Dance Performance at Escuela Profesional de Mazatlan

Bethany Mitchell used two of my tracks in a dance performance she choreographed called “Home.” (My tracks come in around the 4:00 mark.)

The performance was developed during her Fulbright Specialist residency at the Escuela Profesional de Mazatlan in Mexico. She worked with these performers in the spring, and this performance took place on June 10, 2022. It was performed by the third year students at the Angela Peralta Theater in Mazatlan.

This program was made possible by Delfos Danza Contemporanea and the Instituo de Culturo Turismo y Arte de Mazatlan.

Thank you to Bethany and to the dancers at Escuela Profesional de Mazatlan! It’s an amazing piece on its own and adds a whole new dimension to the music. I am truly honored.

Beings in transit

“We are more real in our simple wish to find a way than any destination we could reach.”
— David Whyte

There’s a reason some of us like to travel so much. There’s a reason we enjoy the process of going from one place to another.

In many senses, the essence of who we are lies in the journey, the getting to where we’d like to be.

As David Whyte puts so succinctly in his poem, we’re constantly moving closer to finishing, closer to another, closer to losing faith, closer to saying something, closer to success, or closer to giving the whole thing up.

More so than any arrival, we are creatures that exist in being almost there. We’re beings that are on the way.

Because what happens when you arrive? You feel the temporary joy of completion. You relax for a minute. But soon enough, you start looking for your next destination. You need to move on.

That’s why it’s so important to choose the right horizons to chase. We have to find projects worth our time and energy, because life is the journey more so than any destination.

Berlin, Day 4

On the way home from the festival today, some friends and I change trains at Warschauer Strasse, and see a pop up rave happening underneath the motorway.

We grab beers from the store in the train station. I love that these little bodegas exist in the train stations, and also have pretty nice espresso machines inside.

All sorts of people are milling around under the motorway: old, young, locals, travelers. Old school Berlin dudes who see what’s going on and do just like we did -  grab a beer to join in the fun for a while.

This is one of the reasons I love Berlin. People don’t host renegade events in public if they’re depressed. It just speaks to the fact that people in this city are so psyched on life, so filled to the brim with enthusiasm for living, that they would drag a PA under a bridge and a few cases of beer for randoms to go get off their heads serendipitously, just for a laugh, just for a little while.

London, Day 4

London Bridge, 5-22 by Chris Otchy

The first day I arrived in London, I tried to use an old ten pound note to buy a travel card from a small shop. I had saved the note from my last trip to London, which was 15+ years ago.

The shop owner told me the bill was no longer good. He couldn’t accept it.

I thought that a bit strange but kept going with my day, not dwelling too much on it.

It wasn’t until today, standing in front of the original Lloyds of London on Fleet Street, the epicenter of financial commerce in the capitol city of England, that the strangeness of that event truly struck me.

Everything has an expiration date - even money. Everything.

Can you grasp the implications of that? Money expires… like old milk.

Use it or lose it. It all falls away.

I get the whole generational wealth thing — that’s fine. But I feel like this was a big sign — you can’t take it with you. Life is a one way street. Money, like everything else, is ephemera. Use it wisely, but don’t expect to last forever.

In my experience…

Personal history is a one-way street, as well — it need only go in one direction.

No, history doesn’t repeat itself, but yes, it does rhyme. Still, need we try to repeat it by re-visiting these places we have already been?

This is something I have done many times - revisiting places I had a good time, seeking a resurgence of the old feelings I had once before. One could argue I’m doing it right now, coming to London, where I had many good times back in my youthful visits to this amazing city. But there’s something missing now. Me. I’m different. I’m not the person I was, and never will be again.

That’s one of the interesting things about travel — the person who leaves is never really the same person to arrive. The very act of traveling changes you.

Time is a one way street. It’s the universe’s way of telling us that you can never go back. Home was destroyed for you the day you left it.

This should never make one feel upset because there are so many places in the world to explore. You have to just keep going keep going keep going keep going.

London, Day 3

 

I feel like I finally got into a groove with this town. Had a coffee in my regular place, and off I went to the British Museum.

