Disappointments

I've been going through a disappointing stretch, which is part of the reason I haven't updated this blog for awhile. First of all, I sent out a bunch of emails to booking agents trying to get shows for an East Coast tour in January, and got no responses. Bleah. Part of it may be that I waited too long to send the emails; two or three months in advance would have been better. So I might try again later (I had wanted to do January to coincide with my friend Michael's vacation). Another thing that helps is if you have contacts with people in other cities, and that comes with time: playing more shows and meeting bands from out of town. I also haven't had any luck booking more shows in Michigan.

The second item of disappointment was my first paid gig at the Crofoot on Friday 12/12. It was this bar gig... people were mostly sitting talking at the bar and ignoring me. I got good responses for a few songs but overall I felt uncomfortable. One issue was that there were sound problems and my lyrics were hard to hear. Also I had forgotten the power cord for the mannequins so that effect was missing. Mostly people paid attention to me when I got hyper and crazy, but I felt like there were diminishing returns on that, driving me to ever more drastic craziness... it felt sort of desperate. So the last song, "The Crazy Man Dance", I pretty much cut loose... I drew people from adjacent rooms, coming in to see what the commotion was. My sense was that people weren't excited or into it though, they were just gawking. I want a balance in my shows, I like making people a little uncomfortable or weirded out, but I also want them excited and drawn in. So I think the balance this time was too much towards the former side.

Perhaps it just wasn't the right audience. The question has been on my mind: exactly what are my goals for this year? I don't want to make a living off of this. I'm not aiming to be MTV famous. So after the last show it occurred to me that a big thing to connect with the audience for my music. The theory is that some people out there would be especially receptive to my music, and I just want to get noticed enough so that those people can find my stuff.

One thing to note about the Crofoot gig was that I got so worked up during "The Crazy Man Dance" that I entered some kind of altered state of consciousness. There was this moment where I wasn't really aware of my surroundings. My body was moving by itself without me willing it; I felt like I was removed, floating in space somewhere, with a warm light around me. All my worries about how the gig was going were suddenly gone and I felt very happy. It may have been related psychologically to some religious experiences, which I suppose in some cultures are partly induced by dancing (e.g. Whirling Dervishes). It would be good to have more, and more prolonged, experiences like this... hopefully while not alienating the audience.

Works in progress

The goal I set a few weeks ago, to have rough versions of all my coddlefoe material (i.e. lyric-oriented stuff, including the stuff I do live), got abandoned, for two reasons: I had to refocus my attention on trying to book gigs for my planned January tour, and I expanded the list of songs I wanted to include on the coddlefoe CD. After the unpleasant Crofoot gig I didn't want to think about let alone listen to the coddlefoe material for a long time, so to recharge my batteries a bit I started playing around with old predominantly instrumental odds and ends I had started a long time ago. Going back and hearing these funky beats that I've forgotten about is one of the best parts of this music-making project. These things are all in various stages of completion, from being just a few beats and riffs, to being fully fleshed out songs needing only some detail work and mixing.

Here's some of those old things which I've worked on in the past week.

Victims Are Responsible
Evolved from a funk jam that rambles through several sections of sharply contrasting moods and tempi. I omitted a first section which needs a lot more work.

Lucifer Over Lancs ripoff
The bludgeon-like riff from The Fall's "Lucifer Over Lancs" was stuck in my head, in a slowed down form. Includes some funny weird vocals.

When Will My Mind Move On To Something Else
A stiffly funky march.

Um, I sort of wanted to keep posting works in progress, like once a week... good exercise for me and gives people something to listen to who visit this blog... on the other hand I keep holding back from posting more because I don't know that these incomplete things are worth sharing. I'll see how I feel next week.

Back to high school

So I see a post on the Detroit Music Scene MySpace group advertising a series of shows at this teen arts center called The Woods, I imagined something like the Neutral Zone in Ann Arbor. My friend Damon (of the famous-to-devoted-indie-rock-fans band The Swirlies) once told me that high school kids make the best, most enthusiastic audiences and I should seek out venues catering to them, so I decided to see if The Woods would book me. I sent them my usual email:

Hi,

I have a one-man band act... it's me rapping and singing, darkly witty lyrics, over funk beats that I build from loops in real time...
blah blah blah, just describing my act, the mannequins, etc. This morning I saw in my inbox I had a reply -- always good since venues don't bother replying if they don't want you. Here's the reply:

Do you go to AAW? I am not impressed or amused by your "dark witty lyrics". They are not appropriate for our concerts.

Ouch. Then I looked back at their myspace site... it looks like it's not really an independent teen center as I had supposed, but the Arts Academy in the Woods, a high school. Here's an excerpt from their blurb:

Art (and Music) in The Woods

Is it possible to simultaneously raise arts awareness in our community and encourage the creative pursuits of youth while providing a safe, all-ages environment for the audience?

Come Nov. 21, you can ask fans of Red Star Redemption, Wave Eats the Walrus, Maceri and The Sheeny Men. They are the inaugural acts lined up for The Woods -- a fresh, bi-monthly concert series and art fair dedicated to the advancement of the arts in metro Detroit.
...
We hope you’ll come and experience the local art and sounds of generation next!

