Text as Instrument?
PROJECT: Find or devise a computer program to be used on a laptop that can take text and display it in a visualization format that can also be customized in real time. Project this on a screen during performances of musicians. Before the performances, discuss with the musicians ideas that are important to them and type simultaneously the words that arise in one's head in response to the music.

I was pondering, as I always am for my zine, Future Wave, about what is beneath the music that musicians make. It is important to unify all of one's experiences as arts and all of one's arts as experience. It is all a holistic, cyclical process; what affinities the artist has are manifested in the art. An acknowledgement of the ideas can only nuance and accentuate this presence in the music.

I would hope that the projection of the text could be spontaneous and quick to register, yet easy to manage. The computer program would have to have different levels of user skill so that someone familiar with the program coul easily sit down and just worry about the words and not about the imagery (yet let the computer take this aspect over to be sure that the presentation was not dull). This way, during a performance, different idealists could tag each other out and switch off, just as two musicians often will exchange instruments, getting up from the drums to play guitar. There should also be capabilities, however, for the more advanced text artist to decide if the words should flash, pan, or linger, and what flashes of colors and effects can be shown at what times. I would imagine that it would be similar to the visualization plug-in modules that can be downloaded for the Winamp multimedia players...

Sunburned Hand of the Man & Comets on Fire at the Hemlock Tavern.

Last night I went to go see a concert, which I haven't done in a while due to the fact that the price of a performance is often the price of a record. While musicians need to support themselves, I am satisfied with the ability to listen to music in a more relaxed anti-capitalist setting. A record is something you can take with you. Sitting in the back-most corner of the small intimate venue (my favorite place to sit when I go by myself to a show) I recollected that even the details of my favorite live music experience I'd attented (Godspeed You Black Emperor!, see below) have receded. I can rarely remember the progression of a musical performance, only whether or not I had enjoyed it. Well, I will thus document the little portion of last night's performance that stands out in my mind.

Sunburned Hand of the Man, a neo-psychedelic collective from Boston, manifested itself last night as a ten-piece rhythmic freakout, much like a rosebush. so many thorns, but so much color. While I own some of their more abstract older music (Piff's Clicks and Mind of a Brother), this was mostly a dynamic, looping, eloping rhythm between the percussion section that was laced up in the electric meanderings of gadgetboxes, manipulated microphones, and guitars unwilling to obey any formalisms of chords and scales; and the acoustics of hand percussions like bells, chikka-chikka spools (whatever they're called), djembes, and chanting. there was an electrically enhanced violin but i couldn't find it in the swirling mix. Unlike most collective jamouts that exceed six persons, you could pick out every instrument (except for the enunciation of the words that were utilized as instrument tones). There were multiple sets of exploration, and each had a common thread to it, but the group halted and switched instruments often, perhaps to allow diversity to the performance. Some jams, while stellar, are a waste of time because they languish so much. (see Phish, Subarachnoid Space, Sunroof!) The music climaxed with a pile-on of all the musicians that were not playing large instruments. It was wonderful to see a female participating in the group, but I wished she had found more to contribute than her sideline inaudible chanting and percussion.

A splendid factor of the performance was that a good third of the musicians did not sit on the stage but instead in the crowd. While this could likely be on account of ten people never fitting on the tiny stage, I spoke with some of the group afterwards and they told me of their loft in Boston where they often play. Apparently at these loft parties, the band will be spread out throughout the entire loft. The effect produced was that I felt guilty as a spectator. For certain, any beholder of art is in essence a participant, but I find the spectator's reduction of feedback to be inhibitory. So, the random musicians littered throughout the non-stage area made me feel less as a spectator because someone in the crowd was participating. I regretted for a moment being so far away from the stage, on my perch in the back corner (but I wouldn't renounce my perfect vantage!). It was funny that afterwards, the fellows in the band said that they had noticed me getting into the groove. Unfortunately, the crowd was full of the indie-snob variety that likes to drink beer and inwardly feel the music without ever sharing their passions. This inwardness was an affliction I used to have; back in my teenage years of rocketing through space, stoned cold during "washing machine" (SY), I would stand and gape at the stage in secret, deadpanned awe. I believe myself to have come out of the closet to music reactionism, and when not showing my emotion through my body language (why does nobody dance?), I can be found interminably ranting of my experience with the music. In short, the show would have been most inredible, had the whole group of nonmusicians metamorphosed into a throbbing throng, like the hippies used to do in those acid-lodged days of the Grateful Dead, probably not too far from the Hemlock Tavern.