I found myself a bit peckish, and about an hour later had another coffee and a bite in a small sidewalk cafe. This place was a stone’s throw from the British Museum, so the three women working there must have experienced a steady stream of tourists all day long. They were absolutely miserable. These women were so clearly run down by their own existence, it was sad. The Eastern European haircuts, the dull, lifeless eyes, the exhausted way they handled their duties and spoke with the customers—it all spoke of a deep despair.  Life to them was making mediocre food and coffee drinks for an endless stream of rude, blaze’ tourists struggling to speak English. It depressed me so much I downed my food, paid, and quickly scurried away.

The British Museum is a facilitating place, but it’s hard to ignore that it’s also a testament to the horrible brutality of humanity, and western civilization’s endless capacity to rob and pillage all that came before. Beautiful and at the same time revolting.

It’s a little hard to recon with the fact that everything in that museum (like many historical museums), was pilfered from the Near and Far East and from Europe. All stolen items. I couldn’t help but think, “Wow, this is amazing… but shouldn’t it be nearer to the culture from which it sprang?”

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche, (1833) in the National Gallery, London

I understand how ages-old antiquities can easily be destroyed in war torn countries. The reliefs of the centaurs fighting the men in the Parthenon, the reliefs of the lion hunt from Assyria, the aeons-old Egyptian sarcophagi and mummies, the freaking Rosetta Stone for crimminy’s sake… Amazing, but why is all this stuff here, in London?

The short story, I’m sure, is because richly endowed Brits (and Americans, no doubt) went to these countries when they were either impoverished or under siege, and offered their governments a shit ton of money to excavate these treasures and bring them to the museum, “for the benefit of humanity.”

And now I’m contributing to that larceny by attending the museum. So I’m as much a tacit contributor to the cultural appropriation as the next guy. SHAME ON ME.

It’s also kind of weird that here we are, all us thousands of tourists, gliding by room after room after room of fantastically old artifacts. And on we glide to the next room, to the next painting, to the next femur of an ancient farm woman… and to most of these artifacts, we give not much more than a cursory glance. “Oh, another bas relief from the Parthenon. Huh, this one’s more than 2,000 years old. Crazy.”

On to the next, on to the next, on to the next.

I got the same feeling at the National Gallery in the afternoon.

Room after room after room of these priceless masterpieces of fine art, mainly of European (white male) artisans. In truth, each one of those paintings deserves an entire day, or at the very least an hour, of intense study and speculation, just to understand the context in which it emerged, its meaning to its creator and its meaning in the wider context of history.

But we don’t take the time. No one does. We just walk on by.

But what else could you do? It’s overwhelming. There’s so much of it. And for the majority of the people there, we’re only visiting London for a brief period, so the instinct is to cram it all in. Sigh.

Between the galleries I got a pint and a pie at The Guinea, which was amazing. That pub is 350 years older than the formation of the United States! No big deal.

On to the next, on to the next, on to the next…

London, Day 1

 

The Wells and Campden Baths and Wash Houses of 1888, Hampstead Heath

I arrived in London yesterday and got a room in a guesthouse in Camden Town. It is one of the most threadbare guesthouses I’ve ever stayed in. It reminds me of this place I stayed in Penang, Malaysia on a visa run about 15 years ago. It felt very similar to this, actually - a room that was originally about 20 feet long that was then sub-divided with cheap construction to create 2-3 tiny apartments with only beds in them. No top sheet. No blankets. Just a mattress and a duvet and a bathroom across the hall. Squeaky floors. Thin walls (I can actually hear people farting in the bathroom down the hall with both doors closed). Living!

The Good Mixer, Campden Town

Legendary Camden Town music venue, The Good Mixer

Woke up jet lagged at an ungodly hour and went into Hidden Coffee here in Camden. It was totally pleasant. Then I headed over to the Barbican to see this exhibit on Postwar British Artists. It was totally and completely depressing. A lot of the folks represented in this exhibition were either refugees from the Holocaust or were deeply affected by the bombings in London, and so all the works were very, very dark. A lot of deeply disturbing paintings and sculpture. I felt like I was going to barf pretty much the whole time.

