Category: Music (Page 1 of 5)

I listen to music to open up. I listen to music to forget. I listen to music to explore the edges of my mind. I listen to music to be better. I like the way music makes me feel. I’m constantly thinking about new musical ideas and I see inspiration for new songs, sounds and compositions everywhere. Recently, I was riding in an elevator listening to the hum of the motor and as I toned with the vibration I started to sing a melody. Fortunately, nobody caught me as they would have been sure that I had lost my mind, singing loudly on the elevator on a particularly gray Monday morning. But there I was. I couldn’t help myself. Music and ideas for music are everywhere.

For reasons that still haven’t become totally clear to me I find my inspiration leads me towards ambient music. Sometimes these are drones, sometimes these are washed out guitars, or as my friend Jeff Towne called spacey piano textures: “vaporous piano”. There’s something really appealing about the nuance of ambient music. It doesn’t put it all out there, it holds something back for you to experience, an essence of sorts that you just can’t grab onto, such as you can the melody of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nacht Musik or the Beatles Yesterday. A strong melodic presence, that’s super-defined, i.e. much of today’s popular music somehow leaves me, as a listener feeling as if I’ve been clobbered over the head. There’s no mystery, there’s no essence, there’s no allusion, its all just right there – BAM!

What is ambient music? What does it mean to make ambient music? Some might not even believe that ambient music is not a music at all. At one point, I tried to define ambient music and posted it on my Ambient Soundbath Podcast site; overall, I think that this definition still fits, but like anything, definitions are rigid and need some tweaking over time. At the very least this definition fits my needs for when I’m talking about ambient music, but I’m starting to get off track.

Looking back at where I started I think about listening to ambient music to open up, to rejuvenate myself, to relax and to just be. I start each morning by listening to Soma.FM’s Drone Zone. It’s a good way for me to get going. My coffee and Drone Zone. It’s nice. It’s calming.

People have written me letters and told me in person all of the different things that they’ve felt listening to my music. I appreciate that. That makes me feel like the the music I’ve created matters. I don’t know if people wake up to my music the way I do with others, but I like knowing that folks are out there in the universe listening to it.

I’m starting to lose the point I was initially trying to capture.

Actually, I’ve fully lost it now. I guess this is probably where I should wrap it up…

Listening to Daniel Lanois’ The Deadly Nightshade from his Belladonna recording, I’m drawn towards thinking about emotion in music. There’s something about music that connects us to the moment. There’s some element that acts as a conduit, connecting us back to a series of events and/or a time that makes us long for that time again. I’ve always been amazed by the transcendental quality of music. In fact, I think that it’s been one of the things that’s brought me back to music time and again. The abstract, almost intangible quality of music and sound gives us a marker for experiences in our lives; almost like a folded-over page, or bookmark indicating that in this time and in this place, this thing
happened. It allows us to live in that time and that sequence of events again, if only for just the few minutes that we are transported back to that place on sonic, and psycho-emotional level. I believe that this connection is one of many conduits to the infinite source, allowing us to connect on conscious level, if only momentarily, to the collective unconscious, and its rich pool of experiences.

Writing about sound is a real challenge. There’s no possible way that I can use words to explain how a sound and the hearing of it feels. Sure, I can write something that gets you curious to hear it, or I can allude to it, but words are of little value when it comes time to relay the power of sound and music. I’ll keep struggling with it and try to do it, but mostly it will be a lost cause. Sound and music needs to be experienced. Talking about, and using the poetics of words, is like seeing a pencil sketch of the a sunset compared to see the sunset itself.

Words are no good here.

We can only hope that the words trigger some kind of emotional response that opens a person up to this perspective, or brings about a nostalgia to a time when a person was open to what we’re saying. From there, maybe, if we’re lucky, and truly we’ll never know, someone who reads these words may become open to the experience of a sound or a piece of music. The writings, as the Buddhists say, is a finger pointing at the moon, not the moon itself.

I don’t have any recollection of how I stumbled upon this. I was doing a series of non-event sonic wallpaper gigs as solo guitarist at local cafes and coffee shops around the Detroit-area and working crummy temp jobs during the day. There was no plan. There were no real goals except to not to have to get a full-time job not doing music. I was kind of in between colleges, but that infers I knew where I was going, but really had no idea where the next educational stop was to be. I had never heard of ambient music, and the closest I had gotten to exploring contemplative music was Pink Floyd and some of my own exploratory jams with my first band.

