Release.

(Involve others.)

Keep the circling mind in check. Do not obsess over an idea: you will kill its magic, temporarily, and maybe forever…

The work is about taming obsessive and destructive tendencies and distilling a certain wholeness of spirit and steadiness of gesture. At times you will feel this so utterly and explicitly that you will think the work is done and that you are ready for a victory lap. Resist. Take a deep breath and consider the well-documented evidence that suggests that victory lap will turn into a stale loop.

Enjoy the good times, but…

Prepare for the bad: stockpile ideas for sounds to record, edits to be made, lyrical concepts to pursue when you are not in a heightened state of reality. If the sounds are strong and the ideas are good, work will flow.

Trust yourself. The sounds ARE good.

Produce, produce, produce.

Keep the circling mind in check.

There are a million little steps that go into making a well-executed and convincing big step: some involve miniature, sublime revelations. Most do not. You will be drawn to the mediums (media?) that historically have been the source of such inspiration. Eschew. Cycle among your devices. Prioritize the weakest.

Create a good space.

Treat the work well. With high respect. Like a dear friend.

Relax. Don’t take it so seriously!

Know that there is a world outside yourself.

Know that you are only getting better.

Know when to move on.

Go outside.

Take a deep breath.

Believe in yourself.

(Start over.)

Now that I have a stable source of income, I’m finally looking to get a guitar (or two) to match my lofty ideals. I’m thinking VINTAGE. I recently discovered that one of the finest used guitar stores I’ve ever visited is right around the corner from my office and I’ve already decided I’m going to get my next axe (or two) there. Leaning toward an old Martin 0-15 (prewar or early ’50s):

In the studio doing the final mixes on Penelope all week. Stay tuned for more…

The other day, my brother and I were enjoying a fine taco dinner at one of the many taco establishments on our block (my neighborhood has a very large latino population and there are about half a dozen incredible mexican restaurants just down the street from my apartment). While eating, we noticed that the radio in the restaurant was caught in the netherworld between two stations, one blasting a jazz trio and the other, mariachi music:

No one in the restaurant seemed to notice at all, but the racket went on, quite loudly for several minutes. It reminded me of the infamous “radio happening” conversations between Morton Feldman and John Cage. One of my favorite parts of the conversation is when the two composers discuss the auditory “intrusions” of noise into our world and how they each came to accept and appreciate sounds most people consider mundane at best and unpleasant or grating at worst. In their conversation, the sound of the radio becomes a metaphor for all such noises.

Cage suggests that part of his conversion to the side of “noise” might have come about while composing a piece for 12 radios. Cage says that since he wrote the piece, whenever he hears one or more radios playing, he thinks to himself, “Oh, they’re just playing my piece.”

Feldman, on the other hand, proposes that these things we consider “intrusions” in our sonic world are not intrusions at all, but rather that we are the intrusion on a natural auditory environment.

Mostly, I just find it intriguing that some of the things Cage and Feldman undoubtedly considered “intrusions” in their time go almost completely unnoticed by people today. This could be for a number of reasons, but I suspect it’s partly due to the fact that noise is no longer the provenance of just the avant-garde and is, in fact, ubiquitous in pop culture in music, movies, commercials, etc., something that was predicted by none other than Cage and Feldman and which probably seemed a very silly idea for many years. Let’s take a moment to appreciate that. Close your eyes and listen to the sounds around you. Maybe enjoy a taco while you’re at it.

1. The simple act of detuning the instrument turns it into a completely different beast.

2. The overtones are as much a part of the piece as the fundamental frequencies. At times the overtones combine to create a wash of white noise so dense that it threatens to swallow up piano and performer.

This morning, as I was changing the strings on my acoustic guitar, I picked up the guitar to find that I had inadvertently tuned it to a beautiful, full minor chord several steps down from standard tuning (normally I put on all the strings before tuning any of them). As I noodled for a moment, I realized that just as in Young’s piece, my guitar no longer sounded like a guitar. I continued to play and improvise for several minutes, recording as I went.

The tuning was rich and low, with lots of buzzing metal on wood. But I wanted more of that white noise effect that buoys Young’s piano up into the heavens. So I twiddled some knobs and pressed some buttons on the laptop, letting loose a wave of sound that could be heard as either the logical extension of the overtone-as-white-noise aesthetic or a gauche bastardization of it, depending on your perspective. Listen below:

   Hi!!! Can you find meee??

At this particular show, I was playing laptop. Sarah (the composer) and I have been working on sound design for Penelope for several months, but we’ve been thinking of things almost exclusively in terms of how they will sound on the studio album, not how they will be performed live. So we’ve created tons of little sonic events, ambient soundscapes, and rhythmic textures, but almost none of it is “performable.” Additionally, neither the performers nor the conductor had heard the sound design before our one-and-only rehearsal. Oh, and playing to a click was not an option.

So this wasn’t the typical, “hit play on the iPod and let the band jam along to a backing track” situation. In fact, it was just the opposite. The sound design was incidental, to be performed fluidly on top of the very human orchestra (though not too human, thanks to conductor Brad Lubman’s incredible sense of time).

There are several obvious problems here: How is the laptop to stay synchronized with the ensemble? How can important sonic events happen when they need to? How many parameters and effects need to be performed live in order for the sounds to blend with the orchestra?