I’ve been having this really weird feeling all day… a little out of body, having been up for most of the 10 hour flight here, just running on fumes and caffeine. A little delirious, the anxiety creeping up. I have this feeling I might just suddenly lose it… shit myself or puke or explode in the museum or in the streets and make a messy, messy spectacle in the midst of these smartly dressed Londoners.

Next up, the Museum of London, which was also pretty disturbing, but in different ways. For those who have never been, the Museum of London doesn’t really try to give you hard facts about what London was like through the ages—rather it attempts to give you the impression of what happened. So there’s a lot of photos and artifacts and even sights and sounds from the time periods, but it’s a little light on exact events.

You walk through the history of the town, from Roman Londinuim to the modern era. They have exhibits on gladiatorial combat, the Black Plague, the fires, the executions, the wars, the triumphs and the tragedies of the ages. Not sure if it was the vibe from the previous exhibition at the Barbican that set me off, but I was definitely picking up on some darkness there. London is a dark city where a lot of bad stuff has gone down.

The Museum of London's Children's Toys

Scary children’s toys from the Museum of London

This feeling of darkness all coalesced around the museum’s reenactments of 1800s era London. They had a whole section dedicated to what a pub would look like in the 1800s, what a barber shop would look like, what a pharmacy would look like, what a market would look like, etc… each vignette brought to life by the sounds of people conversing playing on hidden speakers. They did an amazing job with tons of very authentic looking artifacts from that era.

Something about that time was deeply weird to me. The bizarre costumes, the sound montages of people interacting, the horrifying photos of the plagues and the fires, the disturbing children’s toys, the bomb shelters and food rationing, the evidence of Jack the Ripper… I came out positively shook. London is kind of a messed up place where a lot of stuff has gone down over time, and not all of it was good. And that dark undercurrent is still very much there. It’s palpable. When you have all that violence and tragedy that have happened in a place over a long period of time, it has to leave a residue. Just like The Shining… Some places are like people — some shine, and some don’t. In this sense, London is positively glowing.

Anyway, then I went to the Hoop and Grapes, which was a great, ancient pub, nicely updated to be cozy and comfortable. You really can’t beat an old British pub for understated charm.

A Confession

 
 

Some would call me a fool for spending so much of my time and energy creating music — thinking about it, planning it, obsessing over it. Some might say I am crazy.

I just listened to some podcasts earlier this week; interviews with Robert Plant and Paul Simon — giants of industry who each had their first hits by age 17. I’m not in the same league as them—probably never will be, but such is life.

I do have something to contribute to the cannon; entries into the lofty and by-all-means weighty tome that we call musicale historie.

Will anyone want to read or listen to the entry I make into said book? Time will tell.

But like it or not, this is my lot in life. To think, to plan, and to obsess over the creation of music. Who can argue with that? It may not be a traditional path, and as as I said, there have been and will continue to be detractors.

It doesn’t make me very much money, which is how the world measures success. But that to me is beside the point.

This is what I’m doing — end of story. I’ll do it as long and as often as I can until the day I die.  Whether it’s in the form of strumming a guitar, playing with synthesizers, or humming into an iPhone, this is what I do and what I will continue to do.

Some may say, “but you’ve never had a hit, and the music you make is strange and abstract. It doesn’t even feature a singer most of the time — how can you even hope to be taken seriously?”

And to that I say: so be it. This is who I am, and this is what I do. I tell stories with sound. Full stop.

Free Yourself

 

Photo by Milivoj Kuhar

 

Almost every bad feeling you’ve ever had

almost all the suffering you’ve ever experienced

was the result of attaching emotion and significance 

to some passing thought

that could have simply been ignored

Good Friday

Photo: Christopher Makos

Watched another episode of the Warhol documentary last night. It covered the part of his life when a lot of his friends, and especially his lover, John, got the ‘gay cancer’ in the mid-1980s. The ‘gay cancer.’ For some reason, that sounds so much worse than AIDS. So sad. 

Andy was such a talented artist, and not just for what he created in terms of paintings and films. The whole idea of being a celebrity, and your personality—your personal brand— being the work of art itself is just brilliant. They point out that although some others had done it before—Oscar Wilde, Salvador Dali, Gertrude Stein—but he was the one who really popularized it.

And now everyone is doing it; a pale imitation of it, at least. 

