"Daylighting" Live EP Release & Excision/Papadosio Painting

• Music (interactive discography here)

Daylighting: Electronic Improvisations on Acoustic Guitar [EP]

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I'm delighted to present you my newest EP of cybernetic sound sculpture, recorded live at the MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference (San Jose, CA) and the Fantastic Hullaballoo (New Orleans, LA) this April. Everything you hear on this EP is improvised solo acoustic guitar and eBow routed through hardware FX and live looping, edited only for time. No software manipulation, multitracking, or post-production gimmickry. One more step down the road on my journey to completely reimagine the acoustic guitar.

In civil engineering language, "daylighting" is the uncovering of natural waterways that were once forced underground by construction. I learned the term from ethnobotanist Kathleen Harrison, who stretched this definition to include the process of reacquainting ourselves with our own rejected dimensions – bringing the buried back into the light, where it can breathe and nourish us.

This album is dedicated to Jeremy Jensen of Critical Beats, without whom there would not have been a concert to record.

Thanks for listening!

• Imagery (full gallery & price list here)

Gateway To Blue Truth

2010 06 11 & 12 Cervantes & Quixotes

(Excision, Liquid Stranger, RumbleJunkie, Sub.mission Residents,

Papadosio, Juno What?, Fresh2Death)

18"x24" – paint marker on cradled gesso board

original, 11"x17" posters, & 18"x24" giclees for sale

Night one: The craziest dubstep show I have ever attended. At the end of the night, a sea of jagged broken pilsner glasses around the humble riser keeping me above the fray. It's nights like these that a few good souls volunteer themselves to keep the less-aware/respectful from pitching headlong into my entire set-up (as almost happened a few times). But wild, messy shows like that one are equally full of bright, beautiful, loving expression, sincere interest, and honest-to-God P.L.U.R. It's why I keep coming back.

Night two: A delightful mini-festival held by my favorite contenders for "Next Über-Famous Electronic Jam Ensemble," my boys Papadosio. I got to play the evening's opening set (clips coming soon...er or later...), and we saw lovely showings from my friends Anthony Fugate, Fresh2Death, and The Floozies, as well as numerous other excellent acts. A way less intimidating, way more heartfelt evening, all told. Less polarized, anyway.

According to David Deida, "blue truth" is like the blue part of a flame – so subtle you might miss it, even though it's the hottest part. Blue truth is the kind you can't grasp unless you've really sat with it, until you can feel it so deeply that it lives and acts as you. It can't be "understood" intellectually. Or, as he puts it: "Knowing the truth is fairly useless; feeling it is profound; living it makes all the difference."

I dedicate this one to Jason Takahashi, globetrotting trickster, exemplary passionate intellect, and the poor fool who has to take credit for introducing me to the 'Dosio family – and to Jeremy Goldstein, consummate band manager, who knows how to look out for his artists.

• Upcoming Gigs (full calendar here)

Jun 24 2010 - 8:00P - Boulder, CO

live illustration for Hamsa Lila & Tinariwen @ Boulder Theatre

Jun 25, 26, 27 2010 - 6:00P - Bellvue, CO

second annual live illustration residency @ Sonic Bloom Festival, Mishawaka Amphitheatre

Jun 28 2010 - 8:00P - Boulder, CO

live illustration for Messy Jiverson @ The Southern Sun Brewery

Jul 3 2010 - 2:00P - Bellvue, CO

cyberballadry & live illustration @ Ramble On The River Festival, Mishawaka Amphitheatre

Best & Worst New Musical Instruments of the 2000s

Copied below is my response to the contributors' poll H+ Magazine published on New Year's Eve Eve, 2010: "What were the best and worst _______s of the 00s?" Everyone chose a different topic, although most people preferred to ignore the "_____" and suggest more sweeping milestones for the decade. A few months later and I'm sticking to my guns about this one...

Worst New Musical Instrument: Guitar Hero

Essentially an electronic sample-triggering interface with near-zero control over which samples — more of a percussion toy than the guitar to whose lovers it was marketed — Guitar Hero exemplifies to me a massive step backward, the mascot of an obsolete paradigm. User input is a binary endeavor — you either march on beat to the manufacturer’s selection of Top 40 content, or suffer the annoying clicks that announce your failure. Way to perpetuate the producer/consumer divide, Guitar Hero! Way to reinforce the Pavlovian nightmare of school bells and rote learning that already undermines the last-resort creative capital of the western world.... This kind of musical training will cripple our next generation of musicians when the time comes to prove our worth next to improvising robots. And that’ll be, like, now.

Best New Musical Instrument: The Reactable

If Guitar Hero operates on the centralized, consumption-centered media-model of television, The Reactable is the musical avatar of Web 2.0. Not only is it a content-free revolution in musical control interfaces with a negligible learning curve (kids can pick it up almost immediately) that screams for collaborative applications (it can be played by as many people as can squeeze themselves around the table), but it was actually designed vision-first with these qualities in mind by an entire academic music technology department in Barcelona. And the tech they developed to make their dream a reality is applicable to a ludicrous range of “interactive tangible multi-touch applications” limited solely by our collective imagination. Watching this device in the able hands on stage with Björk last year made me feel like I’d been abducted by the future — and if the future bears any resemblance, it will be an awesome party, indeed.

(Read the whole contributor's poll at H+ Magazine.)

New Video: "Spokes" (Live At The B Side)

> Music
Here's my solo acoustic tapping piece "Spokes" from last week's show at The B Side Lounge in Boulder, the encore from my opening set in support of The Floozies & Fresh2Death. There's a short exposition about Bicycle Day and Albert Hofmann, to which this song is dedicated (after all, his discovery of LSD most likely saved the human species from nuclear annihilation).

Then I shred.