So I guess this was put together by some sort of teacher or principal or other responsible molder of young minds. It looks like they only listened to my first song on MySpace, the one that goes "I kill babies to keep the house clean." (According to MySpace no one has gotten to any of the other songs since I reinstated my account. I think I'm going to change my first song.) I thought the "Do you go to AAW?" part of the email was funny, like they want to find out who this kid is so they can put him on their shit list. The blurb does make it sound like they're primarily looking for teen bands but other things they said, and the bands they booked, suggest otherwise. Actually I checked those bands out... Maceri are awful cookie-cutter MTV-ready pretty-boy alt-rock (no I'm not bitter... that's what they are!)... The Sheeny Men are kind of blah, self-seriously "soulful" blooze-rock, maybe not terrible live or if they were friends of mine or if I liked blues-rock... Red Star Redemption similar quality in a pop-rock vein, though they're a teen band so I can't be too harsh... Wave Eats the Walrus surprisingly good, moody indie-pop with interesting, semi-orchestral arrangements. So whoever put this together I guess can't tell the difference.

Every once in a blue moon something happens like this to remind me how much high school sucked.

"Plan for Salvation" lyrics

In this last push to get this CD done one of my main tasks is to finish the lyrics on a bunch of old raps that have been sitting around incomplete for months and years. I want to get all my old raps out with this CD, this is the place for it. Tonight I finally finished lyrics for one song that I started a couple years ago (or almost finished it... I still might add / change a bit, especially the chorus). I'm excited enough about it to want to post it. The parts in parentheses are rapped by the mannequin backup singers.


Plan for Salvation

The sermon that you're preaching (Not winning many converts)
It's getting a reaction (that's generally adverse)
All about heaven (a favorable habitat)
Who wouldn't want to go there? (There's just a little caveat)
Your plan for salvation (hinges on dying)
Wake up and smell the coffee! (Your eggs are frying.)
No one wants to go there (It's really very scary)
People and death (is like a vegan and dairy)

Chorus:
It wouldn't have this appeal for you
If life were not an ordeal for you

(Morality declines) as the economy rises
(People make money) from other people's vices
(Playing on your weakness) you know you really want it
(The hottest young porn stars!) You broke down and bought it
(Everywhere you turn) kids fucking on TV
(It's so decadent) and yet so alluring...
(The world is disgusting) So full of iniquity
(A level of depravity) not seen since antiquity
(If there was someplace elsewhere) I'd go there in a second
(Open up your Bible) a paradise beckons

Last night I had a vision (it filled me with awe)
The ultimate repository (of divine law)
A towering palace (big as a planet)
Divided into ten wings (one for each commandment)
And further subdivided (into floors and rooms)
For finer applications (of the golden rule)
And each of these rooms (overflowing with files)
Combined all together (it'd reach a trillion miles)
And every little paper (for each eventuality)
A detailed instruction (leaving no ambiguity)
The scale was mind boggling (truly breathtaking)
I thought that my brain cracked (I felt myself shaking)
I thought I was in Heaven (or at least a suburb)
Until I saw the Devil. (He smelled like burning rubber.)
He told me (The palace that left you so impressed)
(Has never been finished.) Really quite a mess.
(Millions of instructions) still needing to be filed
(And that's where you come in) he said with a smile
(The task will be difficult) and probably unending
(But the Big Guy wants it) you know he's unrelenting
(Always making new rules) and no signs of slowing
(And someone needs to file them) I'd better get going

Naturally-occurring paradox

Recently I was surfing the 'net when I was distracted by this loud bass from someone playing music in my apartment building, not an unusual occurrence. After a moment I realized it was one of my songs, from the 24-hour album, which my friends upstairs were playing. It was "I Would Be Disturbed If It Weren't So Funky." I was a little disappointed that they were playing that song as it was one of the thrown-together time-filling jams towards the end of the album. I mean, it came out well for a thrown-together time-filling jam, but still. I was thinking that they probably chose to play that song because of the attention-getting title, and they would be disappointed when the song failed to be as interesting as the title. The title was really too good for the song; it would be more appropriate if the song had a title as humdrum as the song itself. But then, I thought, in a way the title's poor fit with the song makes the title as crappy as the song itself. So it's actually a good match for the song... but of course that means it's in fact not a crappy title after all. This is the first time I can recall coming across a paradox in real life as opposed to something that someone just made up. Is the title good or not? is a much more concrete question than whether some sentence that refers only to itself is true or not. Though I think the title paradox is more easily resolved than "This sentence is false."

On the other hand, I'm kind of feeling like the album title was a bad title for a good album... thus an even-worse title.

Goal

After the 24-hour album exercise I decided I want to start setting stronger goals for myself. My first goal is to finish as much as I can of the coddlefoe album I've been chipping away at (mostly home-recorded versions of the songs I do live, plus a few unfinished raps that I want to finish), get decent (not necessarily final) versions of each of the songs that will be on the album, and post it here in two weeks. If that goes well I might make a regular practice of setting goals and posting the results here.

It will be good to get that CD done... really it's been lingering around too long, I don't want it to go into next year. It could be a good way to help find audiences. I haven't been pushing myself on it to avoid jinxing the creative process but the 24-hour album showed that I can push myself and still have good results.

