiB at the moment, which is good.

I will also be starting an audio log with some thoughts about music/albums/genres/artists.

Hubris is such an upfront album, with its stark contrast between the droning, rhythmic punctuations of the opener, and the aggressive, booming and shrill closer, with the middle track connecting the two loosely in a brief rhythmic intermission–this tells us what we need to know about hubris, which seems to be the theme of the album. The eyes peeking in at you from the cover, what do they see?

Hubris pt. 1 starts off simple enough, a modulated guitar tone in a loop, bass comes in soon after and the guitar picks up, but what happens is subtle and I can’t help but enjoy it, a plucky series of scalework notes starts playing over another modulated guitar tone, looped again, bass intensifies, two and a half minutes into the song and the guitar hasn’t really repeated in either tracks–the plucking or the droning, bass is intensifying in its melodic structure, gradually things are forming into quite a moving pace, and then another drone starts, that treble-heavy, high-attack picking still going, never playing the same thing twice–as far as I can tell, but I draw all this out because the difference between two minutes into the song and four needs to be heard or pointed out to really understand the purpose of this song.

Slowly the rhythmic elements build and build into a hypnotic experience, patiently they layer themselves into what becomes quite a wall of sound, synth comes in to give form to the structure, and to add, and thus change, and lead into, the “drop” of the beat. This synth line changes a 2/4 time (subdivided up) overlaid with a 3/4, into a 4/4 time on top of a 3/4, the bass (or synth?) coming in and accenting this structure in a humming, punctuated rhythm. The beat, yes the beat, it takes that upbeat 2/4, and slows it down to a wonderful pace at 4/4. All the while the song has been building, rhythmically changing ever-so-slightly, leading up to the finale, but instead of an explosion, instead of the beat being heavy and big, it fits snugly into the mix, tapping into the rhythm and accenting it, highlighting it with the ghost notes and “finger snap” snare, and giving it a body it otherwise wouldn’t have if the song hadn’t been so slowly building, and that’s exactly what I think this music is trying to highlight…

Hubris pt. 3 is the thematic opposite of Hubris pt. 1, with its immediately heavy and full guitar-riff and in-your-face drums, high-pitched noise-drones and loops, its ultimate implosion in structure, it’s structurally completely different, quite literally opposite, and this contrast is really the highlight of the album for me, and this contrast really serves to highlight what the artists are trying to say. Maybe it’s even a tragedy, the story, if there is one…

‘Hubris’ by Oren Ambarchi on Bandcamp.

I just noticed most of the greatest post-metal/stoner-metal/drone metal albums are about new worlds and societal changes, but they have this wonderful imagery to complement these sorts of themes… Some of the ones I can think of like Earth 2: Low Frequency Edition, is crushingly hard to get through on a first listen without knowing what is going on in musical terms, and even then, it doesn’t help that much but to just power through it, but one is rewarded with a very sublime feeling upon reaching the climax of the album at the end of the third song. It’s themes are Biblical and depict the end times and then descriptions of heaven… Boris’s Flood does a similar thing, but the climax being much more rock-leaning, as opposed to drone leaning, with a wonderful amount of delayed guitar on the fourth part that creates the sublime feeling. Sunn O))) in their later career created Monoliths And Dimensions which commented clearly on Earth 2 with direct references to it on the third side. It’s a very dark song, in tone and in themes, talking about, yet again, the destruction of the world and a new age, a new beginning. Other bands like ISIS and Neurosis are more politically leaning, while some other bands yet just create completely new worlds with their music, like Sleep… yet there remains a common theme that there is a difference to the world they portray, a surreal aspect or component, often there is great change happening…

Your eyes, your eyes, bolded inspire, sable desire.. Your smile, your smile, lay down beside, open our lives…

Such a wonderful album, light horn melodies and a bigness flaring up in waves. Luke’s lyrics tend toward the ambiguously suggestive, yet broad and beautiful, a solemn melancholy and a warm hopefulness runs through the album and showers the listener in a moody beauty that keeps paying out until the final track.

