“Journeys are the midwives of thought…” This quote was said by de Botton. I believe that he’s trying to say that when you’re on a journey you have to develop an artistic way of looking at the world because you need to adapt to the stress and trivial, irritating things that accompany travel. By developing your ability to condense the striking elements of the world and to cast away the trivialities, you will find happiness or peace within yourself. By looking at the world as an artist, everything around you becomes art. When you are thinking creatively, and as an artist, you are able to grasp concepts of the world easier than most people who look past thing that aren’t of usual interest. On page 13 of The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton, he says, “If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.” I believe that in this quote, de Botton is trying to convey the idea that art is basically a distilled reality. Because art is designed to hold the most interesting or startling perspectives of and reflections on the world, with all the boring bits sucked out, it can end up creating a distorted expectation of reality. Furthermore, when you’ve got an artistic imagination I would say it improves your ability to retain the most critical images from an experience, but as de Botton soon makes a point about, even a human trained to identify powerful images may allow their brain to edit their memories into small, scattered handfuls of single images. I think it’s interesting that he creates this contrast between the beauty of art and the aesthetic appreciation of points of travel that would normally be ignored. That is, while most might try to forget or sleep through the more stupefying parts of the journey, de Botton proudly shows his appreciation for the subtle, ephemeral details – the transitory byproducts of human travel. For instance, when de Botton has started to talk about Edward Hopper (page 47) and his love for the elements of travel and transport: gas stations, hotels, near-empty diners. As de Botton quickly assesses, “Loneliness is the dominant theme here.” Perhaps traveling alone affords one more introspection and opportunity to spend time reflecting on their experiences.

This was certainly the case for Gustave Flaubert. In the first Motives section, On the Exotic, de Botton creates a portrait of the French author of Madame Bovary. I was really impressed at how radical his views were for his time in history.  I drew a connection between his total hostility to his own country and love of the exotic to some of the things I hear nowadays, like people who say they’re “colorblind” in an attempt to try and downplay their privilege. It was so rare for someone from that time period to be so dedicated to throwing away pointless affectations and limiting social boundaries like binary sexuality, so I thought his experience was interesting. I wish that de Botton would have included more information about Flaubert throughout the novel, because I found his section to interest me the most, quite honestly. I like to read about strange characters and people who were radical before their time versus someone continually speaking about the same subject using different words. To be quie honest, I am not fond of de Botton as a writer. I find his opinions to be strange and his attitude to be off putting. He does this by using a way of speaking that is hard to understand. The tone of his writing is rude, and it almost feels like he is acting like he has infinite knowledge of everything. I feel that his tone is condescending and because of that it’s hard for me to not become biased while reading this. He uses tiresome language to express extremely facile ideas. This is probably not the most popular opinion of de Botton and his writing, but it is how I feel. I also thought that some sections of the book were consistent, and some tended to meander. The quality of the writing was inconsistent. You could see this inconsistency in the Departure sections 1 and 2. This is mainly where he is describing the details of travel and he is reflecting on it in what I consider to be a rather vapid way.

This track is unmixed and unmastered. It has accompanying vocals that are not on the recording. It is only instrumental.

I have been writing and performing this song so often that it almost seems opaque to me. It started out in a series of recordings I was working on utilizing record samples inspired from our classwork. I picked up a Stravinsky record, Gregorian Chanting record and Shoenberg/Beethoven record from Rainy Day in Olympia. This was the ninth song in a series of sixteen and counting. The exact sample is from the beginning of the Concerto in D. The piano I wrote is rooted in D major but spends most of its time in the minors surrounding it. It wasn’t until this afternoon that the piano was actually recorded into the song file. This instrumental was used simultaneously with slight variations for two different performance collaborations. I practiced performing this song for two weeks with three different people; each version was equally as powerful and met with similar reception.  The first performance took place at Pig Bar in downtown Olympia with Ladexx. It was the only original in a series of three songs we performed and I used the Akai MPK49 to perform the piano live. The next morning I awoke and came into class to perform the piece for our quarters final performance workshop with Eli and Kimani. This time I decided to use the actual grand piano rather than a keyboard. The difference in key weight had an unexpected effect on my ability to play some of the softer parts audibly and stronger parts with restraint. For the first time I was able to contrast separate performances and instruments before writing a finalized version of instrumentation. The piece is still in development and is due to be performed in Eli’s future set lists as well as Wednesday March 18th at Pig Bar’s Open Mic. There is a recording of the original performance floating in cyberspace that I am trying to aggregate. I will post when I find it.