Something of which there is a googol

A future Facebook friend of mine posed this puzzle: "Name any material, physical, thing, of which there exist a googol." The "material" restriction excludes things like, e.g., 1/googol of a meter, or the number of different combinations of hydrogen molecules. He asserted there was nothing that existed in the quantity of a googol. Here's a possible (more interesting than satisfactory) answer.

Let f(t) be the highest number someone could reasonably give at time t to answer the question "What is the largest number of any object in the universe?"

The function f I guess has been increasing over the last couple centuries as scientists have probed deeper into the microstructure and macrostructure of the universe. If you assume it will continue with the same trajectory in the future, you can plot when it will hit a googol. So there are a googol of whatever particle scientists will have discovered at that time. You could challenge this as not being a "material, physical" object as it hasn't been discovered yet, but it is nevertheless an actual existing entity in the world now. We only need better futurology to predict its discovery with greater certainty. If you have a futurology that confidently predicts a discovery, is not the discovery as good as made? How about a futurology that is only good enough to discover the discoveries of future futurologists? If one continued this reasoning too far one might eventually get in a futurological panic analogous to the current financial panic (science research grinds to a halt as scientists re-examine all the particles and chemicals and biological processes they've been studying, disentangling the real things from discredited future projections; embarrassed science teachers announce that classes have been cancelled indefinitely) but surely any good futurology would have already taken this issue into account, the way that a good statistician makes sure to take multiple comparisons into account.

I guess my brain's been warped by the books I've recently read: Stanislaw Lem's "The Futurological Congress" (science fiction, enthusiastically recommended) and Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" (putative science non-fiction, more cautiously recommended).

Album-A-Day, finished

I got it done within 24 hour limit! I got 3-4 hours of sleep (that's counted in the 24). So I'm somewhat affected by that now. I was really happy when it was done, after the intense effort I put in. The last song is called "Album Release Party" and it reflects my bouyant mood. I was really surprised by the quality of the results. Maybe I'm biased having been in the thick of it for the last day but a lot of it sounds very good to me. You can judge for yourself. My favorite track is "The Place Where the Hallucination Peaks", it's transcendent (at least to my sleep-deprived brain). Kazoo glissandi, who knew? "The Place Where I Start Hallucinating" and "Joke's On You, Now Could You Lend Me Fifty Dollars Man?" are teeth-grindingly catchy pop songs, and "King of Kazoos" and "Granny Can Still Lindy-Hop" are nice-sounding instrumentals, the former pretty, the latter bouncy and experimental. Those are the best, but the rest aren't bad either.

The songs are ordered in the order that I wrote / recorded them. With the last few I was running out of time and so they're much more thrown together, but still they have some value. For most of the songs I would sort of keep developing them until I got tired of them or the creative part of my brain got tired, and at that point I would start figuring out how to wind it up; for this reason they may sound a bit abortive. One of the songs ("Lots of Fun") has the lyrics, "Going to sleep now / See you next week now" -- this was the last thing I finished last night before I decided I wasn't going to stay up all night.

That was all I was doing and thinking about for the last 24 hours. It felt like ages. I still feel giddy that I accomplished it. It's pretty remarkable that I did it considering how slowly I usually progress with my music. It really helps when you don't have to worry too much about the results because it's not a "serious" project. Besides working faster, I also tried a lot of experimental ideas that I would be less likely to try normally, with good results.

When I was done I couldn't think of a title until several hours later. It was hard to sum up the range of styles and emotions in a single title. I came up with "I Was Able To Find Something Beautiful". I wanted a name that would do justice to the significance the album has to me, and how I felt on listening to it. Maybe the title's too sentimental or weighty... whatever, I had to come up with something. I don't like being flip all the time anyway. Argh, I hope I don't regret the title later.

Here's the link! http://www.archive.org/details/IWasAbleToFindSomethingBeautiful

Album-A-Day

I was using StumbleUpon (basically, jumping to cool websites at random, for those who aren't familiar) and I hit a site for something called Album-A-Day. To make an Album-A-Day, you have to write and record the entire thing within a 24 hour period; you can't use any material written before. The album is supposed to total at least 20 minutes or at least 30 songs. It's not a contest or anything, just an exercise to spur creativity, and you can post it to their website when you're done. It's preferred to do the entire thing in one contiguous period without sleep but I don't think that's worth it to me. I did start it though... when I read it, I thought for a few minutes and then went for it. Randomly stumble on a site and there goes your next 24 hours. I'll post the final product tomorrow. So far it's surprisingly good. I was just listening back to one of the songs and was like, "Damn, that's catchy"... now I have the radio on to get the fucking thing out of my head. It's really fucking catchy. The last song I did tonight, I just wanted to get out of it as soon as possible, figure out a way to end it. Started writing lyrics like "I'm going to sleep now... see you next week now...." I got pretty worn down.

So tonight starting from 6 PM I recorded six songs totalling 7.4 minutes. So I'm over a third of the way there. Looks like I'm going to have to start speeding up a bit. Unfortunate... I anticipate the remainder won't have as many sublimely catchy moments as the first part.

Ok time for bed or at least a rest.