Spokes - 2009 11 07, The B Side Lounge, Boulder CO

(This song was originally featured on my 2008 EP Double-Edged Sword, which you can find for free or pay-what-you-want at Bandcamp.com)

The Coming Revolution In Audio Design

Design is not merely about changing our objects, but about changing our lives. It is not merely about improving the appearance or utility of our surroundings, but about the way we relate to them, and thus who we are. A revolution in design shakes both inner and outer worlds – and rarely is this more apparent than with new media technologies that reshape the sensory environment of our everyday lives. I recently stumbled across one such innovation – a radical twist in the world of sound engineering – and it immediately spun me into speculation on a bizarrely probable near-future world…

It’s 2015. I’m attending the premiere performance of the Houston Audioplanetarium, a marriage of science and art that guides the audience by the ears on a tour of our night sky’s celestial bodies. Using fantastic new technology, each star and planet’s radio frequencies are detuned to within the range of human hearing, then placed on a virtual speaker within the planetarium’s sophisticated audio software. Sonic qualities of each signal are modulated to trick our brains into assigning a specific, independent position, distance, and velocity for every sound source – animating the simulated sky with a vast choir of outer space’s spooky resonances as if we were actually listening to the night.
The more distant a star, the fainter its humming and moaning. The projectionists isolate constellations one at a time, and we are reacquainted with our familiar myths as they ring out in thick cinematic chords. Our virtual observatory moves through space and there are gasps as the sky comes unhinged and whizzes past everyone, each point of light and its radio howl zooming like a freight train, new stars up ahead announcing themselves with new tones. We have just navigated to the center of the galaxy to catch the opus of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. Then we zip off to listen to the strange beauty of the Crab Nebula, the Cat’s Eye Nebula, the rotary duets of binary stars, the cannonball roar of a supernova.

This virtual voyage is awe-inspiring and terrifying in its scope and realism, opening an entire sense to the realms of astronomy, revealing unexpected relationships between stars and galaxies, restoring us to wonder at the “music of the spheres” ancient science had predicted and modernity had all but forgotten. My mother, blinded by diabetes, cries tears of awe and joy at her first “glimpse” of the night sky in years.

Driving to the airport the next morning, I’m guided by a field of traffic alert signals my car stereo projects into my environment. Developed for pilots, my car’s sensors (in conjunction with a saturating network of handheld electronic devices, mounted civic sensors, and GPS satellites) notify me audibly of approaching vehicles and pedestrians, objects and obstructions in the road, and invisibly-distant traffic jams. Standard issue hardware on the nicer civilian automobiles now creates such a vivid real-time audio environment, every alert placed at actual distance in the virtual sonic sphere, that even the legally blind can drive (they have to pass a hearing exam).

Later, at work, I’m on a trans-Atlantic conference call in which the voices of my European associates seem to come directly from the mouths of their high-resolution holographic projections. I haven’t made a business trip in almost a year, down from two a month just a few years ago. The sense of “there-ness” is so compelling that sometimes I forget we still can’t actually shake on a deal.
If I’m to believe the rumors my friends are circulating, this means a new age for interrogation…a new form of psychological torture to break political prisoners by dangling their loved ones and enemies right in front of them. Fugitives are lured out of hiding by familiar voices (the technology to simulate a person’s unique vocal spectrum has existed for well over a decade). The “fireside chats” of internet media personalities have risen to a whole new level, celebrity spokespeople projected onto the street next to us. Porn stars really whisper in your ear, now.

A few years ago, when the first of these convincing phantasms saturated Hollywood, the surround sound industry disappeared overnight. Now, nobody trusts perception like we used to. Just as Photoshop made us learn to doubt the testimony of our eyes, so too do we now question our hearing. We’re no longer such a naïve culture, but something else has replaced our childlike confidence in the reality of our senses: a rigorous discernment, an eagerness to reach out and touch, a scientific sensibility that – day by day – erodes our assumptions about the nature of “reality” and has created a generation of philosophers.

It’s all due to the innovative work of one company, GenAudio, which in 2008 released a new level of “4D” audio processing software. Founded in Englewood, Colorado in the middle of the 21st Century’s first decade, their AstoundSound technology quickly exploded from its original applications in home theater and music production, rattling and rattled our society to the core, growing a new layer of thought and experience on the scaffold of our wild brains. We live in a new world of sound, and nobody saw it coming. But a few of us had our ears to the ground.
(Written for d/visible magazine.)

Luke Redfield's Folk Mysticism and Mystic Folk

I've always been ambivalent to folk music, because for so many it's a shelter in the comforting conventions of the past – an escape from the buzzing confusion of modern life in the platitudes and tired imagery of yesteryear. Folk is too frequently a narrow answer to broader questions, the musical equivalent of quoting Scripture to someone asking for advice on open relationships.

On the one hand, I too feel in over my head, and admire the urge to return to something simpler, something most of us understand as "behind" us in time. On the other hand, we can't turn this car around – in the words of Winston Churchill, "When you're going through Hell, keep going." The way out isn't back, it's through. The big questions deserve equally big answers – or, at least, an honest admission of their tremendous and terrifying unansweredness. The mystery of life isn't going away...and more and more, I find deeper solace in acknowledging this than by burying my head in familiar sand.

Broadly speaking, folk music's recent evolutions haven't brought the genre any closer – neo-folk and anti-folk drape themselves in old clothes but either indulge in absurd over-the-top romanticism, wooly pagan freakishness, or insensible deconstructed hipster chic.

Anyway, folk music, like every other genre, is merely a vehicle. If Matisyahu can use rap and reggae to preach the principles of his Jewish Orthodoxy, and Ween can write country tunes that spin out into vulgar surrealism, there is no reason why someone can't offer real depth through the idioms of folk music. And every once in a while, I get to rejoice at finding someone who does just that.

Luke Redfield is one such artist. His earnest, half-broken voice and slow-jangling acoustic guitar nestle quite naturally into the crook of folk's timeless and popular constitution. The plodding, mellow roll of a trap kit doesn't exactly herald visionary songwriting. If I hadn't read the words before I'd heard the music, I might have missed it. But there it is: a wonder at the immeasurable grandeur of it all, a blushing laugh at impermanence and the silly expectations of our brief human lives, even a few daring moments when capital-M Mystery gets called out into the street for a staring contest.

Co-author of a guru-themed cookbook, Cooking With Sages – in which vegetarian recipes are paired with paintings and cocktail napkin bios of various 20th Century enlightened masters – Redfield's a committed scholar-practitioner of the world's wisdom traditions. And it shows in the music; as a songwriter, he's has taken folk's humble yearning for transcendence and ridden it to the stars. Fire Mountain, 2008's rehearsal album for this summer's forthcoming LP, opens with the unyielding-yet-empathetic "Silent Afternoon," practically a tract from the missing Folk Sutra, in which listeners are challenged to "strip that which defines you...an illusion, like the setting sun," and asked, "Would the guitar make a sound if I was not here to strum?"

