REKS was an album I released April 11th, 2015 following the conclusion of Winter Quarter. It is a solo album with an appearance from Eli on Bass Guitar in one track. This album focused around my relationship with my mother and the concept of predetermined initial conditions. I sampled from a lot of sad music, Cocorosie specifically whose music is often about abuse and trauma. I also used a lot of old music; jazz, classical, and 50’s love lamentations. I created about 25 original songs in this vein and selected the tracks I thought were ‘best.’ It’s my first major work using the Sp404 SX Sampler. The drum samples used were from a compilation of old school producers samples released in the alley’s of some production forums. It’s the first time I used these particular drum sounds and veered away from the collection I had been using on previous albums. There’s a heavy amount of piano work for the very first time where I attempted to utilize the grids and structures from classwork in my playing style. The compositions were created before and during a few live performances prior to any physical recording of the composed material. This was my first time experimenting with composition through live performances rather than only performing in the studio. Two major aspects of this album are its lack of dependency on synthesizers and increased usage of Bass Guitar. I used bass synths in this album mostly to fill out the low end of the music to maintain a contemporary atmosphere while layering old school sampling, light piano and old school drum samples on top. When not using the bass synth there is actual line-in bass guitar, which I prefer, and have used a lot previously. The album contains 8 songs. All the songs are under 3 minutes besides one. Some are even under 2 minutes or significantly close to 2 minutes. Almost every song has a ‘cut to black’ ending without any fading out or trailing outro. This album was the best display of my production quality to date, it was the easiest to mix and closest to completion “right out of the box.” It is still technically unmastered.

(This Widget is huge)

While in Los Angeles I composed 13 songs in 5 weeks and performed 7 of them while residing there. Few of the songs have names but the naming has taken on a more variant style than i’m used to. Cloud 9, These Days, The Magic of Money and I Just Want it All, are some examples. It seemed that the experience of temporary travel influenced the conceptual commitment to any particular ideas that would bring forth a name for some of our songs. They are currently named by the date of creation for my reflection. About 80% of the tracks were created without any lyrical writing and only three currently have vocals recorded. It’s been a spacey experience. The process of making these songs is not at all what I am comfortable with: Sparse recording sessions, “quantity over initial quality,” and lack of conceptual identification. Only after returning home have I begun to fully organize the stages of the compositions along with their vocal recordings. My experience in Los Angeles bred an odd composing style. I continued to use a turntable to aggregate samples from vinyl, the SP404 for manipulating those samples and Logic Pro X, Massive and Reaktor 5 as usual. However I lacked any realistic sound monitoring system (besides flat frequency headphones,) a piano/keyboard/midi controller, studio microphone, guitar and Bass.

It seems to me that the way in which music and cities are connected is ever evolving. Could it not be said that any change that is happening is happening simultaneously in congruence with all other changes? It has come to my attention many times at the farce of divulging a grand exposition about music and cities. It’s mentally impossible to narrow the causes and effects of geographic ecosystems over any period of time without anthropological investigation and even then we’re only able to interpret off of what we see. The inexplicable possibilities of everything in a world so governed by mass media, transportation technology and internet interaction mutes any point of reference for cause and effect in western society. Look at EDM. What isn’t EDM now? Where can’t you find EDM? Is anything within EDM original at all and therefore who is to be credited and what is their geographical location? Were they born there? How long have they lived there? There are individuals who travel the world multiple times in a single lifetime. Is earth their city? How does earth effect the music on earth? Earth is the reason there is music to begin with. No earth, no people. No people, No music.

People are what connects music to the city or to anything for that matter. How much of myself did I carry there and into my music? How much of what I interpret is through an unshakable lens? My music took a turn towards greater accessibility with a more popesque style. The writing content revolved around temptation, desire and possession. Sure, these are changes brought about by my experience but they are changes in the meta. I didn’t write about the sun, sand, surf and palm trees. My compositions do not reflect the wide open geography, traffic or smog. What is buried in the cracks of my Los Angeles music are the people whom I met that reside there. These people are not from LA. They are not long time residents. They are young, they are successful, they are professional, discourteous, rude, uplifting, inspirational and fleshy. They are the hands of the urban space. They reach out to you as if the city were a living vessel for life. The music is the sound they make, the sound they listen to and the sounds I heard. What if I did all of a sudden begin to make my compositions reflect the physical world of Los Angeles? I could create anything from classical music to hip hop and still have identifiable correlations. It seems that the act of adapting music directly from the geography of a place is a specific style in and of itself like adaptations of literature into film and is not so much indicative of the place the musician is in rather of their preferred method of composing.

Possibly related thoughts: Consciousness stays the same. Try to exist in the third dimension in a way that is not somehow relatable to a constant state of ‘experience’ which metaphysically ‘feels’ the same no matter where you go or what you do. I’ve been all over and one thing has always remained the same: ego. The variables of what occurs may be wildly different waking up in Japan from waking up at home but the true essence of your experience retains its state; your identity with identity, awareness of temporality and fear. Identity is what keeps you doing what you do, temporality rules what you do and fear keeps you not doing what you don’t do. All three of these metaphysical principles interact with the physical world and therefore the physical world must in some way shape the metaphysical laws that govern these principles.