NASCO show

Saturday night I played at a party at Black Elk co-op in Ann Arbor. The party was for the annual NASCO conference (North American Students of Cooperation), so there were people from all over the country in attendance. I think it was the best show I've played so far (out of six). I felt like I had a small breakthrough in terms of not being nervous or inhibited. I was still quite nervous before the show, but it didn't affect me during the show. My friend Kiwi also said that I performed better, with more confidence, than in previous shows. This was all very encouraging. Especially the pleased looks on some people's faces... it reminds me of the look on my housemate's face after a particularly thrilling ride when we went to Cedar Point. This is definitely what I was there to do. One guy told me that since he saw me perform, he understood how Jesse Jackson felt at Obama's victory speech.

There's definitely still room for improvement. I was pretty winded after just three songs and was thinking how in the hell was I going to get through the rest of the show. So the second half of the show ended up being more subdued than the first half, and the Crazy Man Dance wasn't quite as crazy as I would like. (Though it was fun charging into the audience; some girls looked pretty scared. Everyone had been standing around watching at a polite distance, like it was a stroll through the zoo... I just thought, Fuck this...) So, I've started jogging every day and I'm going to start going faster and farther than I used to. I'm in pretty good shape already, but not nearly enough to be able to give my all to each of 13 songs including the Crazy Man. As usual I was totally spent afterwards and feel like I've been recuperating for the past two days.

Before the show there was a problem where I tried to insert cables into my foot button board and rather than connecting with the ports, the ports just bent back into the frame until I couldn't reach them. I had to find a screwdriver in the house and open the thing up so I could hold the ports from the inside while I connected the cables to them. It's really not a good thing to be taking apart your equipment right before the show is supposed to start... it kind of put me on edge. Then when I put the button board in place under the keyboard and went to connect the other ends of the cables to the keyboard and the PC, I discovered that both ends of the same cable were connected to the two ports. So I had to open it back up, switch cables, put it back in place... and then I discovered that I plugged both ends of a different cable in the ports, same mistake again. I don't know how I managed that. I didn't take the time to screw the lid back on, I just put it on the floor and hoped nothing would get jostled out of place. It worked ok thankfully. I had a scare when in the middle of one song the buttons stopped working and I had to stop the song, but it was a completely routine fuckup for one of my shows -- just a matter of having selected (with the mouse) the wrong thing for the buttons to trigger. It's so easy to make mistakes like that... so far I think I've had only one show of the six where none of the songs got interrupted. (The Linder show last week was almost without interruptions; there was just one song where it was close to the end, I was about to play the final solo, and bang, the mic fell on the computer keyboard and the music stopped. Nice dramatic finish.) I figure the glitches are just part of the fun.

Unfortunately I didn't make contacts for future shows outside Michigan as I had hoped -- again I need to figure out how to promote myself more -- except for one girl from Austin who said I should come to the South by Southwest music festival there in March... this seems like it could be an interesting thing to do.

Later that night, the Ann Arbor band Canada played. They were surprisingly good ("surprisingly" because I'm predisposed to hate contemporary indie-rockers). The best thing about them were their strong rhythm section. They reminded me a lot of the band Mice Parade.

Halloween and a show

For Halloween I dressed as a "potato-enhanced human". I duct-taped four potatoes to my back and wired them to each other and to my fingertips, scalp electrodes, "virtual reality" sunglasses, and earbuds. The flux capacitor on my back was the idea of my friend Dave who helped wire me up, the idea being that I traveled here from the distant potato-future.Dave went as Ash from Evil Dead/Army of Darkness, he of the chainsaw-hand. I actually went with Sarah to pick up the chainsaw a week earlier.

Dave's girlfriend Sarah went as swan-dress Bjork (sewn by herself... she's really good).

You can make up your own story for what my costume is exactly... Primarily I was thinking that I was augmenting my senses with the powerful potato senses, but there's additional possibilities. Mainly I was just going for a combination of creepy and absurd... people have probably noticed that I like that combination.

In honor of my costume, I'm posting the song "I'm A Potato" by Devo [download]. Potato-humanity was a recurring theme in Devo's music, though the relationship to my costume is mostly coincidental.

We went out to a dance party at the MOCAD and then to the Old Miami where a punk band, Circus Boy, was playing. I really enjoyed their set (though the strength of the Old Miami's cocktails had a good deal to do with that). They were these old punk veterans in their 40s and 50s, just kicking out the jams, sans bullshit. I did a lot of hollering and dancing around.

Throughout the night I got a lot of questions about my costume and a few requests for photos. It was nice. Especially the girls who felt up my potatoes.

Luckily the potatoes were still edible after the night was over. Even more luckily, I had homemade chili and cheddar cheese in the fridge.

Saturday night I played a little party at Linder co-op in Ann Arbor. It went well, people were cheering and bobbing their heads and dancing a lot, and afterwards I got a lot of enthusiastic compliments. One guy in the audience DJs on WCBN (U-M college radio) and wants me to play on his radio show.

I was painfully nervous before the show, though it was considerably better than my first show. During the show I decided to ignore the audience most of the time and just play for myself... it felt better that way, compared to previous shows where I was too caught up in the effort of putting on the show which detracted from me feeling the music. It's funny, before I started actually doing this, when I would picture it it seemed so easy. I mean, obviously I had endless reserves of emotion and nervous energy, I just had to do what came naturally, right? I didn't think about how nervousness and self-doubt could dampen my enthusiasm, or how the moods when one is fired up and feeling like a rock star don't necessarily correspond to the times when one has to play. So in fact it's not easy; it's a challenge -- which makes it more worthwhile, nontrivial. The main reason I applied to grad school was that I felt I needed a challenge. Anyway I still haven't put on a show that I'm 100% satisfied with, but it's improving.

