Halfway through the quarter! It’s crazy how fast it feels like this study is moving along. I’m guessing that these past two weeks have seemed pass quickly because I’m constantly throwing myself at new information. Sometimes the sheer amount of information in front of me can feel suffocating, but usually I come away from it with a profound sense of respect for the infinitely deep topic I’ve chosen to pursue. The fact is I love music so I don’t really mind if I drown in it.

That being said, these blog posts are certainly a great way for me to catch a breath of air and put my thoughts together in a coherent way. In fact, I’m thinking of utilizing the blog more by pooling more of my thoughts, and resources here. I’m planning on collecting my notes as well as the exercises (from Tonal Harmony and Schafer’s Ear Cleaning) I’m doing somewhere on this blog (I’m thinking of creating a new page, but I might find some better format). Basically, I want to start making this blog more accurately represent everything I’m actually doing in hopes that it’ll help me organize, understand, and feel more motivated about what it is I’m actually doing.

Speaking of which, I think it’s time I start writing about what it is I’ve done rather than jotting down ideas for the future.

Last Thursday my band played at a punk show at the garage under the CAB. We got asked on pretty short notice to play, and we don’t identify as a punk band. Regardless, we said yes. We played our songs way faster than usual, and threw in an impromptu punk song in which Blaise (our drummer) switched onto vocals and I switched onto drums. It was one of our sloppiest sets, but I had a lot of fun with it. It was also really cool to be both exposed to and (sort of?) accepted into a side of the Olympia music scene which I wasn’t really too familiar with.

We then played a show the Saturday after that at the Metcalf Manor alongside another Olympia band, Swoon, and some out-of-towners. Swoon’s set was great, and Blaise and I picked up one of their CD’s (it was their release show). Our set consisted almost entirely of “newer” material. The highlight for me was our semi-improvised jam (we’re calling it Blackberry jam for the time being). Unfortunately I didn’t stick around for the last band because my stomach was in need of some solid food. I spent the rest of the night rewatching Princess Mononoke with my roommate, Justin. The reason I mention this because about and hour and twenty-four minutes into the movie there’s a piece of music that’s entirely percussive. Between the instrumentation and the syncopated rhythms the song creates a really tense, tribal vibe which fits the scene perfectly. The next morning, I showed it to Blaise and we discussed making a song that featured only percussion instruments. I’ve also been working with him on finishing a song he’s been writing for a while called “The Space Between.”

I’ve barely done any music production these past few weeks. I texted Nicole earlier today though, and am planning on finishing up “Source of Life” with her soon before I move on to my next song. In the mean time, I’ve been coming up with a lot of musical ideas on the piano and guitar. I’m having a lot of fun experimenting with them, but I usually find myself stuck, unable to develop the ideas into anything I’d call complete. I’m going to start recording some of the motifs and posting them on here, mostly so I don’t forget about them. I’m also going to start writing some of my chord/lyrical ideas down in a journal that I got just so that I can develop them outside of my head. I’d really like to see myself complete more songs though, I’m starting to lose track of the various ideas I have. I also need to start setting aside more time to just listen to music…

I’m almost done with Part II of Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone. Though the material hasn’t gotten any less dense, it is starting to connect to topics I am more familiar with. Part I was an introduction to the fundamentals of sound. I learned about how all sounds are composed of sine waves, and sympathetic resonance. I learned about simple and compound tones, and that timbre is (for the most part) determined by a note’s overtones. Part II takes the focus to the effect that two tones have on each other when sounded together. I learned about combination tones (a phenomena I had never noticed or heard about before), and about the “beats” that tones with similar frequencies produce in our ears. Though I have been familiar with discordance and concordance in musical harmony, I hadn’t really understood the physics behind it. I think the most interesting part of my study has been learning more about the art of harmony from Allen Forte while also getting to read about Helmholtz’s explanations about the physical and physiological phenomena that creates the foundation for it.

Tomorrow I plan on finishing the last chapter of Part II, which addresses the concept of chords, working through some more of Tonal Harmony in Concept in Practice, and watching the first part of Howard Goodall’s How Music Works. Earlier today I also went to West Bay Park to check out a spot there that has some interesting sound qualities. I found out that that spot is called Rotary Point. Tomorrow I’ll follow up with more research, and hopefully I’ll be able to find out why exactly that spot creates the kind of resonance that it does.

After two full weeks spent in New Orleans, I have returned back to my hometown of Redondo Beach, California where I am currently picking up the pieces and reflecting upon my journey. While I was there I kept entries in my personal journal along with recordings and photos but decided to save the bulk of my writing for afterwards so that I might recall my experiences with a greater scope.