Everyone is seeking their 15 minutes of fame. It comes, then disappears before you even realized it had arrived.

And Warhol started going on these ridiculous sitcoms like The Love Boat, but only appearing as himself. It was like he was injecting himself into pop culture. Kind of elevating these stupid, disposable media products and lampooning them, almost exploding them. A real life person popping up next to Richie Cunningham. Interacting with the artifice. It’s very meta. 

Warhol’s relationship with Basquiat was so sad. They seemed to genuinely love and appreciate one another on multiple levels. An older, established, white artist, and a upcoming, brilliant young Black artist. But then the media got in the way, the critics said some horrible things, and Warhol couldn’t understand everything Basquiat was going through as a young Black man. I think it really hurt them both. Tragic. Especially when you think about what happens next and how they both end their lives.

The death of two icons. Two Sons. Two Saviors of the art world, of our culture.

A quote

Photo: David Becker

“We all have mothers and fathers, and what sweet anguish, sometimes terror, there is in those names... So much of the emotional content of our lives seems to occur before we are before we are 19 or 20, doesn’t it?

After that, we seem like stone walls, mortared together by scar tissue. The whole point is not to be. From all my reading… the main point or challenge is to stay as conscious as possible, absurd as that seems.”

- Jim Harrison, Sundog

Why I directly support artists

Directly supporting artists with as few middle entities as possible is very important to me. There are two reasons for this.

First, I grew up in an era where if you wanted to listen to music or discover new music outside of what was playing on the radio or MTV, you needed to go to a store to search for the physical record, tape, or CD. Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but I still get a lot of joy from the feeling of owning music, even if it is only a file on my hard drive. It brings with it a connection with the artist that doesn’t escape me.

Second, supporting artists directly is the most straightforward way to show appreciation for their art. In an era when audio-visual content—especially music—is viewed by most people as disposable or downright worthless, giving cold, hard cash to an artist feels like a revolutionary act.

You streaming?

Yes, I use streaming services. A necessary evil? I’m not sure they’re necessary, but they’re here and they aren’t going away.

From a listener’s standpoint, it’s the most convenient option. From the artist’s perspective, unless you’ve reached the Taylor Swift level of success, streaming makes sense for helping people discover your music.

That said, I understand what’s going on in the streaming game. It’s a nightmare for artists. Our music is being used for free in order for the Spotify and YouTube’s of the world to rake in advertising dollars. But this is the state we find ourselves in, and IMO it’s useless to stand in the way of progress.

Top 5 Bandcamp Purchases of Q4-2021

Today I’m sharing a few of my favorite purchases over the past few months. View my whole Collection on Bandcamp.

Rhucle - With

Rhucle is an amazingly prolific Japanese ambient artist. I discovered him last year through my new favorite newsletter, Flow State. When someone release 5+ albums a year (not singles -- albums of eight or more tracks each), you start to wonder about the quality of the material someone is putting out. You can’t put that much music out and still retain premium quality, right? Rhucle proved this thought wrong. Everything I’ve heard of his is really nice. It’s one of the most minimal forms of ambient music I’ve heard, but it’s also some of the most sublime. Rhucle is an expert at stripping music back until what’s left is only the essential elements, each of which are irreplaceable to the emotional impact. Of the albums he put out in 2021, this one is my favorite.

 

Belgian artist Romeo Poirier’s music is tough to categorize. The lack of drums or obvious percussion suggests calling it ambient, but the brand of textures he utilizes and arrangement of loops makes it feel more like avant-garde techno. Not quite as aggressive as Barker, but approaching the same overall feeling.

 

I’ve long appreciated Rod Modell’s work, in both his Deepchord and Echospace expressions. Immersions was released in 2018 on the excellent London-based label, Astral Industries, but I only recently picked it up. It’s composed of just two extended tracks, 17 and the 18 minutes long respectively. They feel like two takes from the same patch or arrangement of instruments. Modell’s work here is squarely between ambient and dub techno, being characterized almost entirely by an ocean of swirling synths and delicious undulating noise. No attack. Then from the briny deep arises a chugging 145bpm rhythm… It never fully emerges, the kick sometimes imperceptible, deep beneath the surface, but you feel it.

Truly sublime. Excellent stuff for long flights and late nights.