Birthday

Had a birthday dinner at my aunt's tonight with family. Got this tattered piece of sheet music from a friend of my aunt's who I don't even know that well (I guess she likes my piano playing).

The bottom corner says "Copyright MDCDIII" which is... 1903! The cover is really beautiful and antique-looking and will make a good decoration for my wall (it's fallen off anyway). As was popular back then, the music is supposed to represent events in a story. Inside the cover there's a wordy description of the events described by the music and instructions for how the different parts should be played, and in the music itself there's corresponding notes letting you know where you are in the story:

INTRO. Dash of the Charioteers for Position. Con Brilliant.
The Race.
Finish of the Race.
Parade of the Victors. Grandioso.
TRIO. Populace Dispersing.
Evening Song of the Christians, dolce
Alarm of Fire, fff
People in Consternation, furioso.
Second Alarm
People in Panic.
People rush wildly through the streets.
Fire fiercely Raging, fff
Crash of falling walls.

...and then it reprises the beginning, concluding with "a grand finale that is thoroughly in keeping with the spirit, life, and enthusiasm of the occasion that is being described" in the words of the description.

The piece itself sounds like the accompaniment you sometimes hear in old silent films; in fact another piece by this guy, "The Chariot Race", was used in the accompaniment to the silent version of Ben-Hur (though it was published before the film). You can hear the piece here (midi file... also the player added some ragtime embellishments towards the end... the composer wasn't that cool). I'm surprised how much I like it, it would actually be pretty fun to play.

Yesterday was my actual birthday. I spent pretty much the whole day installing programs for microtonal tunings and then playing with the results. My friend Damon has been bugging me to produce more microtonal music since I posted my first quarter-tone piece, and anyway I wanted to just screw around for awhile and further procrastinate CD recording. Once I got the programs running (Scala [www.xs4all.nl/~huygensf/scala] and Scala 2 SynthEdit Microtuner [www.12equalboresme.com]) I had to sit down and work out what note frequencies I wanted to map to the keyboard keys. My first keyboard mapping scheme was kind of hard to play with and I ended up laying awake for much of the night thinking about the problem and rearranging the notes first thing in the morning. Here's what I came up with -- boldface represents black keys:

KEYBOARD LEFT HALF:
1 (base note, C)
16/15 of the base note's frequency
9/8
6/5
5/4
27/20
45/32
3/2
8/5
27/16
9/5
15/8
2

KEYBOARD RIGHT HALF:
1
25/24
10/9
7/6
32/27
4/3
25/18
40/27
Average of 14/9 and 25/16
5/3
7/4
16/9
2

(In the first version I found that 14/9 and 25/16 were practically indistinguishable, so I decided to combine them.) The notes come from a modified version of Partch's tonality diamond described in an earlier post, laid out to correspond with their closest approximations on a conventional keyboard. Many of the notes on the right half are 80/81 of the corresponding notes on the left half. 80/81 is a subtle but audible difference, about a fifth of the distance between adjacent notes on the conventional scale. The contrast sounds interesting. The way it comes about is, on the keyboard's left half, F, B-flat, and E-flat are tuned as a series of exact fourths (4/3 or 2/3) and A, D, and G, respectively, are tuned an exact third in relation to those (5/4 or 5/8); whereas on the right side the opposite occurs: G, D, and A are tuned as a series of exact fifths (3/2 or 3/4) and F, B-flat, and E-flat are tuned a minor sixth (4/5 or 8/5) in relation to those. So these sets of keys in the two keyboard halves are harmonious within themselves, except for the chords C-F on the left half and C-G on the right. My tuning also contains some multiples of 7, which aren't used in standard tuning and are considerably different (flatter) than the corresponding notes on the standard keyboard. For a long time I've been curious what 7/4 (and 11/8 and 13/8) sounds like so it was exciting to try it out... yesterday I probably spent an hour just listening to droning chords with unusual intervals, trying to get an intuition for them. This morning I made a good start on a piece using my new scheme.

This represents the difference between a major third tuned as the ratio 5/4, or tuned as four steps through the circle of fifths (81/64) -- the conventional scale compromises between those two tunings.

I feel a bit like I'm getting sucked into this obsessive subculture of tuning geeks. You can really spend a lot of time doing all this math to calculate frequencies that are only a teeny-tiny distance away from the conventional notes (but make absolutely perfect ratios, without the compromises in the standard 12-equal-divisions tuning... some people really get off on that). I'm still trying to figure out what difference the alternate tunings really make and how to use that difference musically. To get a sense of how deep tuning geekdom can go, just browse this catalog of the 3700+ alternate tunings that come with the Scala software. (Example: the "detempered convex closure of 11-limit diamond in {243/242, 441/440} temperament plane," with 39 tones per octave. Or more simply, there's the "Yugoslavian bagpipe" tuning... for all you Yugoslavs reading this...)

In other random news, I've heard back from two of the venues I contacted regarding future shows. I'm looking at a Halloween party show at The Factory with Carjack! and a show in November at the TrumbullPlex with Emily Bate, though both are tentative now. I'm excited.