On my very first night, I was picked up from the airport by my two friends from back home, Buster and Anthony, who had been living in New Orleans for the last 6 months. Along the way to their shabby, old apartment in Carrollton, (a neighborhood in the uptown New Orleans), they gave me a basic overview of what it’s been like to live there. Although neither of them could give me a very detailed description so briefly other than “it’s a trip” or “it’s like no other place”. So I accepted that and soon enough found myself agreeing with the same exact sentiment. After dropping off my suitcase and guitar at the apartment, Buster gave me some instructions on how to catch the streetcar towards downtown.

Soon enough I found myself racing after a streetcar down Carrollton Avenue and eventually hopped on at its closest stop. I paid my fair and was immediately in awe at the sight of this small, antique bus. The street car’s interior was composed of furnished wooden benches, small lights that ran along the ceiling, and a single shaft that was used by the driver to enable and discontinue the flow of power drawn from the overhead electrical wires. New Orleans has been using this type of electric-powered streetcar for 122 years and it has since remained the primary means of public transportation in the city.

I had reached the end of the line and arrived at my destination, Downtown New Orleans. The streets were much less populated than I had imagined; granted it was just past 12am on a Tuesday night. So I made my way towards the one street that seemed to be occupied by human life and a stream of neon lights, the infamous, Bourbon Street. With some disillusion, I discovered that Bourbon on a Tuesday night is a eerily bleak yet colorful wasteland occupied mostly by strippers, residual barflys, a few street vendors, and the quintessential Bourbon Street hobo who asks “Ay man, lemme guess where you got those shoes from”; expecting some amount of pocket change if he guesses correctly. I digressed, bought myself a beer and looked to strike up conversation with any locals looking to impart some information on their native city of New Orleans. I met a black man named George who told me he was 42 and had spent the majority of his life living in NOLA. He told me about the shoddy details of the city’s infrastructure and local politics. He told me about a scandal involving the former Mayor Ray Nagin during the Hurricane Katrina era where the then-Mayor had been charged for money laundering and bribery; trading local business to outside contractors and accumulating about several hundred thousand dollars in return. George assured me that despite all of the corruption and natural disaster in the city’s recent history, the city’s greater, cultural history is what keeps the spirit of New Orleans alive and strong. He followed this up by saying that the material history such as all the old buildings, streetcars, and traditions need to be preserved.

After a few more drinks and some more conversation with other locals, I decided to catch the next streetcar back up to Carrollton. Along the way, I met two guys named Max and Patrick. They were both white guys in their mid and late 20’s who worked as accountants at a local firm. They offered a different perspective on the city. While on the streetcar, Max had a lot to say about the current state of New Orleans and what he thought would benefit it most. When the topic of infrastructure came up, he suggested that it drastically needs an upgrade. He complained about the poor quality of the roads (which is indisputable), the inefficiency of streetcars, the dilapidated buildings and the city ordinances regarding the renovation of homes. Meanwhile, the streetcar had passed a giant monument which I somehow failed to notice on the ride down. It turns out that monument was a 60 foot marble column with a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee placed on top. Max insisted that this was a symbol of racism; an ideological and cultural infrastructure that desperately needed renewal. He said it should have been demolished a long time ago. I didn’t disagree but playing devil’s advocate, I half-heartedly suggested that maybe if the monument remained intact it would remind people of the self-defeating ideology of a past generation so that they will want to strive to be something better than that.

I think that hearing several different perspectives that night had helped me form an impression of the city. Regardless of the differing viewpoints held by the people of New Orleans, the thing that I found most in common among them was their pride and irreverence for their city and its culture.

Leavenworth, Wa.

Hi Everyone!,

This week I was going to read and write about the history of France. It’s not even possible! There is so much history to discover here so I want to tell you about early poetry and music in France.
The French language has been known to be romantic since at least the year 1000 when, for the first time in Europe, poems and songs were written in the vernacular rather than in Latin. The lyrics were written about and to celebrate the wealth and power of kings, barons, princes and their women. These songs were meant to be read aloud or sung for as entertainment. Duke William IX’s poetry may have been influenced by Arabic and Hebrew love poetry and in turn provided a model for poetic forms that became popular (336). The poets of this time were called troubadours and what made their verse troubadour was the idea of Cortesia or courtesy which was the refinement of people that lived at court. Their attempts to achieve an ideal of virtue also made these lyrics troubadour (337). The theme of Troubadour lyrics were about equality between lovers and sometimes they preached that love was the source of virtue while others bragged about sexual conquests. These lyrics were all about the power of women since, at that time, there were many powerful females in southern France. Many were lords who owned property, had vassals (someone who received protection and land from a lord in return for loyalty and service) led battles, decided disputes and entered into and broke political alliances as their advantage dictated. Both men and women liked troubadour lyrics which praised the power that women had and also eroticized it. The language in southern France was called Occitan. The lyrics spread to northern France, Italy, England and Germany where Occitan was a foreign language then similar poetry began to appear in other vernacular languages. Eventually the lyrics began to focus on war, later called epics. Some focused on romances. These romances reached their peak of popularity in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Lancelot, by Chretien de Troyes was about the hero being in love with Queen Guinevere, the wife of his lord, King Arthur, and would do anything for her (338).