This track is lightly mixed and unmastered. It is only the instrumental.

Chad Leaf is a classmate, friend and LA native whom I collaborated with in Fall quarter. I thought this a pertinent inclusion in the study considering the connections between Olympia, Musical Cities and LA. With idle hands I slowly pieced this track together. It began as essentially a long series of trial and error experiences between two jams separated by a cigarette comma. The instrumentals consist of myself on the piano, Chad on the guitars and bass and Eli with lyrical accompaniment, however, this has yet to make it onto the recording. The drums and beats were produced by myself and a unique drum program to Logic Pro X.

The collaboration started as a rough idea chad had recorded and an inquiry to my involvement. Chad came over to my place with Eli and we set out to replicate the drums Chad had included in his rough draft. This process was relatively easy considering the ability to program and quantize in DAW’s. I took the beat Chad had in mind and added my own flair to it with the quick snap 808 Snare drum and the live sounding cymbals and fills. After this loop was created, Chad tuned into the Digital Audio Workstation and accompanying instruments set out we jammed over the guitar riffs and melodies that were written beforehand. This process went on for a few hours. We eventually decided on a few solid ideas and recorded an instrumental with rhythmic repetition and movement over-layed with sparse dances of guitar.

A second recording session brought Chad in on the Bass Guitar and filled out the bottom of the song like an old wedding dress.

Okay. I’m bad at simile.

This track is unmixed and unmastered. It is an instrumental in constructive process.

StreetSweeper is a track I have been working on most recently with the lovely and beautiful Alexis Wolf aka Ladexx. I’m not sure how many X’s she prefers.

 This track signifies the beginning of an exploration into the expectations and perceptions of hip-hop music, sexuality and gender. The lyrics for the hook are some   variation of the following:

Gatekeeper sent to sweep the people straight, people straight. / Gatekeeper sent to sweep us all straight, all straight.

Originally the line was taken from a verse I wrote for a track with Eli, “Gatekeeper sent to sweep the peoples street  / feet stretched far fetched waxing the souls streak.”

I began using this line as a hook and contended that I had no idea what my stream of consciousness was on about with the sweeping of a street or who the gatekeeper is. I looked up at lex. “Straight,” I said. “Gatekeeper sent to sweep the people straight.” Wether it’s a friends dad texting them about the liberal sins of evergreen or a religious troupe of family members oppressing the true identity of a collaborator it seems that the Gatekeeper of heaven is attempting to keep all of these beautiful humans heterosexual. To dive into that theology is not my expertise only my hand in expression. I recorded the hook into the Roland Sp-404SX with a vocal transformer that lowers my pitch a few hundred cents. I then layered the outro hook with booth recorded vocals compressed but otherwise unaffected.

I do not know how to read or write music. At all. I am familiar with the alphabetic notation but I couldn’t tell you what a grouping of notes is as a chord. So to the left you will find a ‘musical sketch’ of what each of the three melodic instruments are and what they are playing. It is read from top to bottom chronologically and left to right otherwise.

This recording is lightly mixed and unmastered.

This song began before two strangers. The entire class was struck by Ruby’s performance during the second week of classes. Andrea was urging us all to work together and step outside the premeditated solo acts and begin incorporating the classwork, texts and classmates into our performances. The Moldy Peaches are an interesting bunch for a topic divergence. A bit of sass and spit mixed with pop melodies and Kimya Dawson. An Olympia native, she has recently been performing around the U.S with Aesop Rock in a folk/hip-hop trio. The sound that they capture; a cocktail of New York style edge and PNW overcast days is exactly what I had envisioned for a collaboration with Ruby’s powerful and dynamic vocals. Her sound contrasts perfectly with the repetitive and accessible nature of the Ukelele.

I approached her after her performance to gather a sense of which pages of life’s book we were on. Of course she knew Kimya, of course she knew Aesop. It was easy. Somewhere soon after she sent me Sea of Love by Cat Power which is a cover of the 1959 hit by Phil Phillips. It was enough to draw my inspiration and begin a process of selecting a few poems from our class text Burning Cities. She said she covered this song well but I needed a sense first hand. Technology is a beautiful evil. Ruby sent me a video of her playing the song and I began plugging away at drums, ideas and lyrics. Never enough, never enough.