If I could, I would drown myself in these tones again and again, since it tells such a gorgeous story, but with an ambiguous end.. Old Friend marks a turn of the album, whose concepts show scenic romance, time passing, grandiose freeness and wistfulness. Meanehile, the lovely bouncing energy of the first side slows down and reveals a longing that can’t auite be satiated.. I love the way the album balances these two sides, the tone of Get Alive is probably the cornerstone of the album, “step into this light with me” and it beckons a longing to come forth from the listener.

I’ve been alive so long, you’ve been dead all these years, love is what we wait for, I bid you well

Saito Koji, after a long absence, started releasing music again sometime before 2019, not sure when, but sadly he wiped his bandcamp of a lot of… well… over 400 songs… It’s sad to see it all disappear, so quickly, so fast, it’s just lost to time, maybe a few have it, but such an infinitisimal few.

I have a few songs from that era, I’m not sure why they’re gone, I’d almost like him to start making one bandcamp account per year, dumping it all there, leaving it there forever….. but for some reason, he sees something in impermanence of his own music that he likes, or maybe even dislikes. It’s possible he thinks it’s not worth keeping around, maybe he doesn’t want to overwhelm new fans, maybe he feels new stuff is a better representation of his work and his life, maybe he just doesn’t really think it’s that important to anyone… I don’t know. I can’t assume anything, at all…

2023-08-24

In the dimly lit room, dawn seeping through,
slowly blue from black, and then hazel,
the morning leads a shift in color,
form returns to the room: a polaroid,
a trinket toy in the shape of a lion,
  a woman standing proudly,
    hidden behind the leaves and growth,
  a glass windchime inscribed with a language you can’t speak;
    the movement fills you,
      so you stay still.

Praying for rain, it dropped in the form of snow, draining to the valleys below.

Gathered in bodies, nourishing life, it goes by endless–passing by, leading to the sun.

1. I. Calonyction Girl
2. II. Whisper Ineffable
3. III. Abyss Hinge I: Sleeping Birds Sighing In Roscolux
4. IV. Abyss Hinge II: The Shrinking Armature
5. V. Cartogram Out Of Phase

I. Calonyction Girl

Help me, I’m disappearing,
the doors are breathing,
floorboards are bowing.

Remind me if I’m not saying anything
There’s just so much I can’t say.

I feel I’m misplaced.
I feel misplaced.

Like a moth trapped in the window blinds
after wings came apart into pieces,
who knows who I am anymore?

One day I entered the room of my mind,
shut the thick door behind my back,
Although there was no one like you,
I felt safe here.

I decided to draw some pictures in the air.
When the darkness drove it up–
all my imaginations,
they were creeping
and you told me:

“I will, I want to live forever.”

II. Whisper Ineffable

My heart was like a crumpled piece of paper, it’s been wrinkled and shrunk by hopeless ignorance. I saw it rolling over the old wooden floor isolated from my body.

I picked it up and let it sit on the desk, pulled at contusions until it opened up again. The velocity of the realm tears me apart.

My body with the shape of a blue flower whole became free from all restraint. All organs were tumbling around the room.

My true visions got let out, tangling along the wall full of enjoyment. I can see through the call, a sea of birds, ambition, and memory.

*Unwritten, those calls taste of the artificial and alive. Sorrow’s on empty.

When I released myself completely, like that, all sensations came out of my body, my feelings seemed to begin recovering from a long, long, long day..

I kept on drawing abstract vectors in one after another.

I was kept in there…

Help me out.

IV. Abyss Hinge II: The Shrinking Armature

It makes me feel terrified
The feeling, in, into, to me,
into all of my “I.”

V. Cartogram Out Of Phase

On top of the roof,
I realized that
there was no moon.
Searching for it
among the sprinkled stars,
I gazed into the light
that’s reaching in
from millions of years ago.