Excuse me, what? Zen koans in a four-chord rambler? I want to take a minute here to reprint the lyrics from this number verbatim, just to be clear:

There’s no finger, there’s no moon
No whale, no harpoon
Can you hear the voices calling on a silent afternoon?
There’s no hand, there’s no gun
No slayer, no slayed one
Would the guitar make a sound if I was not here to strum?
There’s no body, there’s no soul
No candidate, no poll
No presidency, no kingship – for there’s nothing to control
There’s no death, there’s no birth
No countries, no earth
There is no fence around the universe

As you watch your life pass by
With what do you identify?
Can you strip that which defines you?
The attachments that bind you
An illusion, like the setting sun
Somewhere, the day has just begun

There’s no you, there’s no me
No two, no three
There is no one, but none, for eternity
There’s no time, there’s no space
No Original Face
No mathematical answer and no point of grace
There’s no wine, there’s no glass
No prayer, no fast
There is no religion and all of them will pass
No success, no fame
No winners, no game
The rat race exists only in your brain
There’s no mind, there’s no thought
No self, no want
There’s nothing that you need you haven’t already got

He manages to tear down the icons of just about every other folk song in five minutes – country, religion, desire, death, even music. I'd probably prickle if Redfield were just horny for turning folk music's innate rebelliousness on its own sacred cows, but he's clearly affectionate, even reverent, for the horse he's riding in on. Elsewhere on the album, he revels in a mysticism of the road that stands on the shoulders of masterpieces like Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, relishing the transparent sameness of the world that only a thousand diners and endless stretches of asphalt can instill. No self but the appearance of self, no wandering but the appearance of wandering.

Luke Redfield is speaking a language that anyone weaned on the mythos of the American Highway can understand...but crafts with it a bigger story, one beyond smaller and more recognizable concerns. In "Grateful Man," he leads us through the usual:

You came from down the road, you came right off the train
You have nowhere to go, ‘cause everywhere is the same
If I were a hobo, I’d roam this world with you
If I were a hobo, that’s what I’d do

Heard it before – until all of a sudden, he's nailing us with cowboy cosmology:

You came from the cosmos, you came from emptiness
You came from the bang that made this big ol’ mess
If I were a mystic, I’d be just passing thru
If I were a mystic, that’s what I’d do

One whole song is a reminder that "we've all got to lose this flesh." Another speaks of "how darkness came from light," and invites Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Taoists, and Hindus to a common table at which "Truth is a pathless land."

This is the kind of music I'd expect Conor Oberst to write, if he could ever get his head out of the bottle – comfortable in its limits, but what limits? After all, "Life...is just a bed to dream away what's in your head." This is the kind of music I wish I'd found in high school, when I was more impressionable and sensitive to simple wisdom. This is the kind of music I want played in bars and folk festivals, where – God willing – it might enlighten a few people by osmosis. It makes me reconsider my opinions about folk music, maybe even want to go back and give a few dismissed artists a second listen. It kindles my inner vagabond mystic, burning to live the adventure of synchronous Spirit's wandering whim.

After all, if folk music is about tradition (both keeping it and bucking it), then Luke Redfield has upped the ante: next to the perennial knowledge of ancient societies the world over, acoustic guitars and road anthems look baby fresh. Dropping folk's clichés into a far bigger context, he's cast new light on music that I long considered stale, reminding me that soul takes any – and every – form.

(Written for Colorado Music Board.)

Live From Zero Point

> Music

Forty minutes of new live recordings from my adventures in Arizona. These highlights from shows all over Phoenix and Flagstaff show off a few new songs as well as solid performances of old standards...and my first-ever foray into electronic dance music for acoustic guitar. Not to mention rambling interludes regarding quantum biology, the origins of Bicycle Day, and my solemn vow to give that girl in the audience a dance party before the night is through.

And it's all totally free for you to share and remix to your heart's content, courtesy of a Creative Commons Noncommercial Attribution License and the good people at Archive.org. (If you feel like throwing me a tip, though, it won't go unnoticed.) Enjoy!

YOU'RE The Musician; YOU Make Some Noise!

(continued from part one)

I have been consumed by thoughts regarding the changing role of the artist in our culture. As I started to mention in my previous essay ("The 3-2-1 of Musical Performance"), there are – even in the narrow and unimaginative relationships between contemporary musicians and their audiences – at least three different depths of intimacy, three different lenses through which the rules of performance can be observed. The performer, in recognizing the audience as Impersonal Other (It), Personal Other (You), or Self (I), projects radically different characteristics on the concert environment.

This can be intentional, but usually artists naturally settle into one of these three perspectives and become known for it. (To give you a taste of what I mean, imagine the distinctions between playing to a room full of uninterested strangers, or friends, or family, or alone, or as worship...now imagine taking each of those various perspectives on the same group of people. It's a fantastic exercise in developing fluid perception.)

This is the kind of thing I rattle on about to whomever I can capture in my word-sphere, trying to coax from them new aspects I haven't recognized. I brought this stuff up with my girlfriend the morning after live painting at a huge rave outside of Phoenix. One of their MCs spent most of his airtime asking how many of us were fucked up, and how many of us were really fucked up, and complaining that we weren't making enough noise, and try again, make some fucking noise!

Never mind that as someone more immersed the jam band scene and its hippie-noveau mentality, I can't imagine actually volunteering to announce that I am on drugs. Never mind that I was questioning the musicality of the entire event when I found out that one of the headlining DJs, apparently by playing the same stuff I'd heard in a dubious Scottsdale nightclub the evening before, had been voted #4 in the US (our desiccated monoculture should be evidence enough for the dangers of democracy).

The real sticking point was this:

As a passionate defender of individual autonomy, someone who bristles up when a DJ's robotic vocal sample insists, "I – control you! I – control you!," I'd rather zip my lips in revolt when some obnoxious dude with a microphone tries to play audio-puppeteer. I believe it is the urgent duty of anyone blessed enough to be amplified before a crowd to at least attempt to express some understanding of our common identity. And this guy clearly didn't get it.

My girlfriend, once a symphonic violist for the Topeka Symphony and thus coming from a much more formal tradition of stage-theatre interaction, put it well:

"YOU'RE the musician; YOU make some noise!"

On the one hand, this is exactly the assumption that I as a songwriter would like to challenge. I don't want us all relinquishing our creative agency to whomever The Machine decides is going to be The Next Big Thing. In an age when we can all produce our own books/video/music/fine art/theater, I think it's time for us to reclaim our inspiration from centralized corporate governance.

At the same time, even as an artist I prefer to let the guy on stage take the reigns for a little while. Yelling at your audience for not giving you enough applause is a tragic misunderstanding of the postmodern argument that the critic co-creates the artwork. It's an abdication of your personal responsibility to melt our fucking faces off. And it's a waste of our time – we came to get down, not to coddle your bravado. Less talk, more rock.