Carjack! and more works-in-progress

Yesterday I finally finished a presentable version of The Cheese... I'm sure I'll want to tweak it further, but the main thing is, it was good enough to post on my myspage. I've been holding off for awhile on contacting venues to try to get gigs, until I had more presentable stuff on MySpace. I really wanted to have even more of my songs on there, but lately I've been feeling restless, working in my apartment, feeling like I ought to be getting out and doing stuff... and I went to see this dude in concert Friday, called Carjack!, and it made me even more restless.

Carjack! put on a very good show, lots of energy and weirdness; I recommend seeing him if you get the chance. It was at this little loft space in Rochester called The Factory. The crowd seemed to be young hip-looking college kids and high-schoolers and maybe a few middle-schoolers. I was the oldest person there I think except for Carjack! himself (who's 35... this may partly explain why I relate to his music), Carjack!'s sidekick, and some people who looked like parents of people in the other bands that were playing. I danced some at the show but mostly the scene felt a little too uptight for me to get too loose... other people were mostly standing still, crowded back against the walls of the small space while Carjack! cavorted about in the center. I had the impression that Carjack! was trying very hard to get people into it, and failing, and trying harder and still failing, and that he must be a very sad Carjack!. After the show I bought a homemade CD from him and talked to him and he talked a lot about what an awesome show he had put on, how he must have totally freaked those kids out and they didn't know what had hit them. While he was talking he was standing very close to me in the cramped space, looking down at me (I hadn't realized how much taller than me he was) and talking very quickly, loudly, and animatedly. I nodded and smiled a lot.

I tried promoting myself there a little bit... I got the contact info for the person who books shows at the Factory, and I told Carjack! about my thing and said we should play together. I am still a bit uncomfortable doing the self-promotion thing.

Carjack! was followed by Aleph-1. For the uninitiated, Aleph-1 is the mathematical term for the first infinity larger than the infinity which is the size of the integers (which is Aleph-0). I felt special that I understood their name, but unfortunately they were too prog-y for my taste; I thought the music was a bit self-indulgent and lacking in substance. I fantasized about heckling them with mathematical jargon: "You call yourselves uncountable? You're in one-to-one correspondence with every bad prog band from the '70s! Take it to the power-set, guys, take it to the power-set!" But I'm not that big of a jerk, so I just left early.

So I went home and checked out Carjack!'s MySpace and all his side projects, and was reminded, again, that you really don't have to have your stuff be too polished to get venues to give you gigs. So the next day I did one final round of tweaking on The Cheese and said to hell with it... posted it, and then emailed six places (the Factory, the Luna Cafe [St. Clair Shores], the Blind Pig [Ann Arbor], the Neutral Zone [teen hangout in Ann Arbor], TrumbullPlex [anarchist co-op in Detroit], the Asterisk [place in Brooklyn where Carjack! is playing next week]), sending them my MySpace link. I'll email more soon... maybe wait till I get feedback on this round? I'm procrastinating a little; this whole thing is a tad scary.

Here's The Cheese.

While I'm at it... here's another work-in-progress that I've been adding to over the past couple weeks:
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary Free-Association Song
"I never have enough lyrics to go with my music, so for this song I'll just read from the dictionary and free-associate and that'll be another one down."

Last week I spent several hours trying, and failing, to get Partch's tonality diamond (see my earlier post) to play with my music software. I got sick of wrestling with my computer and just wanted to play something, so finally I just programmed it so the keyboard was split in half with the upper half a quarter-tone lower than the lower half, and I started playing... that was a thrill. Just savor those quarter-tones.

Here's my little preliminary stab at microtonal music: Ha What Did I Say

I'm pretty proud of it actually... though I don't think it approaches the awesomeness of the piece by Charles Ives that inspired it: Quarter-Tone Piece #3: Chorale

aha

I spent a few hours today at my cousins' house practicing my trio and trying to convince my cousin Laila that (1) 0.999... equals 1, and (2) math can be cool. I convinced her on (1) and made a little headway on (2). To try to convince her further on (2), I thought of this funny math problem I came across once upon a time. I think it's cool enough to be worth posting here.

Dr. Pugh and Dr. Steel are colleagues in the math department at the University of California at Berkeley. One day they are at a math department party and their student, Mason, says, "I have an amusing little problem for you. I'm thinking of two whole numbers between 1 and 9, inclusive. Their product is [he whispers something in Pugh's ear] and their sum is [he whispers something in Steel's ear]. Can you figure out what the numbers are?"
They both take out pencil and paper and do some calculations.
Then Pugh says, "Hmm... no, I don't know."
Then Steel does some more calculations and says, "Hmm... no, I don't know."
Then Pugh does some more calculations and says, "Hmm... no, I still don't know."
Then Steel does some more calculations and says, "Hmm... no, I still don't know."
Then Pugh does some more calculations and says, "Hmm... no, I still don't know."
Then Steel does some more calculations and says, "Hmm... no, I still don't know."
Then Pugh does some more calculations and says, "Hmm... no, I still don't know."
Then Steel does some more calculations and says, "Hmm... no, I still don't know."
Then Pugh does some more calculations and says, "AHA!"
What are the two numbers?

If you know, don't give it away in the comments. If you're stuck and need a hint, email me (clobberfoe of geemale).