Around that time, I worked at a bank… I remember this only because it was very boring, and I had to be there all day. Because I only had about a half-hour of cumulative work throughout the day, they let me read on the job, so  I did a lot of reading. One of the books that I ended up reading was David Toop’s Ocean of Sound.

I was reminded of this book recently while doing some random perusing of my favorite Web sites and found a link to a PDF of David Toop’s Ocean of Sound… I didn’t think about it a lot, but I did quickly move to take a look at it, for old time’s sake. As I clicked on the PDF and started to look at a flood of memories came rushing in.

I remember the book as being odd, almost impressionistic. There were contemplative writings and impressions on John Cage, Terry Riley (this was where I discovered In C), and LaMonte Young, Brian Eno, and this was where I read about Satie’s Vexations and his ideas of Furniture Music.

I quickly realized that this book, that had consciously left me with the vaguest of impressions had actually left an indelible mark on all that followed my reading it. Ocean of Sound came to influence, rather subconsciously much of my work and my outlook on the sound, music and experiences that I strive for today.

I haven’t gone back and read it, except for a few brief passages, and parts of it are dated, as it preceded the 2000ish blow up of electronic music in the US, and was published near the peak of dance and rave culture in Europe, but, this book, that’s half treatise and half poetry on the experience of sound, is an overlooked classic.

I’ve dedicated a large swath of my life to thinking about music, sound and the experience of it. It’s curious to me now and worthy of investigation on my part, to  just how much of what I read in David Toop’s Ocean of Sound affected my worldview and my perspective on music. Anything and everything that I think about from the perspective of sound and music is touched on in this book.

Thinking of the experience of sound, I reflect on how sound, noise and acoustic ecology are not things that have caught on here in the United States… these things have caught on elsewhere, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, but not as much here; this is important, because central to what I’ve taken from Ocean of Sound, is that we’re living in an ocean of sound, and the more noise that is injected into our sonic lives the more we turn to our iPods or whatever to tune in to our own sonic environment and tune out the world’s. That’s just fine, but what’s lost is the ability to collectively tune-in to the soundworld around us, collectively, and focus on it, which is at the core of what David Toop writes about, being enveloped by sound and the experience of it.

Sound and music is not to just be heard, it’s to be experienced, whether in a performance hall, or standing under buzzing power lines or enjoying a busker doing a rendition of All Along the Watchtower on a city street; the idea of this came to me as I reflected after reading Ocean of Sound. I became more conscious of sound. I found a vocabulary and a context for things I had experienced and felt while listening to music, and also realized that I could make a music where this kind of music/sound experience wasn’t just serendipity, but was the focal point of the work.

All this is to say, reading Ocean of Sound changed me, and it changed the way I hear and listen. Discovering this book again reminds me of that, and it also reminds me that before I discovered this I was missing a large chunk of what was going on around me.

Playing music is a celebration of life. The rhythm, the chords, the vamps, the jams, doing it by yourself, doing it with others. That’s one thing I love about improvised music, you can come together with someone, a total stranger, and have a great musical conversation. In many ways, it’s like falling in love. You find someone who helps you be the best you that you can be and because of that you ascend to some higher realm of consciousness. In fact, improvised music is the complete analogy for life, because when that presence is no longer there you miss it, and you look for it, grieve for it… sometimes you find it in another right away, some times it takes a while, but you’re out there, trying and communing with others in the name of music, celebrating life, celebrating what it means to be alive through music.

Remembering spring.

Listening to a robin singing high up in a tree, as I was walking into work, signaled that spring is beginning; a time for new life and rebirth. I was struck by the volume and purity of tone with which the robin sang. The birdsong had more depth and timbral color than any voice or wind instrument I’ve known. Birdsong and other sounds of nature is a constant reminder to me that the music of nature is some of the most well-orchestrated and perfect music there is. There’s a purity and arbitrary feeling that comes with this music, as if the tension and release is just right, perfectly configured for the listener to become engaged or to ignore. Here’s a link to the Cornell Lab of Orinthology for those interested in hearing the birdsong of the robin; though, admittedly, what I heard was much richer and sweeter.