I wanted to create a notation system – a performance protocol – that would address these issues while using minimal equipment (laptop plus a single control surface – M-AUDIO Trigger Finger). So for each song, I created a custom score which could be placed on the Trigger Finger. Here is a picture of the set of finished scores:

   Finished Scores for Penelope

And one closeup:

   Score for “Circe”

Each score consists of a grid of squares that correspond to the pads on the Trigger Finger. Cues are given inside each square as measure numbers or lyrics. When a pad is struck, a sample is launched in Ableton Live. I chose Ableton for a few reasons. For one, I had done the brunt of the sound design for Penelope in Ableton so it made sense to keep things there. Also, I wanted to be able to take advantage of Ableton’s “warp” feature which allowed me to tap along with the live ensemble and have my samples stretched to fit the live tempo. This was incredibly useful for songs where rhythm was key. In other songs, tempo mattered hardly at all and samples could be played without warping. I also made heavy use of Ableton’s crossfade capabilities to ensure smooth transitions between clips.

Here’s a screenshot of the Live set:

   Master Ableton Live Set

As you can see, each “group” of tracks represents a song. Between songs, I would solo the next group of tracks in the set. The scores tell me the initial tempo of the song so that warped clips will be played back at a reasonable tempo if tapping to reset the tempo has not occurred. So the setup between songs is minimal: solo the track and set the initial tempo. The scores also tell which sliders control the current sample’s volume and to which crossfade group each sample belongs (A or B). I found this to be an extremely intuitive way of performing. A lot of the time when I have performed laptop in the past, I get overwhelmed trying to remember where all my samples are and which knobs do what. But I found this method to be a happy medium between having too much (sample overload) and too little to do (“hit play and go”). It was also quite thrilling to be able to play along with a real live ensemble without forcing them to follow the laptop. I almost felt just like another member of the orchestra! (If you discount the giant headphones and the ubiquitous luminescent laptop glow on my face.)

For the past few weeks, I’ve had this little acoustic guitar shuffle laying around. I liked the chords a lot! I thought to myself, “If I like the chords, I must like the song,” because I tend to put a lot of importance into harmony. Somehow I failed to notice that even if those chords were pretty neat, the way in which they were delivered to the ear had about as much rhythmic oomph as a Ringo song. I was originally going to post it here and then thought better of it. If you really want to know the degree of rhythmic impotency of which I speak, simply close your eyes and imagine a circle of hand-clasped evangelicals singing, “Lord I lift your name on hiiiiigh…”

So! I took those same chords and reworked them, with a healthy dose of SOUL. Enjoy:

If someone had told me back then that the Box Tops were from Memphis, I would have been surprised. At the time, I listened to a lot of the music of that era (late Beatles, Kinks, early Pink Floyd), but it never seemed connected to my immediate surroundings. Of course, that was part of the appeal. I probably had a mild case of Anglophilia as a kid, wherein I imagined Britain with a music and art-obsessed culture and none of the problems of the American Bible-belt.

However, had I listened harder to my radio, I would have noticed a quality of the Box Tops’ music that wasn’t just another Beatles rip-off, something strikingly original and undeniably “Memphis.” Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers, writing in the wake of Chilton’s death, describes it thusly:

“It combined that pop sensibility that came over with the British Invasion with that southern soul and grittiness…It’s like the Beatles with booty.”

For me, it’s the sound of looking outward for something only to realize you’re already home.

Thinking about this, I realized most of my favorite music has an intuitive, easy soulfulness about it, however obfuscated. Considering I listen to a lot of weird noise music, think of it this way: Soul can act as a structural frame for building an accessible piece of pop music, while the facade can grow and move wildly around the essentially human interior. Tom Waits is THE obvious example. But also, think of the dissonant groove of krautrock bands like Can, or the atmospheric blues of a Talk Talk song. Even Radiohead is pretty damn soulful sometimes (after all, Thom Yorke is a heavy proponent of trip-hoppers Portishead and – guess who – Talk Talk). These are bands that simultaneously challenge the listener with new sounds and comfort them with an age-old sentiment.

Coming up: In my next post, I will share some audio examples of how these thoughts have made their way into my own music.

This is a recorded document of my inaugural interaction with the very first piece of truly musical software I ever created. It’s essentially about a hundred layers of guitar stacked on top of each other, pushing and pulling until the layers drip drip drip and melt away into the vacuum.

This was made with LiLo, before she looked like this. Back then, the graphical interface was just a grid of gray circles. That’s part of the beauty of musical software. Just as in composition, limitations prove to be beneficial. And seemingly finite systems can open the door to endless sonic possibilities.

As you examine the contents of this site, you will notice that posts are divided into three categories. Here are some examples of what you can expect to find, and not find, in each:

Sounds – What you will find: Clips of ambient music and experimental noise collages; Links to music technology that excites me; Music software ideas; Adventures in sound design self-discovery.

– What you will not find: Links to Steve Jobs’s Live Journal.

Songs– What you will find: Fragments of new songs; diagrams of finished songs; lyrics

– What you will not find: Actual, finished songs (Gotta save something for the album!)

Scribbles– What you will find: General thoughts about composing, art, pop, life, etc. Hopefully the main focus will be on the Sounds and Songs. I don’t want this to devolve into a twitter-feed or an outlet for personal drama, lest it become like all those other, non-audio blogs.

— What you will not find: my Live Journal (I hope).

And there you have it. An audio blog! Please check back often as I hope to update fairly regularly.

Thanks, All.

Michael