The Dequindre Cut pathway

Today I tried biking on the new Dequindre Cut bike path, from Eastern Market to Chene Park. It used to be an abandoned railway line, with bridges at every street that were completely covered with elaborate graffiti. Now they put this nice, streetlamp-lined, tastefully landscaped path through it so you can stroll past the graffiti as if in the Detroit Institute of Arts. It felt pretty incongruous and disorienting to see this illicit artform, painted on these old decaying structures, featured as the centerpiece of this pretty, bourgeois sort of parkway. I thought it was a great idea though, very cool.


The image above is from this DetroitYes gallery (from before the bourgification). More photos here.

The diamond marimba

So I got very excited by this yesterday... Apparently there's an instrument called a diamond marimba whose notes are laid out in two dimensions.

This actually seems to be much more logical and interesting than a one-dimensional layout. The marimba plays microtonal music, i.e. notes that don't exist on a normal keyboard (the microtonal notes are in between the normal keyboard notes). Each southwest-northeast row contains a scale in a different key. Each scale contains notes whose frequencies are exact multiples of that scale's base key (give or take some octaves) -- e.g. if the base note is C then the scale contains C, G, E, D, plus other non-standard notes. The rows in the perpendicular, northwest-southeast direction also contain scales. These scales contain all the notes that the base note's frequency is a multiple of -- the inverse relationships of the relationships in the southwest-northeast rows -- e.g. for a base note of C, the scale contains C, F, A-flat, B-flat, plus other non-standard notes -- more like a minor scale. The southwest-northeast rows are called otonalities and the northeast-southwest rows are called utonalities... I love good jargon.

The coolest thing, however, is that you can actually play the diamond marimba, virtually, at this site. (Note: I think the labels on the lower half are off by an octave or two [i.e. a factor of 2 or 4]).

This guy's site also has links to the software he uses to compose microtonal music. I definitely want to try it.

The diamond marimba was invented by Harry Partch, a 20th century American composer whose music I've been a fan of for a year now, without knowing much about the instruments on which it was played. Here's some of his music featuring (I think) the diamond marimba.

Arrest, Trial and Judgement (single song from the opera Delusion of the Fury)

Delusion of the Fury in its entirety

Shadow Klan

So I was biking by Comerica Park this morning, stopped at a red light, and this guy approached me, shook my hand, handed me a CD, and started rapidly telling me about its contents in a charming hustler sort of way. The CD cover was deep green with these psychedelic pencil drawings all over it. He told me he rapped about science -- "You like science, right?" "Yeah, I'm down with science," I murmured. He said he rapped about the genome and molecular biology, and he showed me these clippings from the Detroit Free Press science section he had pasted to some cardboard. Well, lately I've been getting my mind blown by the excellent pop-science book Genome by Matt Ridley, so I was very interested. Then he started going off on evidence for aliens on Mars, supported by more clippings. I didn't have any money on me to buy the CD (and I'd want to preview before buying anyway) but I asked for his website (myspace.com/shadowklann) so I could check him out. He gave me a fist bump and said he'd catch me next time. His myspace songs sound pretty whacked out, especially the backing tracks. It's fun, I like it. On the other hand I was disappointed there wasn't more hard science content, and I think the musicianship could be better. Now I'm struggling to make up my mind whether to buy it the next time he approaches me, which I'm sure will happen soon. I want to support local music especially weird local music but I can't support everything.

Works in progress

I thought I'd use this blog to share works in progress. The majority of my pieces will probably never be completed so if I don't post them here they'll just never be heard. I'm using MediaFire to host these for free, the cost being that you might get annoying pop-ups when you click the links, sorry. Besides that, downloading should be easy; let me know if anything is messed up or if you know of better alternatives for file hosting.

The main order of business recently has been to get final recorded versions of the songs in my live set, suitable for a CD and for promoting myself. Today I added the final touches to a version of Marketable that I'm tentatively satisfied with; I'll come back in a week or two and see if I think it needs any further tweaking. A lot of the other songs are close and I'll post them as I finish them.

Aside from that, I've been working on some classical-flavored stuff, instrumentals with emphasis on complicated polyphony, more intricate than the poppier stuff I do. I have over a hundred solo piano recordings from 2001-2004 of fragments that never developed into songs, which I'd like to develop this year. A few days ago I started developing one of those old kernels: "And Here's Another One" (the old idea is just the opening pattern).

I have a couple young cousins in Grosse Pointe who play cello and clarinet and I thought it would be fun for us to play a trio. Here's a sketch of an idea that I wrote today: Trio. (My computer doesn't have a clarinet sound so I used organ.)

I've also been working on random unfinished things in my more usual rock style, such as "I Set Fire To My House" (the last part with the harmony vocals is what I recently added).

My usual mode of operating is to switch between the hundred-odd open projects I have, adding a little each time, so that they sound fresh when I eventually come back to them. So, it may be awhile before the above get completed, if they ever do. But maybe this year I'll try a more focused approach.

My routine lately has been: biking in the morning, making music in the afternoon, and in the evening doing productive stuff on the internet (e.g. looking for happenings in Detroit, downloading music, playing with music production shareware), or sometimes visiting friends/family. I average about two hours of work per day on the music; past that I usually get tired and my brain isn't productive anymore. I'm taking weekends off to recharge.

