If anything brings me closer to achieving happiness it is the act of traveling. Los Angeles brought me so far away from the spiritual journey I began 5 years ago but upon returning to Olympia I realize that to taint the soul with evil is to learn to cleanse the soul of evil. I have never felt so a part of something larger than myself and my ego. It’s as if my destiny is riding slowly underneath me to keep me from falling through the earth. I am insanely lucky. I am outrageously blessed. This quarter has given me faith in the revolutions of our planet.

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. My writing content this quarter 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 of Los Angeles. What is buried in the cracks of my LA 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.

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 the world 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.

I move closer and closer to a complete understanding of my life’s work in metaphysics while remaining true to my creative expression through music. I am growing closer to the people who inhabit this earth through sound of and the study of human interaction.