Of course, there are awesome exceptions to these traditional polarities – like John Cage's piece 4'33", for which a blank score is placed on the stand and the pianist (or any other musicians) just sits there while the audience starts to squirm. After a minute or two, people are coughing, shifting in their seats, sighing...and all of these random noises make up the actual performance, by an unwitting orchestra.

Cage, a postmodern philosopher and mystic if there ever was one, was making a point: pulling the audience into the performance, 4'33", is not only an intense defiance of expectations, but points out how those expectations are part of the piece, that the audience is at least half-responsible for any perceived musicality.

Sure enough, some people "get it" and some people don't, depending on who can hear "noise" as "music" and the crowd's restless soundscape as John Cage's actual musical intent. Even as he demonstrates the participatory role of the so-called "observers," he denies their total sovereignty by playing them like instruments. And he manages this without demanding that people do anything, in what is widely considered the first "noise music" composition, blurring will and accident. It's a complex and nuanced deconstruction of classical music's rigid artist-audience dynamics.

I was born thirty-two years after 4'33" debuted. It's a part of my blood, my bearing. I grew up with the fourth wall trampled into dust. Still, I don't bring my guitar to concerts so I can jam along from the crowd. Nor do I try to rape participation out of my audiences when I can't seduce them with the music. After all, learning to see the arbitrariness of our social conventions doesn't make them go away. We still all have to stop at a red light, even if we know it could just as well be blue.

But oh, how I long for the day when I no longer hear people say, "I'm not an artist. I don't have a creative bone in my body." We're all more likely to "make some fucking noise" when we have reclaimed our creative selves and can appreciate what it's like to be up there on stage, when we understand the effort and can applaud from a sense of solidarity, rather than obligation. Until that day, it is all I can do to remind people at every opportunity that we're in this boat together, even as we take turns at the helm.

(Written for Colorado Music Board.)

The 3-2-1 of Musical Performance

For whatever reasons, our culture has decided that we are not all musicians. Instead, a few trained (or not-so trained) specialists are expected to get up on stage so we can live vicariously through them. There are musicians, and there are spectators. But I don't think the distinction is so clear cut; we're all participants in something larger called a "concert" that requires both artist and audience in the same way that fertilization requires both male and female.

To designate the female as the only creative member of that dyad is just as insane as saying that only the dudes on stage are creative...and yet this is exactly what we do. Beneath it all is a significant cultural pathology, an issue of misunderstood self-other boundaries writ large. In order to explain this, let me take a detour through a bit of my history in personal development...

In the fall of 2005, I attended a seminar on Integral Life Practice – a sort of practice-of-combining-practices that regards everything from weightlifting and Tai Chi to Gestalt therapy and Vipassana meditation as tools in a kit for people to exercise every dimension of their being. After all, there are a lot of ways to grow in "self, culture, and nature," innumerable different lines of development, and should one care to cultivate them, each has its appropriate program of possible activities, both ancient and postmodern.

Needless to say, I learned a lot that weekend about the various ways to be more intentional about my life, about how to organize my self-development activities so that they support each other, and of course how the ultimate end of all of this isn't bragging rights but a greater capacity to usher forth more truth, beauty, and goodness in the world.

But out of all of the practices and meta-practices I learned that weekend, only a few really stuck with me, percolated through my mind and become fundamental aspects of how I understand and relate to the world. One of these was the so-called "3-2-1 Process," a way to uncover and deal with troublesome material in one's psychological shadow (the part of yourself you aren't willing to admit and so can only see in "the world out there," in other people and things). The 3-2-1 Process is almost a theatre exercise:

- First, you notice an intense emotional reaction to something;
- Then, you describe it in as much detail as you can (the "3" of third-person analysis);
- Then, you imagine yourself in conversation with that thing, asking it what it might have to teach you, and whatever other questions you have for it (the "2" of second-person relationship);
- Then, you speak AS that thing, recognizing it as a facet of who you are and not some absolute other (the "1" of first-person identity).

This can be done with pleasant or unpleasant emotional reactions; you might unwind your fear of some monster in a recurring nightmare, or find within yourself the beauty of someone you envy and admire. It takes practice – and vigilance – but is one of the quickest ways I know to turn anger or fear or hatred into understanding and love.

What more, as it became clear to me in the years since, this same structure is recapitulated not just in moments of intentional shadow work but also in the entire saga of human development. We begin identifying with nothing at all, not even aware of a self. Slowly we become more aware of the world, and begin to engage it relationally. It is through these relationships that we eventually learn how the world is us and we are the world.

And here's where the music comes in.

As a performing singer-songwriter, I can identify this trajectory in the way I understand what is going on while I'm on stage. The 3, 2, and 1 of the process are three different kinds of relationships I have with the audience, three different states of being.

When I first started playing music at open mics, I would be looking out at the audience and noticing things about them ("That is obviously a wig," "Holy shit, look at that hottie," "What a bunch of drunks"), but not really doing anything useful with that information. More than helping me, it was often a distraction from what I was TRYING to do, which is "just play" – but of course, I wasn't just playing, I was PLAYING AT, trying to FORGET about the audience and pretend I'm alone in the room, playing to an insentient empty space. Even today, this sometimes happens when I'm especially nervous.

At some point, after getting used to being the center of attention (and that this is not always by their choice – especially with bar crowds, where it's pretty unlikely anyone is actually there specifically to hear me), I realized that there's a certain amount of trust and reciprocity involved in the musician-audience dynamic and I have to meet the crowd halfway in order to really entertain them. It's a relationship, and relationships require mutuality. That means if I want them to listen to me, I have to listen to them. I have to be able to read the crowd like the face of a single person – sometimes the crowd is sleepy and belligerent and trying to watch TV, and sometimes she's totally rapt and playing with her hair and trying to get you ask her to come home with you. Each person in the crowd is like a little voice in the head of that one person, and so in conversation, I can PLAY TO certain voices and draw the attention of the entire crowd by sparking something in only a few of them. (People, after all, are social-mirroring animals. If you see someone else enjoying themselves, you're more likely to join suit. And in that way it really is almost like playing to one person, like trying to persuade someone by finding out what matters to them and planting hooks in it.)

This is a more engaged, more personal, warmer way of playing. If I'm talking on the mic in "3 mode," I'm usually talking to myself. If I'm on the mic in "2 mode," I'm asking questions, looking people in the eyes, cracking jokes, keeping the energy between me and the audience lively and dynamic.