See, seeing the past
outside the present,
out-world within my room,
the castle of monologues,
the heir and his failures of trials…

The moon has disappeared
because now the world is reversed,
and my feet are on her land.

I’m out of the room of my mind,
with a perfect shape of love
filling this empty hole in my heart.

Coyote for streaming and purchase by Kayo Dot on Bandcamp"

Why pluck one string? What good is just one note? Oh, one string sounds fine, I guess… We were once “one notes,” we were once lonely wheat quietly ground into grain–what light and momentary pain! So why the safe distance, this curious look? Why tear out single pages when you can throw away the book? Why pluck one string when you can strum the guitar?

Strum the guitar! Strum the guitar! Strum the guitar, with no beginning, with no end. Take down the guitar and strum the guitar! Strum the guitar if you’re afraid–and I’m afraid, and everyone’s afraid, and everyone knows it, but we don’t have to be afraid anymore.

Every artist feels a pull to create something novel and interesting, and for it to be enjoyed and appreciated. Lifetimes have been spent on the subject of what makes good music, and many lives will yet be spent on it. As the countercultures of yesterday turn to the dogma of today, turn to the trash of tomorrow, we can see there is no clearcut, formulaic thing that one must do to succeed, but there is a pattern among all sorts of players. Their ability to create new, exciting sounds stems from a wide number of things, but of the most creative, most definitive artists and groups, there is a lot of commonality. When an artist creates a new style, they are not pulling it out of thin air, it is coming from their personal experiences and they coalesce stylistic elements and artistic concepts into something refreshing and exciting, yet familiar. They pay tribute to what came before by fusing their stylistic proclivities into a new whole. Every definitive turn in music came from interpreting and toying with conventions, and it’s becoming essential to push stylistics and create new sounds. The most definitive musical works of the past have widely been stylistically familiar, yet novel and explorative. The familiarity comes from pushing an existing style’s boundaries, either through blending, deconstruction and/or reconstruction, and so on, and these processes of taking a fundamental piece of style, or many, and changing aspects in a careful manner.

The artist’s struggle is to collect and amalgamate what one gets out of their personal experience in to something novel that one creates, and see it be appreciated. The choice one takes in this endeavor, as to what to take inspiration from and how to use it shouldn’t be taken lightly. Even the music one takes in should be taken into consideration and limited as well, so that this process of stylistic amalgamation can be an organic process to create new sounds. On the other hand, the purpose of art, as far as I can tell, is to communicate a personal and experiential message or idea through the expression of a theory or concept of creation. As artists, there is a drive to have your creations experienced and understood, a self evident observation, and it drives the point home that without a foundational reasoning behind the creation, that it will not prosper. Further, we look into and read into what we’ve seen, with pattern recognizing brains that seek a reason behind the creation, another self evident observation, delivering the same point again. The utility of art is in creation and ideation and conveyance of meaning through symbol/sign/form–or in other words, the how/what/when/where/why of creation–and “how” is always more important than the others.

In the how/what/when/where/why, the values that matter the most as applies to style are honesty and integrity. Honesty in music is as important as honesty in dialog, since the musical process is essentially a dialog anyway–between artist and viewer, as we express ideas with music just like language despite the fact it is a more experiential communication than with spoken language. While one can lie, typically people don’t like being lied to, and it’s much more endearing to be honest–and of course, one can steal, but typically thieves aren’t thought of as endearing either. Since, stylistically, and musically, and artistically, and conceptually, one should speaking, to the best of one’s ability, from a place of truth within themselves. If one does this, it will end up permeating everything one does and the elements of their style will gradually fall into place. There is no one way to be honest, no single method, any number of factors may play into it. It’s a question of stylistic and musical identity, and constructing an idea of what one believes music is or should be.