On our first meeting we were both pretty nervous as most are with these sorts of things. It really only took one run through. We had it almost perfectly. I ran through the tempo with Ruby and settled in so that the beat and Ukelele always synced up as she played. For this project I used Ableton Live to program and perform the piece. The drums that I used came from a personal collection of drum samples and sound samples. There was nothing else to program forward, only words and structure to compose. I threw out what I had written to start anew.

This text is a direct link to a video of our in class performance.

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Lyrics:

Come with me my love to the sea, sea of love
I wanna tell you how much I love you

(00:25s)

Do you remember when we met
that’s the day I knew you were my pet
I wanna tell you how much I love you

( 00:50s)

Everywhere I go I try to keep this cadence
I embrace your hands that unravel the days
It’s true I grew up in the midst of an ocean
that don’t mean I choose to battle the waves
The sea a never ending vast reflection
of watching the present moment as it turns to stone
and Our feet meet shore pulling us aptly apart
Water cascading as the sea slowly erodes

Really I wanna tell you how much I love you
The southern ocean bent inbetween two trees
Separate my self from the sand and the shore
Core masts in the sails of the wind as we leave
The boats move away like your hands yellow flickering
Megaphone bellows salutes to the city
Remembering, but did you forget
to remember when we met
Now I know the night did its duty

(01:40s)

Come with me my love to the sea, sea of love

[I wanna tell you how much I love you]

[Everywhere I go I try to keep this cadence
I embrace your hands that unravel the days
It’s true I grew up in the midst of an ocean
that don’t mean I choose to battle the waves]
The sea a never ending vast reflection
of watching the present moment as it turns to stone
and Our feet meet shore pulling us aptly apart
Water cascading as the sea slowly erodes]

[I wanna tell you how much I love you]

The purpose of this field study is to create as much music as possible utilizing the resources, culture, soundscape and environment of Los Angeles and San Francisco, California, in conjunction with a current process and technology.

Research Question: What Influence will Los Angeles and San Francisco have on the music created?

Research Methods: Collaboration, Musical Community Involvement, Exploration, Soundscape Sampling, City Sampling, Environment Sampling, Listening, Active Participation, LA based Vinyl Sampling, San Francisco based Vinyl Sampling, Reading, Meditation, Reflection, Creative and Academic Writing.

Research Outcomes: Daily Musical Compositions, Composition Evolution, Comparing and Contrasting, Journal Entries, Creative Writings, Photographs, Annotations of Process, Connections between LA/SF and Music Compositions.

This is Your Brain on Music

Audiotopia: Music, Race and America

All You Need to Know About the Music Business

The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960′s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Essentials of Music Theory

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This is Your Brain on Music By Daniel J. Levitin

Music, Science, and the Brain are more closely related than you think. Daniel J. Levitin, James McGill Professor of Psychology and Music at McGill University, shows you why this is. In this groundbreaking union of art and science, rocker-turned-neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin (The World in Six Songs and The Organized Mind) explores the connection between music, its performance, its composition, how we listen to it, why we enjoy it, and the human brain. Drawing on the latest research and on musical examples ranging from Mozart to Duke Ellington to Van Halen, Levitin reveals: How composers produce some of the most pleasurable effects of listening to music by exploiting the way our brains make sense of the world Why we are so emotionally attached to the music we listened to as teenagers, whether it was Fleetwood Mac, U2, or Dr. Dre That practice, rather than talent, is the driving force behind musical expertise How those insidious little jingles (called earworms) get stuck in our head Taking on prominent thinkers who argue that music is nothing more than an evolutionary accident, Levitin poses that music is fundamental to our species, perhaps even more so than language. A Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist, This Is Your Brain on Music will attract readers of Oliver Sacks, as it is an unprecedented, eye-opening investigation into an obsession at the heart of human nature.

Levitin, Daniel J. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. New York: Plume, 2007. Print.