From time to time, however, even this melts away into something much deeper, something in which "2 mode" seems like the desperate manipulative bid that it often is. Because sometimes, I BECOME the audience – or, more accurately, I stop playing the music and the music just happens, and in the flow of things (if I were to stop and try to describe what is happening) the concert is revealed for what it really is: artist and audience as two facets of one event, one creative moment happening all together, one thing in its wholeness. NOT playing AT a crowd, and not playing TO a crowd, but just PLAYING.

This kind of thing, this "1 mode," doesn't happen when I am playing a song for the first time, when it's still awkward and unfamiliar in my hands and throat. And it doesn't happen when I'm trying to impress somebody in the audience – that's me not owning up to something, projecting it "out there," and trying to work some kind of voodoo to control it at a distance. (Try cutting off your hand, throwing it across the room, and willing it to pick up the phone. Good luck.) It happened first in front of friends, with old songs I knew...well, "like the back of my hand." And with practice, learning more about myself as a performer, learning more about the technical minutia that can so easily distract (microphones, monitors, tuning), learning the patterns of crowds in different venues, it happens more frequently these days.

I've found that keeping my eyes open while playing makes a big difference; otherwise I might never be able to engage and relate to the audience, much less transcend that relationship. Certainly, thinking about it helps. I enjoy making it explicit in my own mind that this is a moment of mutuality and co-creation, that I'm shaping their experience while they're shaping mine, so we exist within each other like the dots on a yin yang. Just sitting there listening (or not listening), the audience is in this sense as much a part of the music as I am, because they are the content of my experience – and what better definition of self do we really have? ("You are what you eat.")

Talking about it helps if I'm in the right crowd, one willing to be drawn into deeper awareness of themselves and their environments. Otherwise, it's more likely to alienate the audience than entrain them. I typically keep it to myself at bars.

Perhaps the most useful practice is to exercise simple, general mindfulness both on- and off-stage. The more aware we are, the more likely we are to notice that there isn't really anyone BEING aware, so much as there is an awareNESS that frequently gets lazy and divides into "self" and "other"...or artist and audience.

(continued in part two)

(Written for Colorado Music Board.)

Playing The Body Electric, Part One

I believe that we as a species are currently witnessing the evolution of a new relationship between the inner and outer worlds, renegotiating that tricky self/other boundary...and in the process we might ultimately reach a new platform of musical development at which the individual has internalized not just the other players, but the instruments themselves.

But first, a bit of necessary exposition in the field of developmental psychology, so bear with me, here...

I went to grad school for Integral Theory, which meant studying the intricacies of human mind/body development. One of the recurring themes of "growing up" (which of course extends into ongoing adult development, although most adults seem unwilling to admit that such a thing exists – as if someone with their own job and car has reached the goal posts of maturity) is that we all rely on our environment to take care of things we eventually learn to do ourselves. As we grow more accustomed to assuming personal responsibility for some psychological or physiological function, we go from not even noticing that we're being taken care of, to seeking sources in the external world that will satisfy that need, to satisfying it ourselves.

One example would be how newborns don't even know they need to eat; but eventually learn to inform their parents when they're hungry, and finally manage to feed themselves. Again: young children are unaware of "the rules;" older kids learn to follow them (but don't know how or why they are in place); and adults can not only obey or disobey, but explain why certain rules are necessary for a functioning society.

(Quick check: If you think that the statement "Murder is wrong" is true "because God said so," I love you but you don't qualify as an adult in the modern world. You're still relying on external support for your moral system. If this concerns you, go read Robert Kegan's book In Over Our Heads and then find a few more literate friends.)

So what does this all mean for music? Well, it means we were born right in the middle of a revolution.

Archeologically speaking, instruments appeared first as more or less extensions of the natural environment...hollow reeds, rocks, sticks, and animal gut strung across a bent frame. The earliest instruments emerged from human experimentation with accidental noises and animal calls...what po-mo sophisticates such as you and I would call "found sounds." Ethnomusicologists observe a trend from these earlier instruments, capable of a limited expressive range (typically only a handful of notes, and only one at a time) toward more intricate devices capable of producing complex polyphony. (Think about the difference between relatively ancient intruments like a shaker or hand drum and relatively contemporary instruments like a guitar or piano...or even more contemporary instruments like the laptop.) In other words, the history of human musical instrumentation follows that same developmental curve: first, a symphony of natural sounds; then, a symphony of humans playing simple instruments; then, one human playing an entire array of chords, with remarkable tonal variety, on one instrument. Like so:

These trends seem likely to continue even further as we continue to deepen our relationship with technology. Groundbreaking child psychologist Lev Vygotsky built his developmental model on observations that use of tools within a cultural substrate are often the means to new levels of development (that a child learns to write letters exactly as taught before developing his own handwriting, for example...take it one step further and eventually the child learns to write with any marking object or create his own). From a different field, but with a similar understanding of the flow of things, technology writer Kevin Kelly says that we don't really live in "The Age" of something until it's so much a part of the background of our experience that we don't even notice it until it breaks. We don't live in The Age of Computers...yet. But we will, as soon as computers shrink to invisibility and are embedded in everything.

Likewise, I think we don't live in an Age of Instruments...but we're about to. We're coming up on a new world in which playing music by crude manipulation of some boxy device will be left to the retro-ers and traditionalists. An era when we can speak symphonies as easily as we can form sentences.

This may sound somewhat akin to claiming that soon we'll be able to give up scissors and cut paper with our bare hands. But what I mean is that we may learn to exercise not only conscious control over our hands and voices, but over the subtler biological circuitry of our bodies - those systems responsible for our breath, heartbeats, and brainwaves - in order to make music that is directly translated from tiny electrical potentials through novel electronic interfaces into sound. Not only are people already rigging electroencephalograms to synthesizers, but some are developing full-body suits that communicate musical dimensions of dance in a much more intricate and expressive way than any keyboard-and-pedal control surface ever could.

As a compulsive futurist, I have little doubt that this would bring the evolution of instrumentation to the logical conclusion of a trajectory along which the means of music are increasingly internalized. And of course, music itself grows in complexity at every step along this path - of course, the music made by a group of people all playing polyphonic instruments is potentially much more complex than one guy trying to imitate bird calls by blowing across a blade of grass. There isn't an end point; each new development opens up an entirely new realm of musical expressive possibility, in which each person becomes the entire orchestra of the previous realm. So what will this mean when we have polyphonic synths hooked up to each of a person's once-autonomous bodily functions, have trained that person to operate each "instrument" independently of the others, and throw him in a room with forty other people similarly prepared?