As mentioned in the previous post, I am fiddling with my theme a lot right now, added a background image, made it HTML5 and CSS3 and screen reader compatible, which is nice to know it’s a well-made theme. I minified the CSS. I added a background image, tweaking the theme to accommodate it. Also now the full articles are fed through RSS (no more partials). All in all I am satisfied with my work, gonna see if I want to make any other changes but my list of things to do with this site is basically nil now.

Merry Christmas to you all, and a Happy New Year.

I just updated this site to be HTML5, CSS3, and screen reader compliant. It took a bit of work, but it was a fun challenge.

I mixed up a bunch of folders and files and as a result this website got some duped articles and whatnot. I went through and fixed it… Now to update the CSS too.

[Eng.]

Thank you, for your loose temper, thank you.
Thank you, for your nonsense, thank you.
False flattery, those ironic words, thanks, thanks.
For speaking those words, simply, thank you, thank you.

Thank you, for your downright lies, thank you.
Thank you, for your fake smile, thank you.
False flattery too, those ironic words, thanks thanks.
For speaking those words, simply, thank you, thank you.

How am I? I am like the dry earth,
I pretend to accept this entirely.
Gradually, I’m becoming such a fool…

Thank you, for your warning, thank you.
Thank you, for your kindness, thank you.
Even if there is a crack in your heart,
simply for speaking those words, thank you

How am I? I am like the dry earth,
I pretend to accept this entirely.
Gradually, I’m becoming such a fool…

[JP]

ありがとう 君の気まぐれにありがとう
ありがとう 君のでたらめにありがとう
お世辞も皮肉の言葉にも ただどうもどうも
口から出る言葉は ただありがとうだけ

ありがとう 君の嘘っぱちにありがとう
ありがとう 君の薄笑いにありがとう
お世辞も皮肉の言葉にも ただどうもどうも
口から出る言葉は ただありがとうだけ

どうです 僕は大地のように
かかわる全てを受け入れる振り
だんだん馬鹿になってゆくのです

ありがとう 君の忠告にありがとう
ありがとう 君の親切にありがとう
石になった心の底に響いても
口から出る言葉は ただありがとうだけ

どうです 僕は大地のように
かかわる全てを受け入れる振り
だんだん馬鹿になってゆくのです

[Romaj.]

arigatou kimi no kimagure ni arigatou
arigatou kimi no detarame ni arigtaou
o-seji mo hiniku no kotoba nimo tada doumo doumo
kuchi kara deru kotoba wa tada arigatou dake

arigatou kimi no uso pachi ni arigatou
arigatou kimi no usowarai ni arigatou
o-seji mo hiniku no kotoba ni mo tada doumo doumo
kuchi kara deru kotoba wa tada arigatou dake

doudesu boku wa daichi no you nibb
kakawaru subete wo ukeiwaru furi
dandan baka ni natte yuku no desu

arigatou kimi no chuukoku ni arigatou
arigatou kimi no shinsetsu ni arigatou
iIshi ni natta kokoro no soko ni hibiite mo
kuchi kara deru kotoba wa tada arigatou dake

doudesu boku wa daichi no you ni
kakawaru subete wo ukeiwaru furi
dandan baka ni natte yuku no desu

(Part One)

The song’s begun…

Around and around the needle slinks, and with each passing bar the circle shrinks.

Around, and round, and round she goes–and if reversed the circle grows.

A hazy regard tethers me to the redbrick hill where it’s always an early, misty grey, whose emanence lie in the pews beyond the wall, and corralled its cloudy eye black to bleat.

Some held out gusty day, compelling me to give up, constantly moving around buckets in a room to catch blood only visible to the robin in the grey, and blurred into the carpet by the stairs, a rosy visionaire.

Purposefully early came the ivy-gartered day, sending to bed all the greater creatures, and rousing every ruminant. See each lowly animal with stomach on the wane.

Each morning baby’s six perfect toes and the six things they represent.

I’m guiding blind and bleeding bodies in the bay. I’m guiding cold and congregating ululates by accident.

(Part Two)

We continue.

Each tiny groove the needle fill contains within what’s smaller still.