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Audiotopia: Music, Race and America By Josh Kun

Ranging from Los Angeles to Havana to the Bronx to the U.S.-Mexico border and from klezmer to hip hop to Latin rock, this groundbreaking book injects popular music into contemporary debates over American identity. Josh Kun insists that America is not a single chorus of many voices folded into one, but rather various republics of sound that represent multiple stories of racial and ethnic difference. To this end he covers a range of music and listeners to evoke the ways that popular sounds have expanded our idea of American culture and American identity. Artists as diverse as The Weavers, Cafe Tacuba, Mickey Katz, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Bessie Smith, and Ozomatli reveal that the song of America is endlessly hybrid, heterogeneous, and enriching a source of comfort and strength for populations who have been taught that their lives do not matter. Kun melds studies of individual musicians with studies of painters such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and of writers such as Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, and Langston Hughes. There is no history of race in the Americas that is not a history of popular music, Kun claims. Inviting readers to listen closely and critically, “Audiotopia “forges a new understanding of sound that will stoke debates about music, race, identity, and culture for many years to come.”

Kun, Josh. Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America. Berkeley: U of California, 2005. Print.

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All You Need to Know About the Music Business

The past two decades have seen file-sharing technology and digital streaming services transform the music business from top to bottom, and the changes keep coming at breakneck speed. How are record labels adapting to the demand for instantly accessible, low-cost music while coping with piracy? And what does it all mean for aspiring and established artists today? Donald Passman, one of the most trusted music lawyers in the country, offers his sage advice for creating, selling, sharing, and protecting your music in the Information Age in this updated eighth edition of All You Need to Know About the Music Business. Called “the industry bible” by the Los Angeles Times, Passman’s comprehensive guide—which has sold hundreds of thousands of copies over the past twenty years—draws on his unparalleled experience and up-to-the-minute knowledge of industry trends. Executives and artists, experts and novices alike, will benefit from Passman’s detailed yet easy-to-understand explanations of the latest technology, legalities, and practices shaping the music business, such as: • Royalties for music transmitted via digital down- loads, streaming services, cloud lockers, and apps • Updated licensing regulations and industry agreements • The most recent recording and music publishing deals • The new challenges for performing rights societies He also gives guidance on the basics, such as how to: • Select and hire a winning team of advisors— personal and business managers, agents, and attorneys—and structure their commissions, percentages, and fees in a way that will protect you and maximize these relationships • Master the major and finer points of contract negotiations • Navigate the ins and outs of songwriting and music publishing • Maximize concert, touring, and merchandising agreements Anyone interested in making and marketing music—musicians, songwriters, agents, promoters, publishers, managers, and record company executives—needs this crucial text to keep up with the frenetic pace of technological and legal change. No one understands the music business better than Passman. Let him show you how to “make it” in one of the world’s most dynamic and challenging industries.

Passman, Donald S. All You Need to Know about the Music Business. New York: Free, 2012. Print.

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The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960′s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde

“Who knew, prior to this lovingly detailed account, that five musical discontents could construct what amounted to a cultural particle accelerator in a small San Franciscan house? This book allows readers a window onto the confluence of artistry, innovation, drugs, sexuality, poverty, resourcefulness and, most importantly, the sense of fun that permeated the air during those years.”–Richard Henderson, critic for “The Wire” magazine “As I devoured this vibrantly detailed history of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the 1960s, I found myself wishing repeatedly that I’d been born a couple of decades earlier, so I could have been present for a string of historic events: the debut of the Don Buchla synthesizer, the premiere of Terry Riley’s “In C,” Ramon Sender’s “Tropical Fish Opera,” Pauline Oliveros’s multimedia concert at the Trips Festival. The heroes of the Center were in the business of realizing unimagined possibilities, and they did much to shape the legendary culture of San Francisco in the later sixties.”–Alex Ross “Hats off to David Bernstein for flooding a dark corner of recent musical history with new light, as warm as it is brilliant.”–Richard Taruskin, author of “The Oxford History of Western Music” “This high-voltage oral history takes us straight back to the West Coast epicenter of experimental music in the early 1960s, where synthesizers and tape loops met light shows and LSD, and Merry Pranksters hung with the masters of minimalism. Reading it is like visiting a foreign country and realizing you were born there.”–Fred Turner, author of “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism”

Bernstein, David W. The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-garde. Berkeley: U of California, 2008. Print.

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A Visit from the Goon Squad

Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on every page, A Visit from the Goon Squad is a startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption.

Egan, Jennifer. A Visit from the Goon Squad. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print.

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Essentials of Music Theory

Alfred’s Essentials of Music Theory is designed for students of any age, whether listeners or performers, who want to have a better understanding of the language of music. In this all-in-one theory course, you will learn the essentials of music through concise lessons, practice your music reading and writing skills in the exercises, improve your listening skills with the available ear-training CDs (sold separately), and test your knowledge with a review that completes each unit.The Student Complete Book includes Books 1-3 in a spiral-bound format.