What kind of music can we expect to grow out of early experiments, such as these...

Phil Stearns has bent circuit boards through a biofeedback unit and uses his body as a variable-resistance conductor to make experimental noise music.

Daito Manabe has attached myoelectric sensors that turn the electrical impulses of his muscles into sampling, trigger, and loop controls.

And THIS guy is processing an EEG (electroencephalogram) signal through mediating algorithms to turn raw brainwave data into an intelligible composition (although the guy with the helmet is certainly able to use his info of the device to "compose Beethoven-like music, and make it fast and loud!"

(Written for Colorado Music Board.)

Album Review: Elbow's The Seldom Seen Kid

I love this album so much that four hundred words are criminally insufficient to do it justice; but I wrote this brief review for a music journalism job application and, partial as it is, it seems pointless to keep it locked up on my hard drive. Enjoy!

---

Manchester ballad-kings Elbow found a good thing early on and have ridden it well, doing very little to redefine themselves since 1997's Asleep In The Back. There's a magic potion somewhere between frontman Guy Garvey's velvet rasp, the band's consistent ability to kick out highly dynamic slow-burning odes and dirges, and their rare competency in team songwriting (it's never clear in exactly which instrument their tunes first germinate, as if each piece escapes the studio process to emerge fully-formed). Sudden sprays of aggressive distortion or overpowering organs pepper otherwise tender, even cautious music. Choral repetitions forget they belong to a love song, and hook into hypnotizing drum and bass grooves until an afterthought of a fadeout. Exultant stadium singalongs take turns with ominous, swaggering lounge numbers. One minute, you're hallucinating drunk on your back in the alley outside a pub - and the next minute you're soaring over the golden meadows of your youth.

Elbow's greatest strength is their ability to repeatedly pull listeners though this wash of contradictions, finding the most stirring sentiments and primal urges and then throwing them into the ring together. It's a formula that reaches new levels of sophistication on their latest release, The Seldom Seen Kid (Fiction Records, 2008) – in which divorce proceedings inspire floor-stomping anthems, the small grief of loneliness is rendered in widescreen, and the city’s dirty streets magically transform into a romantic wonderland replete with siren-violins and a disco ball made from the Moon.

Garvey’s lyrics paint rich, tactile emotional space that swings from voice to voice, by turns abrasive (“cramming commitments like cats in a sack”) and nostalgic (“out of a doorway the tentacles stretch of a song that I know, and the world moves in slow-mo”). It’s a moving cocktail - one that can get you drunk before you know it - and so I’m willing to forgive the occasional clumsy tracks where depth is traded out for overplayed suave (“Audience With The Pope,” “The Fix”). There are fewer dragging moments on this album than some of their previous efforts, fewer saccharine stumbles and crawling, undeveloped melodies. They do exist – although by the time the album’s last twinkling electric guitar riff fades away, even the rough spots seem indispensable, endearing, somehow part of why this band is worth it. Elbow is, after all, a bar band – and it is these little testaments to their status as ordinary blokes, these slurs and frayed edges, that drive home the incredible humanity of their music.

A Window Into The Future Of Sound

The way we listen to music today is not going to last. A bevy of new technologies is set to radically change our relationship to auditory media. novel speaker materials, remarkable advances in recording equipment, and pioneering mind-machine interfaces have perched our culture on the verge of a world we would scarcely recognize: where music can be played back on any surface, where headphones have been replaced by custom isolated open-air audioscapes, and where we don't even need mouths to sing or hands to play our instruments. For your consideration, I present the following major innovations - each of which, sooner or later, will force us to reconsider what we think we know about communication.

SURFACESOUND

The first, like many wonderful discoveries, came from failure - failure by the UK Ministry of Defense to find a suitable material for dampening the sound of their helicopters. Instead, they stumbled upon a unique honeycombed structure that conducts sound with surprising efficiency. Already, the technology as been sold to NXT Sound, named SurfaceSound, and crafted into folding flat-panel speakers (14 mm thick) and "speakerless" automobile interiors and mobile phones.
It has also been fashioned into transparent overlays for computer screens, which can be segregated into as many as SIX isolated sound panes. It's only a matter of time (less than a year, according to NXT's projections) before we have integrated speakers in our greeting cards and digital photo displays, and ultra-thin clip-on speakers for juicing up obsolete non-musical surfaces. One of the most exciting prospects for SurfaceSound is as a responsive natural interface for audio engineering - according to the Discovery News article, it "can be made to vibrate when touched, with individual frequencies tailored to each finger" (a benefit of its capacity to be partitioned). With the ability to place sound-conducting surfaces almost anywhere imaginable, the next challenge for NXT seems simple enough: to make "silent loudspeakers" which can only be heard when the listener is in direct contact with the speaker surface.

AUDIO SPOTLIGHT

It's an end that may already have been achieved, albeit differently, by Holosonic Research Labs. Their incredibly cool Audio Spotlight technology fires a narrow beam of ultrasound that distorts in a predictable pattern through as it travels through air. The result is the sonic equivalent of a laser - an invisible ray of sound that can only be heard by someone standing directly in its path. (Their technical explanatory page can be found here.)
I'll say it again: Audio Spotlight turns the AIR into a loudspeaker that can only be heard by standing INSIDE of it. Sound can be projected like a beam of light, bounced off of surfaces, and manipulated in all kinds of other novel ways. The New York Times called Audio Spotlight "the most radical technological development in acoustics since the coil loudspeaker was invented in 1925," and with good reason:

Headphone museum tours are over, soon to be replaced with isolated audio programs for each display. You can listen to music over open air in the public library. The insane cacophony of public advertisements will be forgotten in favor of more discrete "hotspots" pedestrians will learn to systematically avoid. Performing musicians will be able to broadcast multiple submixes into their audiences to compensate for micro-variations in venue acoustics - or even play several concerts at once, through which listeners can move as they dance from one end of the room to the other. You'll never register a noise complaint against your neighbor's bassy stereo system again. The technology is already being adapted by an impressive array of clients, including

Eastman Kodak, Hewlett-Packard, GM, Motorola, and Walt Disney Imagineering (the guys who build the rides). (A full list of current applications can be found here.) It isn't long before our children are digging iPod earbuds out of the attic and querying their internet implants as to what the hell those things are...