Analogous ariole becomes a paper with a hole.

Propellor of Death is a lucky whirl. No shining, climbing, silver stair. Found secret in a book I read, between pages one and a hundred-one. Reveals a druggy follicle, finding sweat, pounded ‘round some unliving pile.

Evasive with the vigor of vanity.

My constant shady articulation of form, an outside exaltante. Lapse a dog is symmetrical sermon on tape, to remind me–a translation of God into a comedy. I feel it’s iron and brick to a greater profanation. Here lies the exaltation of an ordained aberrant.

There isn’t any more time to mend all the moss in the mound, each moist molecule replays the facts in an autonomous web of weary–I’m telling you this because I don’t want us to be divided. Sojourn and walk a sightless vocation through the murky mezzanine.

I’m standing atop the crystalline winter, weaving what troubles itself to sink in the skyless morning divided, over and over, again and again, the whistling of the spectral bird that I’m riding, a parochial fistula in the furrow of a holy bazaar.

Behold the gasp that’s my inevitable punctuation. I can’t stand in the sight of the eyeless morning divisa. Unpopular methods of cosmogonal factuous inimity, uncertain… What I see is a marble spiralling ‘round a negative drain.

Originally from http://www.darklyrics.net/k/kayodot.html

The dreamer glimpses things he has never seen before, and they will change him forever. In the world of dreams, things happen that are not possible in the world he came from. Questions are answered, but the answers are in a language he has never heard before. He understands that language though, in the dream. Everything is resolved in the dream, or so it seems, but it all must remain in the dream–when he awakens, he will forget that language. It will be incomprehensible again. He will only remember that when he dreamed, he understood it. He will forget the music he heard in his dream. Music that made him fly, music that made him escape from his body, music that made him escape from time itself–but he will remember that there was this music, that there must be music like this, somewhere, even if it is only in dreams. The dreamer experiences everything passively. He lies asleep and it moves through him. These experiences may be more wondrous than anything he’s ever tasted, but they are perpetually out of his grasp. The dreamer has no power. He has no will. The dreams enter through him, and he is their vessel.

As you know this is my first public address since I took over my new job. When the New Frontiers had rode into town, I locked myself in my office to get my feet wet.

Let me make clear that what I am talking about is balance. I believe that the public interest is made up of many interests. There are many people in this great country and you must serve all of us. You will get no argument from me, if you say that given a choice between a western and a symphony, more people will watch the western. I like westerns too, but a steady diet for the whole country is obviously not in the public interest.

We all know that people would more often prefer to be entertained, than stimulated or informed, but your obligations are not satisfied if you look only to popularity as a test of what to broadcast. You are not only in showbusiness, you are free to communicate ideas as well as relaxation. You must provide a wider range of choices, more diversity, more alternatives. It is not enough to cater to the nation’s whims, you must also serve the nation’s needs.

There will be times, perhaps, when you will consider that I take myself or my job too seriously, frankly I don’t care if you do, for I am convinced that either one takes this job seriously or one can be seriously taken.

I was looking at some things I wrote a while back, and it had references to the I Ching in it. I then tried to open up reoxy.org and, unfortunately for me and the rest of the world, it has been lost to time. It’s got some of the best content on the web as far as I’m concerned, and yet, it was totally lost without a second thought or concern…

Speaking of impermanence, I updated this blog today with some old writings of mine…

Lying down beneath the stars
alone at last I rest.
Feeling right feels good,
but being right is best.

Oft shooting stars had their effect.
Perfect things left laid.
Oft our hands are held
at perfect hands asleep.

Heavy hearts can you held your hand?
Took your best to understand
that light and dark are wrong
and oft, all the rest is dust.

If we can’t it’s understood
that we never could.
The stars still held when we fell.
Would our hands do what they should?

When they turn from green to brown
what any child can test,
what makes the sound?
What shakes the ground?
It is the greatest.