A high point of the evening was when, during Comets on Fire's mediocre set, I was sitting on my "perch" and randomly found myself accompanied by John Maloney (of Sunburned) on my left, and Steven Wray Lobdell on my right (I was too shy to say hello to this revered spectator). Perhaps the only true musical moment I relish from the set by the hyped-up Comets on Fire was when stand-in Ben Chasny (of our beloved Six Organs of Admittance), during a lull in the marsh of bluesy space madness, leaned over the microphone and emitted an equisite sinewy snippet of a dirge that was on a par with Bjork. I am enamored of his vision. I have yet to see a Six Organs show, but this fancy young Californian (Dr. Chasny, as someone from Sunburned awed him with) is perhaps one of the most enigmatic indie performers I've encountered. The big let-down, however, was that the other 95% of the show involved a careless-minimalist rhythm section supporting loud incomprehensible dual electirc guitar psychedelic hendrix-sprawl matched with whammy-bar like shocks of electronic gadgetbox dopplers. This band's record, "Field Recordings from the Sun" has been hyped up more strongly than Sigur Ros, but somehow the music was ordinary. (Maloney, during the set, answered my question of what makes the band unique with "I've never heard anyone do anything like this these days!" -- now that Hendrix is dead I guess he meant). Personally, I think I've heard the sprawling thunka-thunka-skreeeeeeee! that this band played in numerous places... For one, check the purported "Southern Rock" quotient of the jamband scene (like Gov't Mule and Widespread Panic). Only thing is, these mediocre jambands actually travel from one point to another... I'd be willing to give the band another chance, so long as it's not out of my pocket, but I hereby reject the band on three accounts: (1) it was a waste of Ben Chasny's talent. (2) Rock and Roll is a patriarchal testosterone-driven expression and is only relevant in cases like Explosions in the Sky (who are angry about capitalism and the tragedy of living) and the Boredoms (who feel the importance of epicurean living in a symbolic, divine world). There was a lot of energy expressed here, which is always powerful, but I'm convinced it had a lot to do with drugs and testicles. (3) I've heard this ordinary, unemotional music before.

Check out my post, "Four Views of Collaborative Art" on my other, multi-purpose blog, Future Wave. In it I describe more ideas of conceptual music composition. In brief, one is a collaboration where one composer builds half of a loose piece of music, the second composer layers on top of the piece and then continues the piece onward symmetrically, and then the extension is filled in by the original artist. Another idea is to have a project like the collaborative ep series of Cerberus Shoal, where a piece is written, handed to a second artist who then reinterprets the piece. The same would be done vice-versa, with switched roles. I would extend this concept by returning the interpretive response piece to the original artist and have them re-interpret it themselves. A third collaborative musical project would be something anyone could do: construct a mix tape with a friend, where each person selects a song in response to the song before it, handing the tape back and forth until the tape is filled.

I had an interesting idea tonight about music to create. I'm reading a Philip K. Dick novel (The Martian Time Slip) and a character encoded a secret message and then disguised it as a piece of electronic music. In a later book of Dick's, Radio Free Albemuth, Dick's characters encode hidden, subversive messages in the lyrical format of popular music. As long as America remains true to the spirit of Liberty and free speech (sometimes I think we totter on the edge), there would be no need to encode any sort of radical ideas. Yet, there may come a day when certain comrades may need to communicate in the dark; perhaps forming a new system of code through sampled electronic music may prove interesting. Another interesting application of this would be the elucidation of a more ubiquitous emotional and informational experiential content of wordless music.

I possess a large amount of music that I have not yet listened to, and I'm in the process of digging into it. However, I would not like to review music here as I listen to it, as then I would be forcing reactions in order to find something to say. Rather, I would like to allow the music to sink into my skin and bathe my experiences in it. I am convinced that there is something complex about the tones and arrangements of music and how the mind perceives them that is able to extract emotions from them. This is how music engraves itself upon the experiences we have at the time we first hear it, like a good strummy guitar ballad to remind us of a fleeted summer love, or the chill sombre reverb to resonate with the barrier of the windowpane between a heated apartment and the snow outside. Music takes us places, and I hope to uncover here some of the music that has been able to take me somewhere. Perhaps the music that doesn't produce this effect was first listened to at the inappropriate time, or perhaps some music doesn't move people because they lack certain perspectives to coincide with what a music contains. However, the burn-in effect of most musics is a beauty of life that, in my opinion, transcends the emotional effects of other arts because of the inescapability of music's grasp.

I once was at a Godspeed You Black Emperor! performance by myself at the height of my panic disorder; terrorized by the shrill blares of sound and the ineffectiveness of the medication I'd just imbibed, I oscillated between the back of the crowd and the exit, as I contemplated leaving the show altogether because the feeling of calamity in the music was too intense and I began to have a panic attack. I stayed because a woman took me by the hand and brought me all the way up to the front row where we held each other tightly to withstand the emotional force of the experience.

Welcome to ATROCITY JUKEBOX. This is my second blog, and it is an extension of my first, multipurpose blog, Future Wave. I hope to devote Atrocity Jukebox solely to my passion for music. The name Atrocity Jukebox, in addition to Future Wave, is also the name of a song by Tower Recordings. I will lead off by saying that, despite the subjectivities of music, this collective of musicians has created some of the more colored music of the day, and although they contain many regressions to hippy culture, Tower Recordings is foward-thinking (as I purport myself to be) in that they are the epitome of what I call "space folk". It is both an expression of the folk of forest and tribal cultures and the space of science fiction. It is not a shiny technological hi-fi space of lustrous qualities, as much of the nascent electronica is becoming. Rather, the electronics involved are fractured, dirty, psychedelic and schizophrenic, unclean as the tragedy of industrial existence. It does not proclaim "hooray we space cadets are here!" Instead if proffers the conundrum of what living in a tragic delusion of postindustry's diversions is like. Where it is not dirty in its avant-experimentalism (some drone and noise excursions), it retreats into spiritual caverns. Spirituality is, apart from community and progress, the solace for the soul that may effectively claim to grant salvation. So, it is without further ado that I grant to you ATROCITY JUKEBOX; a collection of ruminations on the atroticties of musical culture. It is not to claim that the music I listen to is atrocious, but rather the injustice of coralling neo-psychedelia into the underground is despicable. Let me remind you that I, a lover of psychedelic music, am drug-free. It is unneccessary to embark on these fast highways to get where we intend to go, and it is for this reason I am writing this blog: to show you all that music is my drug that expands my mind with color.