 
Pablo Bolivar - Framework of a Dream album cover

Spanish producer Pablo Bolivar released Framework of a Dream in June of 2021, and an album of remixes in December. Both are worth a spin. I realized last year there is a strong contingency of excellent deep techno producers from Spain and Italy. Bolivar is one of the rising stars of the genre, and a founding member of both the Avantroots and Seven Villas labels, both specializing in ambient and dub techno.

 

Another solid release from Jarl. I found him from his previous release on Drift Deeper. This one, on Deep Electronics from the Netherlands, is equally fun, groovy, and chill – exactly the mix of ambient and techno I enjoy.

Meditation soundtracks

I’ve long wanted to create a soundtrack for meditation – something you could use more or less as background music that was timed to allow you to meditate for a specific length.

The attraction of doing this is that it allows you to just concentrate on your meditation instead of checking whether or not you’ve gone past your required time. Sure, you can always use an alarm on your phone, but do you really want an alarm tone announcing the end of your meditation? For those who don’t, feel free to use these soundtracks. I’ve created one that is five minutes long, and one that is ten minutes long. I’ve also made them free downloads on SoundCloud.

Hope you find some utility with these.

Businessfunk

We’ve all seen the Windows 95 launch party, which is incredible in its own right.

But in fairness, the Rolling Stones shouldn’t have been part of the party at all. The rock and roll world was as foreign to Gates and the Boyz as the moon.

What the proud bouncing developers in this video should have been jamming to was “business funk.”

This is truly something special — a genre of Maximum Performance Music I only recently discovered, courtesy of a small link on Datassette’s excellent musicForProgramming website, which is a host of wonderful mixes in itself.

But business funk is something else entirely. Listening to the three mixes, I want to laugh and dance with equal measure. Purportedly compiled from the libraries of several collectors and assembled by Datassette himself, this funky ass music feels solidly rooted in the late 70s and early 80s, with beefy synth brass stabs and hair-tastic guitar solos. There’s what sounds like a whole lot of vintage synths being fully utilized. But there’s also some truly fantastic drum programming that brings it into the modern era,  and shows quite a similarity with Datassette’s brand of electro funk.

Well worth a visit and a listen. Check it out here.

Subtle Knowledge

Sri Yukteswar

One of Paramahansa Yogananda’s gurus - Swami Sri Yukteswar

The Vedas are an ancient body of knowledge that were never written down for millennia, only being orally transmitted and directly heard by rishis and their students. 

The over 100,000 couplets composing the Vedas were passed down in word and song in this manner because the holy people studying them understood the superiority of mind over matter. 

Paper and stone are subject to the obliterating effects of time. Memory and the tablets of the heart can never be destroyed. 

“The principles that operate in the outer universe, discoverable by scientists, are called the natural laws. But there are subtler laws that rule the hidden spiritual planes and the inner realm of consciousness; these principles are knowable through yoga.”
— Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri

The ancient yogis knew that matter is nothing more than congealed energy. With practice, they could manipulate it.

Christ, Patanjali, Krishna, Babaji — each knew their life’s trajectory from the very beginning. They lived only to give example that humans can transcend mortality.

Divinity in flesh gives us all something to aspire to — a concrete example of our own potential. 

Just do your shit

The lesson of today is: no one really cares.

What I mean is, don’t get all bugged out or fearful about trying something new or different because you’re worried about how it will be received or judged. It really doesn’t matter.

Most people won’t give a shit because they are totally and completely consumed by their own life and what they are doing at that moment and what they are planning to do next. Admit it – this is how you probably operate, as well. You kind of have to just to get anything done. Anyhow, when it comes down to it, the majority of people won’t care about what you’re doing.

 The people who do care will either applaud it, or think it’s meh and carry on with obsessing over themselves.

Those who applaud really are the only people you need to give a shit about. They are potential fans, collaborators, and co-conspirators and therefore should be cared for and respected, or at least are worth having a conversation with.

Just do your shit.

Endless Wanting

Alexis Fauvet

Alexis Fauvet

If there is one quintessential aspect that defines what it is to be alive, it’s wanting. Constant wanting. I want, you want, he and she and they want. We all want.

What do we want?