Heavy hearts come hold our hand,
The planets help you understand
that light and dark are wrong,
and oft, all that’s left is us.

I am grateful to be born in an age of internet distribution and easy access to many forms of media, but because of that this list of influences will be quite long, although not exhaustive. It is in no particular order, and any appearance on this list can mean many things.

This list will be updated periodically.

Music

• Sound Art/Experimental
  • Tim Hecker
    • Tim Hecker’s website
    • Tim Hecker - Harmony In Ultraviolet on Bandcamp
  • Earth
    • Earth on Bandcamp
    • Earth - The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull on Bandcamp
  • Christian Fennesz
    • Christian Fennesz website
    • Fennesz on Bandcamp
    • Fennesz - Plays on Bandcamp
    • Fennesz + Sakamoto - Flumina on Bandcamp
  • Saito Koji
    • Saito Koji on Bandcamp
  • The Necks
    • The Necks website
    • The Necks on Bandcamp
  • Merzbow
  • Sunn O)))
    • SUNN on Bandcamp
    • SUNN Monoliths & Dimensions on Bandcamp
• Jazz
  • Miles Davis
    • Magi’s Brew
    • Get Up With It
  • Thelonious Monk
  • Phronesis
    • Phronesis on Bandcamp
  • Ryo Fukui
    • A Letter From Slowboat on Bandcamp
    • Mellow Dream on Bandcamp
• Metal
  • ISIS
    • ISIS on Bandcamp
  • Tool
  • Kayo Dot
    • Kayo Dot on Bandcamp
  • The Number Twelve Looks Like You
  • The Dillinger Escape Plan
  • Ed Gein
• Rock
  • mewithoutYou
    • mewithoutYou on Bandcamp
  • Sufjan Stevens
  • Caspian
  • RX Bandits
    • RX Bandits …And The Battle Begun on Bandcamp
  • CAKE
  • The Format
  • Iron & Wine
• Classical
  • Frédéric Chopin
  • Franz Liszt
  • Beethoven

Film

• Synechdoche, New York
• Being John Malkovitch
• Blow-Up (1966)
• Ghost In The Shell (1995)
• Satoshi Kon’s Paprika

Video Games

• Metal Gear Solid (Series)
• Team ICO (Shadow of the Colossus, ICO)
• FEZ
• NieR: Automata
• Kentucky Route Zero
• Hyper Light Drifter

Literature

• The Broom of the System (David Foster Wallace)
• House of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielewski)
• Nijigahara Holograph (Inio Asano)
• Ayako (Osamu Tezuka)
• Notes From Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

The net is more forgetful than anyone will admit, and art is one of those things that is lost very easily. For all the spying, corporate data collection, data trade, etc., it’s ironic to me that we will not, or refuse to preserve things that matter more than what I ate for lunch sometime years ago and posted on some social media site. The net is ephemeral when it comes to culture, but when it comes to personal data it remembers forever, and this is frankly saddening, disgusting, and an enormous loss for the world.

On that topic, Saito Koji has made mountains and mountains of minimal loop-based drone-ambient, over 400 tracks, probably thousands of hours, over more than 10 years. Most of it will be lost to time altogether, as he recently deleted his bandcamp account, and he would routinely wipe it of everything and build it up again. I first heard Guitar Loop Is My Life and it inspired me greatly, it was peaceful, simple, and easy to listen to, unlike some other works in the loop/ambient sphere that I had found until that point. But, it was complex in subtle ways, and it was emotionally stimulating despite its simplicity.

There are some albums that have survived, that were released on netlabels, pretty good releases such as Heavenly, or Guitar Loop Is My Life, however many have just disappeared, like Whatever or Two Of Us among many, many others…

Saito Koji is an artist I’ll remember, and I hope he comes back one day. There are many more I’ve probably missed altogether, when we can come together to preserve lost music, maybe things will be different..