Surmani, Andrew, Karen Farnum. Surmani, and Morton Manus. Alfred’s Essentials of Music Theory: Lessons, Ear Training, Workbook. Van Nuys, CA: Alfred Pub., 1998. Print.

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A short summary. Contested annotation. Briefly briefing. Travel arrangements seem to take aeons, especially when you’re broke. Here they are anyway.
Even though he offered to pay for a stable future debt surmounts the horizon line. Plane Tickets. Not Yet. Something tall enough to manhandle seventeen inches diagonally. Check. Paper and utilities for brushing graphite imitations. Check. Sanity meshed between an EBT card and passport. Check. Eleven books. Four of which are novels. On and on. Order them. Some of them checked off over there; checked out. Medicine. The word echoes seven or eight times. Maybe nine. Divide it by three. Divine. Check. Arrangements with facilitators of steel roofs and rain collectors should be sorted out. A lot of pressure lost pursuing surfboards over couches. On second thought, two nets are always better than one on first thought. Might as well resolve the effort with my own name. Easy. Completing web based communication would polish this river stone. That involves more words. More expectations and inferences. They say there is a girl with flowers in her hair and that she dances in the sand. Or was it the sun? The English have a weird way of interpreting the west. This is the west of the west. The central pacific southern rim of the west. Accent or nil, One could expect sure fire weather.
Over priced Sunglasses. Remissed.
What sort of trouble is found inside four walls surrounded by never ending sun? The contraction of light to leave and the need to fight to stay. A song a day. There will be early mornings. Late nights spent hurting in crowds of mindless alcoholics pushing hands through bricks to pull out inspiration. Gunshots amidst smog covered tinted windows yelling across the road at pedestrian privileged ignoramuses sipping chai latte’s beating drums to the sound of cracks in the sidewalks. Four wheels push transportation on a road of eventual embarrassment. Get better. Try harder just do.
Read mindlessly as to open the mind to what we are not mindful of. Zen seated caricatures smiling through growing seedlings wrapped in orange birthday cake. Bald heads moving towards spotless windows asking someone to help paint. Needless city covered in sweat baths hopelessly corralled by the famously wealthy and unconcerned. Moving videos of famous sidewalks, printed hands and starlets dying out lightyears away. New shoes faded in putrid sun. Walking miles from recording store to record store to record store to recording home listening to the dicing descent of steel blades over living matter. Pockets emptied. Food stuffed in front and behind pant legs after realizing that there isn’t a ban on grocery bags. Go figure. Sun burning sunglasses pasted on my scraggly face. Grow up or out. Never in they always say. Always out with the sand filled boots tracking early morning dew through the mud. Hands busy at writing down memories cryptically over dinner. Salty faces pushing soft necks harder through the pluming palms of hollywood boulevard. Wet blankets with wet ears cruising across horizon lines attempting to grab hold of a slice of pie. Insecurities crippling anxieties that manifest in moistened hands. Shaking,

“How do you do?” How did he do. No try. Just do it. Smiling back behind these glasses he’ll wrap 5 fingers gently around the whole of their hand to introduce the flaming lust of Capricorn only to be met with a never ending stretch of ocean eroding the fire.

“We’ll See.”

Looking like sailors hands perched where hat brims catch baseballs laughing over mountains of grass. Exhaust sounds of Ducati’s silencing worries as troubles give waves to new friends. Smiles turn to faces as eyes become names.

I have been overwhelmed with equal parts excitement and nervousness while arranging my plans to visit New Orleans. I’m trying to wrap my head around pursuing this trip and contemplating what will become of it. I will be taking myself far out of my comfort zone and placing myself into a completely new, unfamiliar environment in which I have to figure out my plan as I go while trying to make the absolute most of it. I look forward to this trip most as an opportunity to grow as a person.

Week 1: Drive down to Los Angeles, Fly out to New Orleans, Arrive in New Orleans, Find where I’m staying in Uptown, Explore City

Week 2-3: Wander around city, look and listen, attend concerts, art shows, museums, visit landmarks, find info on local upcoming events, mingle with locals, play music, return to room, read, record music, reflect

Week 3-6: Return to LA and then Olympia, reflect, compile data and prepare for final presentation.