Musician • Producer • Engineer
Wanted a decent, inexpensive pair of powered monitors for everyday listening, so I got these Presonus Eris 3.5s. Very pleased! They’ll be useful for mix-checking, too.
Listening to Schaun Tozer’s OST for Mighty Jerome. A lot of his stuff is jazzy, but this (like Intelligence) has an electronic edginess to it that I love.
But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
the narrator of Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
The professional blogging sites (and courses, and books) say the savvy blogger should become an expert at something. No, more precisely, you should be perceived to be an expert. I’m not an expert at anything, even the things I love. I love = amateur.
Experts (the real ones, not the “perceived as” types) burrow as deeply as possible into a topic, whether it’s early punk music, or JFK conspiracy theories, or vintage motorcycles… they know the whole history, the tiniest details — and we need these people; they write the histories. And don’t get me wrong, they love their subjects; they all started out as amateurs.
I’ve just never had the inclination to be an expert on any one topic, or a “critic" for that matter. I hope that my writing here (especially about music) comes across more as appreciation, from the heart of an amateur.
As I said earlier, this isn’t an “oldies music blog” (first few posts notwithstanding). It’s not really a “music blog” either, although I’ll probably write more about music than about any other topic. One big area I want to explore is Mindfulness, particularly from a Buddhist perspective. Although, I’d never call myself “a Buddhist.”
Listen to Hal Blaine’s drumming on the “quiet” parts of The Mamas & the Papas’ “Twelve Thirty (Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon)”. No wonder the Wrecking Crew got the big bucks back then. BTW, this is a song I can put on repeat for an hour and still want to listen again. Perfect.
Almost a new year. Stop worrying so much about productivity and getting things done. Start worrying about things worth doing.
Austin Kleon
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
Brian Eno
Why can’t we proclaim that which is neither false nor true?
Chogyam Trungpa