EPOC

And when they do, they'll probably be using technology similar to Emotiv Systems' Epoc, a new videogaming interface that replaces handheld controllers with a mind-reading headset.
Combining 100 year old EEG technology with new software algorithms that analyze human brainwave patterns, the Epoc is a glorified biofeedback device, enabling its users to navigate computer interfaces with nothing more than intent. Beyond its immediate gaming applications (headsets will be on the market for $300 this Christmas), Emotiv is exploring numerous applications in robotics, education, and medicine - making it possible, for example, for quadraplegics to operate household devices on their own. I'm giving us a year before progressive musical acts are using these or similar headsets to control electronic music production arrays - heralding the advent of a long-imagined age when artists are able to directly convey their thoughts to an audience.

(A speculative recipe: combining the Epoc with the Audio Spotlight yields the potential for multi-scaped audio arrays that are activated and operated without so much as lifting a finger.)

And if that weren't enough, it is easy to imagine how such a device - apparently already well on the road to ubiquity - might catalyze a radical development of mental acuity in our culture. Having to learn what is currently an uncommon finesse with concentration and intent could well improve the focus and self-control of everyone who uses it...and already, I can hear the next generation marvel with pity and disbelief at our limited attention spans and cognitive agency.

(More on this here: Discovery Channel)

AUDEO

The Epoc's clever decryption of brainwave semantics has its limitations, however. One significant "drawback" (if that term can even be applied to such a stunning advancement) is that it cannot read your brain with enough precision to decode speech. You'll still have to move your mouth to talk...

...UNLESS, that is, you're using Ambient Corporation's Audeo, a neckband-mounted microchip that relays nerve impulses on their way to the focal cords to a computer, where they are translated into an audible computerized voice.
Although the device can currently recognize fewer than 200 words, Ambient is working to release an improved model by the end of the year that recognizes individualphonemes and has a functionally limitless vocabulary. Michael Callahan, Ambient'stwenty-four year old co-founder, recently placed the first public "voiceless phone call" at a recent technology conference (You can find the video embedded in The New Scientist's recent article). In support of my generation-of-techno-yogis hypothesis, Callahan says that making clean electrical signals that the Audeo can understand requires the specific, deliberate imagining of voicing each word - something he calls "a level above thinking."

It's an innovation whose significance extends beyond the obvious enabling-speech-in-the-mute. Private telephone calls will be made in public, by people who look like they're listening to you. Ventriloquism through invisible wallspeakers and audio beams will further challenge our confidence in human perception. Maybe our hyper-attentive descendents will be able to deliver two different speeches at once. (Most of us already know how to talk without thinking...all it would require is to also talk whilethinking. It's like riding a bike.)

But for me, fettered as I am by my unilingual peasantry, one application takes the cake: linguistic software could be packed into that auxiliary computer, finally realizing something not too distant from the long-fantasized Universal Translator.

It's not technomusical telepathy, but it's close. We're getting there. Yes, indeed: the future is singing quite a tune.

(Written for iggli.com.)

The Transhuman Music of Akhentek

A moment of speculation, rooted in a study of universal trends: Human history can be defined as development along any of numerous axes, but my preferred story-for-our-species is of an advance in mind control technologies. For good and ill, the development of our consciousness flies tandem with our expanding capacity to access and explore various states of mind at will. Our command of navigating mind with sensory and electrochemical stimulation has matured to include everything from early entheogenic experiments with drumming and chanting, to contemporary techniques of magnetic temporal lobe stimulation and virtual reality immersion…and with the impending advent of biotech and nanotech that will profoundly deepen the intimacy between brain and machine (and erase such primitive distinctions), we can be sure that mind control is one of the best markers we have for measuring our humanity (and our trans-humanity).

With this in mind, I spend much of my time looking at contemporary art and music as touchstones, clues to our place as a self-transcending species in the cosmos. Every time I see intention meet technology in a deliberate manipulation of mindstates, I rejoice that we are on the right track. And nowhere is this confluence more apparent than in the careful structuring of electronic musicians like Akhentek, a self-described “crystalline array technician” from Elphinstone, BC, whose psy-trance productions are “precision engineered sonic textures intentionally designed to induce higher frequency mindstates.”

Akhentek’s nuanced tracks, like the burbling glitch of “Spectrality” or the free-floating guitar and synthesizers on his “White Girls In Saris” remix, definitely induce a strange, buzzing feeling – and unlike many other buzz-inducing artists, I know that he’s doing it on purpose.

Deep beneath the art of this music coils the esoteric science of neuroentrainment: getting the brain to vibrate at specific frequencies. It's an easy enough trick. Our brains expect to hear more or less the same thing in each ear, so they split the difference between tones that don't quite line up, creating the auditory illusion of a single note. This activity requires special collaboration between the right and left hemispheres, which syncs brain activity at that agreed-upon mean. If the left ear hears 104 Hz and the right ear hears 108 Hz, the entire brain will pulse at 4 Hz - with the brainwaves producing a corresponding state of mind. It's one of the cheapest ways to engineer consciousness. No drugs, no surgery, no nanobots - all you need is a pair of headphones and a "crystalline array technician" to prepare the sounds for you.

These binaural beats coast inaudibly across each other underneath warm and deep mastering, giving this music the strange quality of feeling at once transparent and mysterious. It’s little wonder that he has a background in biology and “Brazilian Genetics” (which I assume is a euphemism for ayahuasca initiation) – this guy’s eye and ear are definitely trained on human evolution and accelerating its numerous permutations. Cascades of twittering clicks and swells of buzzing oscillations sweep through me as I listen, reformatting my consciousness on a subliminal level. I start feeling the effects of his “rare sensitivity to frequencies” as the café around me starts to ripple with gauzy transparency.

We may be a long way from having total agency over individual awareness. In the meantime, however, I’m relieved to know that we have innovators like Akhentek out there fighting the good fight, sculpting sound with to elevate consciousness directly and for the greater good, those secret agent techno-shamans enlightening unwitting ravers and inspiring the next generation of state-engineers to plunge even deeper into our limitless potential to explore – and create – novel states of mind.

Akhentek’s music, as well as information about Entheogenetic (his electronic music label) and the Entheos Gathering (his festival) can be found online at CBC Radio 3.

(Written for iggli.com)

Soundtrack To Your Funeral, Part VII: Switching Off

(Temple Burn, Burning Man 2008, image from

http-//redroomsalon.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/pictures-410.)

Compared to Life (if the familiar dyad even makes sense), Death is famously dispassionate. Death doesn't care when, or why, or how, or who. Death can not care, because caring is the job of the living. And so choice has precious little to do with death, which is why we clutch at whatever choices we do have about our final moments. We usually don't have the luxury of the death we would prefer, and so we do insignificant and desperate things like making living wills and funeral playlists, pre-emptive strikes at the infinite unyielding unconcern of nonexistence.