I got ahold of the president of a worldwide organization that promotes adapted physical activity. She has suggested that I contact the Special Olympics of Washington for information which I’ll look into. I am hopeful that she can put me in contact with more people that I can include in my survey. I sent out a bunch of letters, copies of surveys and return envelopes to schools in Paris this week. I hope to contact the schools while in Paris and get an invite to a few. I think it would be the highlight of my research to converse with real French people even though I can only speak with a translation book in hand.
I spent the weekend in Leavenworth, which is a town that is made to look like a town in Germany. I wonder if the residents of this town are friendlier than the real town that it is made to look like. The economy of the town is dependent on the pleasure of it’s visitors so maybe the reason that the people here are so pleasant and helpful is a bit false. Not that I’m complaining. The sky blue. This is a beautiful environment with smells of waffle cones baking, the sound of bratwurst sizzling and birds and people chattering.
Napoleon is buried in Paris and I plan on visiting his tomb. His father was a noble from Corsican and owned land but in 1795, at the age of 26, Napoleon was a penniless artillery officer (621). By 1799 he had become the leader of France (623). Once Napoleon gained full power his rule was more that of a military dictator (624). His great energy assisted him in overseeing many facets of the countries daily operations from politics and art to architecture and science (625). On land Napoleons armies remained invincible but England still ruled the sea (629). By 1812, under Napoleons rule, France controlled more territory than any other European ruler had since the Roman Empire. His downfall was the same as Aldof Hitler’s. He was fighting on two fronts (632). In October of 1813 Napoleon’s army was defeated at the Battle of Nations by Russian, Austrian, Prussian and Swedish armies (633). By 1815 he had regained power but was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo. He lived out his days in the remote island of Saint Helen off the coast of West Africa (634).
The next time I write will be from Paris. I hope you all stay safe like your mother is watching. See you soon.

I am going to be focusing on Blues, While the genre is famous for having it’s start in Mississippi, , the city of Chicago and the Blues have been tremendously influenced by each other. To prepare for my studies this week, I have started reading a book about Chicago blues and watching lots and lots of Youtube videos and listening to clips of very early Blues recordings. I also picked up a Chicago Blues CD from the Evergreen Library.

I came across an article that yielded many comments with people describing their experience with Chicago Blues and what it means to them. One user really caught my attention with their response. They said

“to me, blues is a lifestyle. Simple as that. It follows us home after the music stops”

Although the words are not anything profound, I can understand the point they were trying to get across. So far, I can tell that Blues is rooted from emotions, as most music is, but the Chicago Blues were much more than that. It’s as if the notes were telling a story of how far each artist had traveled in life. You could hear the interactions they are describing in the bass line. Blues is visceral and because of that, it effects some listeners more than other music.

As I described in my presentation at the end of Winter Quarter, I am extremely interested in the circumstances involved for some of these Chicago-centric genres to become popular in the place and time that they did. In my Chicago Blues: The City & The Music book, there is a reasonable explanation as to why Chicago was so opportune for the Blues to become extremely popular there. Logistically speaking, the trains that provided transportation for people looking to move cross country had somewhat specific routes.If someone from North Carolina wanted to move, the train that was associated with their state would stop in Ohio, on the Louisville and then to Nashville. So, there was not much leeway as to where you could go, as there were only a few options per route. As one can probably infer now, Chicago and Mississippi were on the same route and so the Blues musicians of Mississippi were attracted to the work potential of Chicago due to its already existing stockyards and steel mills and settled in Chicago. Over in Chicago, the city was accidentally preparing for a music scene to settle in. In the 20s and 30s, there were clubs built and abandoned by prohibition and then depression. When the forties came around and society had somewhat recovered, there was an influx of musicians emerging in Chicago and coming from the South. Conveniently, there were clubs and halls waiting to be played in, and an audience looking for something to hold onto after The Great Depression.