CAKE is a band defined by Americana, adopting various American styles and symbols of Americana into their music and style. The most notable symbol of which is the automobile, and is used many times like in The Distance, a broad metaphor for the race of life through vehicle wordplay; or Stickshifts and Safetybelts to at once represent another time that’s since been lost and also romanticize it through the lack of “bucket-seats” in his “Malibu,” or Satan Is My Motor, a commentary on Christian values regarding sin by representing the intention behind the actions one can take through the vehicle’s motor being “internal combustion.” It’s obvious from this illustration that CAKE has a bit of a fascination with the automobile.

Another set of Americana symbols comes from their stylistic choices and their relevance to American music culture of the 60s and 70s. Funk and Soul elements are represented in the bass, the background vocals, as well as some covers they did, while the guitar often has a more Rock & Roll tone to the playing and sound of the instruments. It gives an interesting dynamic with the stylistic difference. The best example I can think of is The Distance in regards to the sound of each instrument lending its own piece to the puzzle. The drums hold down a great beat alternating open and closed hi-hats while the guitar plays a Zeppelin-esque riff with a good amount of distortion, and the bass is laying down a syncopated line that plays with rests and stuttering plucking. They’ve got a curious use of Country/Folk music elements too, such as on She’ll Come Back To Me with the slide guitar and the guitar riffage on Stickshifts and Safetybelts.

It is peculiar to me how some music can cause such an effect in me and yet remain undefinable. A friend recently said “All emanations recursively obscure that which originated them,” and I feel this is an apt way to describe some of Tim Hecker’s work, specifically the theme that closes out this album and the album Harmony In Ultraviolet. Konoyo captured me as soon as I had heard its opener, This Life. I had listened to it a number of times before the album came out, and when I had finally heard the entire album, I was surprised to find that it was probably the most intense song on the album. Although I had expected something a bit more aggressive, it was a welcome change from Virgins and Love Streams which are both very emotionally and thematically heavy albums.

However, this album’s arc starts high and dips and then ends middle-high, with the low point being at the end of Keyed Out. When considering the title of the album Konoyo meaning “this world”, the first track is titled This Life, while the last track is titled Across To Anoyo, with anoyo meaning “the realm of the dead”, and with clear language we are told there is more besides this world, and this life. Despite the topic of death and the afterlife, it is to me a very beautiful album conceptually, and an album that lifts me up by the end of it. There’s a lot of rememberance in his works, but this album seems almost more personal in a way…

A sterile numbness, overflowing in emptiness, purging all from the core.

In sterile dimness, it lay, fetal, patient for more.

A rewritten future history, a small gesture of near-infinite affectations.

A stone too small from fracture, but growing in permutations, can no longer fit snugly on a handsome thing, can no longer let a refraction through its opulene face, and light through its surface bring, Illuminated through it, colors, brilliance.

Space divided by several layers of time, time carved by will, crossed by a line, undefined, in all its opulence, it was a fragile gem, broken and lost among gods and men, pitted against each other, what wrongs they rend, but not unforgiven, despite their inevitable end, among that dimness, it shall begin again.

Sterile, lost, cleansed…

End.

I should probably give some sort of introduction, but I’ve never really been too keen on the pretense surrounding telling someone all about oneself. Conversations and learning about someone should happen naturally, rather than invoking some pre-determined list of things: what you do for work, what you do for fun, etc.; but that’s not an interesting way to get to learn about someone.

I guess I should provide some sort of introduction, at bare minimum though…

I am the valley,
You are the river coursing
through me, yet stretching on.

From my view, you seem endless,
and endlessly intertwined.

A drooping petal, caught,
in rhythm fills and empties.
In time the rain will pass on.
northward, returning to the sea.

Dreaming in a fog,
drifting across settled water,
this seed breaks away.

I watched you rise,
illuminate the dead night,
and fall ‘fore my path.

But, your light’s from somewhere else,
restless, I seek that “elsewhere”

Your emanations recurse, within, without me,
illuminates the inner path, lit from behind.