Some cultures don't consider suicide to be as tasteless as ours does (thanatophobic and euphemistic, we have a long history of plucking out our own offending eyes without mourning our lost sight). Here and now, we can do little to decide the terms of our passage without distressing the ones we love.

We can, however, write declarations of love that stamp a seal of determination on our last breath. Tenderly capturing his request to die in the presence of his beloved, Elbow frontman Guy Garvey penned an exemplar of such quietly raging hopeful confessions: the organ ballad, "Switching Off." Painting precious, half-iambic metaphors of his last night's fading lights from the perch of candid youth, Garvey imagines a distant and peaceful shutdown - and his partner's place beside him, amidst the creeping noise and the crumbling synchrony.

Elbow - "Switching Off"

Last of the men in hats hops off the coil
And a final scene unfolds inside
Deep in the rain of sparks behind his brow
Is a part replayed from a perfect day
Teaching her how to whistle like a boy
In love's first blush

Is this making sense?
What am I trying to say?
Early evening June, this room and a radio play
This I need to save
I choose my final thoughts today
Switching off with you

All the clocks give in, and the traffic fades
And the insects like...like a neon choir
The instant fizz, connection made
And the curtains sigh in time with you

You're the only sense the world has ever made
Early evening June, this room and radio play
This I need to save
I choose my final scene today
Switching off...

Ran to ground, ran to ground for a while there
But I came off pretty well, I came off pretty well...

You're the only sense the world has ever made
This I need to save
A simple trinket locked away
I choose my final scene today
Switching off with you

This song is one of the truest love letters I've ever heard, daisies growing from a double grave, holding hands to die of old age, because "You're the only sense the world has ever made." Whatever happens between now and then, God save this feeling, this certainty and adoration, togetherness and memory, this "simple trinket locked away," until I can look back and smile at its accurate prediction.

We may not get to choose how we die, but we can hope against hope that we die in someone's arms. We can't carry anything across that threshold, but we can carry our cares right up to its silver edge. We can adorn our lives with these solemn vows, giving worth to each living moment. We can prove that death is in fact meaningful, because it is by death that we determine what is valuable. Romance as I know it is a skull with rose window eyes, burgeoning even as it breaks. And so there is nothing more romantic than telling someone you want them there when you die.

"Switching Off" is a perfect portrait of recognizing what matters. It is the beauty of yearning listening as it strains against fadeout. It'd be a strange song to play at my funeral - bringing the particulars of my death into sharp focus, where wishes may not hold against facts - but I would put it on my funeral playlist anyway, because it so gracefully captures for me the timeless splendor of love. Because we may not get to choose, but we can always hope to choose. And after years of arguing for the concrete value of choice, I am only now beginning to understand the diaphonous, glistening value of hope.

The Soundtrack To Your Funeral, Part VI: Takin' Life So Serious

(Image from roadkilltshirts.com.)

As I've said before, the soundtrack to your funeral is as personal a playlist as you'll ever make. Assuming you have the luxury of deciding what to play to your mourning crowd (and assuming that you have the luxury of a mourning crowd), the funeral playlist is your final opportunity to give a life-affirming message that helps people deal with their grief and conveys the sum of your wisdom in a personal voice.

If it's not clear already, I take this responsibility very seriously. But then, I take everything very seriously. I was born under a Capricorn Sun (on 8 January, same day as Elvis Presley, David Bowie, and Stephen Hawking), and have recently come to appreciate the full significance of this: Capricorn is ruled by Saturn (aka Kronos), the god-devouring Lord of Time and the home planet for intense gravity of both metaphorical and literal varieties. Capricorns are saturnine, heavy, pragmatic, associated with bones and the skeleton, earthiness and history.

And so it comes as only a little surprise that I became a paleontologist, only to shift my attentions to the study of time itself. Little surprise that I was so deeply drawn to Boulder, Colorado, where I now live in the shade at the foothills of the Flatirons and play in a band called Ethereal Underground. Little surprise that I paint bones and eruptions, that I've abandoned the notion of delusion in favor of "practical versus unpractical realities," and spend so much time thinking about the unconscious as if it were geological strata.

Little surprise that many people can't tell when I'm joking, and that I can't tell when they are joking, either. I experience my own feminine compassion as an expanse of drought-cracked and fire-tempered clay, stoic and willing to soak up the spilt blood of human suffering in an ancient, patient embrace. Even my jubilance comes wrapped in rough gauze, a romantic appreciation of the grinning skull, a stealing of each moment's blooming flesh from the bare jaws of transience. Historically, astrological Saturn presides over the 1st House (incarnation) and the 8th House (death): gravity and graves, you know.

And therein lies the incentive for me to make sure that one song in particular is not left out of my funeral playlist, Ash Grunwald's "Serious."

Ash Grunwald - "Serious"

Now, sometimes I act like a fool
With those dark clouds and worries inside
When we live small lives that are way too short
And don't need no reason why

We've gotta stop takin' life so serious
Stop takin' life so serious
Stop takin' life so serious
You don't even know what you have

Sometimes I worry about the future
Are we ever going to find our way?
I don't even realize that we're living in the Good Old Days

I told you, stop takin' life so serious
You don't even know what you have

And your mind can get stuck just like Ararat*
Dangled carrot of desire in your head
Now your heart feels just like a bowling ball
Have you listened to a word I said?

I told you, stop takin' life so serious
Stop takin' life so serious
Stop takin' life so serious
You don't even know what you have

(*I'm not entirely sure that this is what he says, but it makes sense.)

I refuse to accept the assertion that we can only appreciate what we have when it's gone. I have in vivid memory a thousand moments of lightness that pull me out of my well again and again, reminding me that this is just as much "it" as anything else.

If I really do have an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of those who survive me, I hope it's by lightening their hearts. I hope it's by shaking them with the urgency and intensity of my good humor, shaking them out of their time-wasting sad sack nonsense into a larger perspective that floats in the vastness of our world and cannot help but respond to it with play.

And what better way than with a riotous uptempo slide guitar song growled out by a man named Ash? There's something in this about fighting fire with fire, the irony of such a bouyant message coming in the form of such a stern declaration. It appeals to my saturnine self, striving for something sillier. It speaks to my inner fool. It jumps on the bed until I bolt upright laughing, half indignant and half hilarious with surprise.

And it rocks. Which pleases me, of course, being an Earth sign and all.

(Written for iggli.com.)