I hope to find out more of the personal circumstances of the artists as well as the record label executives who helped and hindered careers during my reading/watching. There have been hints in my reading that a lot of the record deals were done in a terribly poor business manner and a plethora of artists were ripped off behind the scenes.

I often question why I am trying to take such a logical route to understand  such a visceral subject such as the Blues. I originally was not even going to focus on the Blues because I didn’t grow up listening to it and I had never even heard of Muddy Waters before 2015. I say that with minimal shame because I believe I am well versed in music enough to admit that I don’t know everything about music (who the heck does?) and I am more than willing to jump into something I have no personal history with. I am going to push myself to write poetry about this music. Dance to this music and hopefully even sing along soon enough. I am intimidated by Blues in a way because it is this enormous enigma that people seem to connect with so deeply and I am treading on the Blues surface.

I am searching for that A-Ha moment where some guitar picking strikes a chord in my heart, when I feel so connected that I understand what that comment meant about the Blues lifestyle that carries you home after the music is over.

This week I couldn’t not keep my eyes off of the sky. Its not usual for me to become so obsessed with what the clouds look like, but for some reason I could not stop staring. They weren’t traditionally interesting clouds, with the colors of red, orange, pinks, and purples. These clouds were more like an array of a hundred shades of white to black. It gave the sky so much depth, and also was a warning of the rain to come, or that already passed.

This weekend I had a fair amount of time to spend in Seattle. I got in on friday and visited an old friend I hadn’t seen in a while, and that night I went out and drank with some other friends in Belltown. It was great time filled with laughter, great drinks, and good food. I was also able to hear a lot of music that night traveling from bar to bar. The next day was time for some work, I left early in the morning from my friends home to go into other parts of the city and start sketching. I thought it would be a fun and easy experience, but I actually became frustrated very quickly. I never thought that I was good at sketching necessarily, but I didn’t think I would struggle so hard at representing what I was seeing at all. It was very hard for me to accurately capture what I was looking at, and it wasn’t so much that I was sad I couldn’t draw it well, but that I was not necessarily able to show the scene so that everyone else could recognize it later. Nevertheless, I moved on and kept trying. I first stopped in in the U-District, my old home, and sat at a coffee shop next door to my old house to draw the street. After that, I left to Greenlake and then Discovery Park. All these places offered different sounds to hear while I was sitting and sketching. The U-District felt sleepy, probably because I was there so early, but it built in noise overtime. Greenlake was full of sounds of peoples radios, as well as the fleeting noises of conversations passing by me. Discovery Park was the most serine with the wind being the most noticeable thing. That night I stayed at my sisters home in Queen Anne, it was great to see my niece and nephew, and sleep in a bed instead of on a couch. The next day I walked from Queen Anne to Pioneer Square, along the way I heard a great number of things; the noise of people shopping, the radio from the cars, street performers, and the sirens from the police. I took this walk not only to listen and see, but because I was headed to a Sounders game at Century Link Feild. It was the Seattle Sounders vs the Portland Timbers, which is a pretty important game. This was by far the most musical place I went as we sang chants from day to night. Its always great to experience music like that, even though they are not the most complex songs, the energy they provide to so many people is intoxicating.

It is hard to believe that in 24 hours I will be in a car driving to New Orleans, then Alabama. I am so excited to get this little road trip going! It may be about halfway through the quarter, but for me it feels like things are just taking off. First I have this trip to go on, to listen and experience things I never have before; and then I will come back to Seattle, where I have plenty of shows and museums to attended as well as starting the recording process. Today when thinking about the road trip I was struck by the simple yet important realisation that the sounds I hear will be different from home in the most fundamental ways. Yes, there is still wind sounds and rain sounds but they will be hitting and blowing a different kind of tree, over a different landscape, at a different temperature, ect. Even though the environmental sounds are similar, it is like the song is being played on different instruments. As I said before I have really only traveled pretty close to where I grew up, and even though I have been to Alabama before, I know I have not looked and listened to it like I will be on this trip.

Beginnings have the potential to be the most difficult; beginning a sentence or a paragraph, beginning new friendships or sports. Parts of ourselves rest between who we are and what we experience. Going beyond our preconceptions of identity becomes easier as we become more comfortable with where we are, who we’re with and what we’re doing. Comfortability comes with preconceptions reaffirmed consistently over time. This is the experience of change.