We want pleasurable things and enjoyable experiences, of course. We want safety and happiness for ourselves and our loved ones, and at the same time we want to move away from suffering and boredom and pain.

Much of our lives and the events that make them up can be sorted into these two categories: moving toward pleasure, and moving away from pain.

The issue, of course, is that no sooner do we acquire that pleasurable thing or experience, than we are bored by it. The pleasure that it delivers is fleeting, and in a matter of weeks or days or even seconds after we get that thing, we move on to want something else.

And so the cycle continues… endlessly.

“The warmth of the sun feels wonderful on your skin, but soon it becomes too much of a good thing. A move to the shade brings immediate relief, but after a minute or two, the breeze is just a little too cold. Do you have a sweater in the car? Let’s take a look. Yes, there it is. You’re warm now, but you notice that your sweater has seen better days. Does it make you look carefree, or disheveled? Perhaps it’s time to shop for something new. And so it goes…”
— Sam Harris

You need only be in the presence of an infant for a few moments before you observe the constant oscillation between joy and sorrow that washes over their features from minute to minute. In truth, as adults we’re subject to the same ceaseless tides, but we know how to control our outer form so as to hide the oscillation (for the most part). But that does nothing to stop this constant wanting, wanting, wanting. Something new. Something different. Something pleasurable. Something fun. Something to look forward to on the weekend.

It’s exhausting, when you think about it. And yet that is who we are at our core—wanting beings, motivated to satiate our thirst for pleasure and to flee from pain, suffering, and boredom.

How do we opt out? We can’t really. But there are things that help.

One of the most conducive practices, I find, is meditation. There are many forms, but the one that I find most helpful is to sit comfortably and close your eyes. Breathe slowly and evenly. Begin to repeat silently in your mind a mantra or mind tool to capture your attention and let your mind relax. I find the most useful mantra is “let go.” Just silently say “let go,” to yourself, and while doing so, let go of the ceaseless thoughts that naturally arise in your mind. Be a rock in the river of thought.

Don’t try to stop your thoughts -- that is a futile task. Acknowledge them as they arise, but don’t engage. Just let them drift away.

When you find yourself engaging with a thought, don’t get frustrated--that’s a natural occurrence. Just calmly disengage. Let go of the thought and return to the mantra.

How does this help with the constant desiring that we inevitably experience? I find that meditation—this act of disengaging from our thoughts and concerns—is very similar to the disengagement that we need to employ with our desires. Instead of constantly looking forward to that thing or event or time in the future that will “make everything better,” you can try to enjoy the present. Be in the now.

Find the simple pleasure in what you’re doing now, like reading a blog post, educating your mind, finding a good piece of advice. Give the gift of your full attention to whatever you are engaged in.

It’s a process, and it will never really be perfect, but I find the more we employ meditative practices like this, the less we are consumed with our desires. It also helps us be more enmeshed in the present moment, as opposed to pining for some moment in the past or future that seems more optimal.

Best of luck with it.  

Sacred Mountain EPs

This week I’m releasing the first in a new series of singles I’m calling the Sacred Mountain EPs, which will be released between August and October, 2021. Listen now on my Spotify or Bandcamp pages.

Sacred mountains have always fascinated me. I have had some of my most profound spiritual experiences in nature, especially in climbing mountains, and I know I’m not alone.

Since earliest recorded history, mountains have been places where humans went to experience transcendence, probably because they were physically ascending closer to heaven or what we believe to be spiritual worlds.

Mountains are holy places that are feared, revered, and sometimes both.

Mount Fuji, or Fuji-san, is the highest mountain in Japan and one of Japan’s three sacred mountains. It has been a frequent subject of artists, poets, and filmmakers the world over, but especially those coming from that nation.

The ancient samurai used the base of Mount Fuji as a remote training area, and folk tales tell of ghosts and demons roaming the forests surrounding the northwest face.

A shinto cult called Fuji-kō venerated the mountain as a female deity, and encouraged members to climb it. The paths leading up and around the mountain still host multiple shrines, teahouses, and huts dedicated to spirits of the area.

A well-known Japanese proverb suggests a wise person will climb Fuji-san once in their lifetime, but only a fool would climb it twice.