It’s difficult to talk about change when it’s happening but even more so before it’s happened. As of my writing this I have spent exactly two weeks in Southern California minus a five day emergency trip back to Olympia. The process of journeying from point A to point B wether from the kitchen to the garage or Olympia to Los Angeles is an experience of consciousness to validate the ego’s continuity. Plotting the points between would be frustrating and useless. Let’s just say there is such thing as a large metal bus that flies and carries people all over the world in a period of hours, sometimes without any lapse in the passengers consciousness, and voila there they are.

Here I am.

Costa Mesa.

This place carries an air of “touch and go.”

The traffic is touch an go. The waves are touch and go. The food is touch and go. I am touch and go.

Away from the touching and going roars mighty metal buses miles high in the sky traveling to and fro. Jet engines swallow the keynote to trail off like distant thunder. Motorcycles feast across the distant expressways, yet youfeel as if you’re right near the beach. The traffic is easily mistaken for waves; birds singing sweet melodies between seagull belches.

Sirens.

No one shouts.

They’re all about their business. Each individual holds themselves responsible for their lives. They see themselves as storefronts, computers and machines. The imageability of this city is the refracted plastering of the inhabitants collected self-imageability. Los Angeles could only be as centralized and beautiful as the identities of 8.6 million people spread through the basin of a valley. I can’t imagine the diversity of artists, businessmen and tourists that frequent and depart on a daily basis. The technological level of the earth is too damn high. How is one supposed to study the living anthropology of a region if it’s changing too rapidly to be identified? I don’t intend to be defeatist but it’s akin to seeing an electron: by the time you see it, it’s gone.

Artists come from all over the world to pursue careers in music and some happen upon careers in music coming from a completely different field. Billions of records are recorded and distributed in Southern California but the artists don’t live in LA. Hell, most of the people who function in LA don’t live in LA; I’m not even in LA! The cultural identity is completely semantical and political. If they didn’t draw a line, LA would be a state of mind.

As for what I do in Costa Mesa: I’m not here to be a tourist. I am not here to listen to bands from other parts of the world and pass that off as a cultural study of Southern California. I am here to make music. I am here to unobtrusively observe, learn and reflect on a new environment. How will this affect the music that the artist composes?

Below I have included four very rough draft skeletons that I am producing and composing in collaboration with Eli, of course. The fact that these songs are in such primitive stages is partially who I am and partially the effect this region has had on me. Since waves (and therefore surfing) are inconsistent we frequently ride off to the beach at a moments notice. The friend we are staying with, Kory, is an artist as well and has no set schedule. The weather is almost perfect, almost all the time. Nothing is stopping you from riding a skateboard to the record store, taco bar or 7-eleven. Less sequential hours are spent on music than when Eli and I are were in Woodland Hills. I forgot my hard drive at the studio we were working in there and have been making music without it since (this also means the other complete instrumental from the first week is yet to be retrieved). Is this place affecting the music? It’s too soon to tell compositionally, although I have purchased a few records here that are LA based musicians. What I am sure of is that this place affects my process in music making, my approach to music and my views as my self as a business.

So finally, here’s some fucking music:

Created 4/27/2015. Logic Pro X, “A Taste of Honey” vinyl sample using Roland Sp-404SX, Steinway Studio Piano. There is another sample used as textured effect with delay and so on. The piano is way too loud especially for systems with high treble. You’ve been warned. The vinyl for this track was purchased at SecondSpin in Costa Mesa.

Created 4/26/2015. Logic Pro X, Massive, Vinyl sample from Jefferson Starship using Roland Sp-404SX. I use a bass synthesizer here that I became aware of working in Woodland Hills with Keaton. On smaller computers this synth sound will go unrecognized in the mix. Get a better sound system, ya kook. I have recently been playing with different 1/32 hi hats instead of 1/8 or 1/16. This change was made after creative conversations in LA with Eli as to what he enjoys to listen to in his music. The vinyl for this track was purchased at SecondSpin in Costa Mesa.

Created 4/21/2015. Logic Pro X, “As Tears Go By,” The Rolling Stones; sampled using Roland Sp-404SX. There is a vocal sample of my voice that was discarded in the process of creating my last album. The phrase is, “Everything’s fine.” We found the record in Kory’s collection.

Created 4/20/2015. Save the Best for Last. This track is the most developed of our second week. It was made prior to my departure back to Olympia on a very stoney day. It uses all the usual gadgets and tricks, however, the sample is one I have utilized before. At the time we didn’t have a turntable to rip new samples with so we delved into the graveyard. Reaktor 5 and Massive were both used in the synthesis as well as the Bass Synth derived from working with Keaton.