Living alone in relative isolation gives one a feeling of being free, to let one's mind wander randomly unconstrained by responsibilities or fear of what others will think. There's good days and bad days but on average I feel significantly more creative than I have in recent years. Last week I even wrote down some notes for a bizarre short story about how games might theoretically play meta-games against other games. Don't know if there's any promise in that premise, but whatever, at least I'm thinking about stuff.

Biking on the freeway

When I was a kid I was fascinated by freeways. I used to create these really complicated maps of freeway interchanges and freeway systems, which probably would have been a huge headache for people to try to navigate in real life. Occasionally I built road systems out of pieces of wood. At one point I decided that when I grew up I was going to live in a house in the middle of a particular freeway interchange along the Ohio Turnpike. I just remembered that now. I wonder if I could actually do that.

I also had a fascination with the streetlights along freeways (and to a lesser extent streetlights in general) and the variations among streetlights in different locales. When my family vacationed in another city the most anticipated thing for me would be the freeways and the local streetlight design. For awhile after I graduated from college I planned to be a truck driver. As a small child my favorite streetlights were the assymetric ones found along the I-75 median; I thought these were hilarious. There were some of these downriver just before the lights end, but later I was happy to find that a few were put up at the M-10 intersection; the latter were quite close to where I've been biking.

A Google search of "freeway fetish" turns up mostly porn (conventional, no freeway porn) and condemnations of American car addiction. Here's one summary: "The California automotive fetish had resulted, locally, in the planning of an extensive freeway network, which included I-480, an unsightly and obstructive..." Unsightly in whose eyes? I bet it's gorgeous. I have a friend who's involved in activism against the new I-69. I'm 2/3 as liberal as him but in this case I'm secretly rooting for the freeway.

This is all by way of explaining why I got excited when I biked past an I-75 exit ramp yesterday and noticed that I-75 had been closed and you could just bike down the exit ramp. I biked the length of the closed off section and explored the I-75 / I-96 interchange. This is one of the more interesting interchanges in the Detroit area; I think only the I-696/M-10/US-24 and I-696/I-275/M-5/I-96 interchanges are cooler. What's unique about it is the half mile where I-96 and I-75 run parallel, interlocked with each other. A daring idea.

Unfortunately the interchange ramps, which I had been anticipating biking on most strongly, were under construction and unbikable. Also my stupid "smartphone" won't talk to my stupid PC to transfer the photos I took. So I'll be returning. Still, it was pretty cool just to bike down the center of the freeway all by myself, with the cranes towering all around.

The Siwatu Effect

Out for my nightly walk tonight, I was thinking about the Siwatu Effect. Last week I was just reveling in the city, like "Living among all these ruins is so cool, it's like living in Rome or an ancient Middle Eastern city." Then Siwatu visited and was like, "Man, this place is so depressing," the entire time. So for the past couple days I was biking around thinking, "Living among these ruins is so depressing, it's like living in a tomb. Get me out of here!!" So tonight, just as I'm thinking about the Siwatu Effect, I walk around the corner and see the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit:
Except the above picture is a little out of date; it now reads "NOTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT." I blame Siwatu.

The story thus far

For the record: I got admitted to Stanford to get a Ph.D. doing artificial intelligence, and decided to defer till Fall 2009 to have a little music career. Also, to generally give myself some space for creativity and personal growth, self-discovery, and whatnot. When you're busy and stressed out a lot, parts of yourself may go neglected for long periods, and when you're idle you can remember that those parts exist again, and be more of a whole person. If that makes any sense.

For a week now I've been living in Detroit in an apartment building in the Cass Corridor by Wayne State, in an apartment that shares a porch with my friends Dave and Sara who are attending Wayne. Also my family is close by in the inner burbs. So I have the solitude I need but also it's easy to break it when I need to. I feel a lot more free, relaxed, and creative without the 35 housemates I had at the co-op... I liked them but I can't relax with people around unless they're really close friends. The Cass Corridor has sort of a bohemian reputation; there's lots of arts and music stuff in the area. It only looks slightly decrepit, though there's a lot of more seriously decrepit areas within a mile or two of biking.

I took a little trip to Chicago a couple weeks ago, hunting for apartments there based on the fact that there's cooler meetup.com groups there (math enthusiasts, composers, sci-fi writers, etc.). The groups were exciting in themselves, and more generally it indicated there was a broader range of people in Chicago with more opportunities for me to find a niche. I stayed at a co-op there and instantly remembered how stressful it is for me meeting new people, and made up my mind that night to stay in Michigan -- that was when I remembered the vacancy in Dave and Sara's apartment building. I did enjoy biking around Chicago though.

A strange parking garage

Can you imagine trying to find a place to park in Detroit and randomly finding yourself here?
It used to be a theater. Living in Detroit is fascinating, like living in an archeological site, or some old city like Rome or Athens, living among ancient ruins. My friend Siwatu showed me these pictures; I haven't actually parked here, yet. He called it "depressing", which I can certainly see... but on the other hand in what other city can you suddenly find yourself in a beautiful ruin, while looking for a place to *park*?

I spent the afternoon at the Detroit Public Library with Siwatu helping him with research for some fiction he's writing set in a now-abandoned hotel building in Detroit.

Stumbling on things in Detroit

I was biking around this morning through some typically rough-looking areas of Detroit and randomly came across this amazing looking building, Dabl's African Bead Gallery, on Grand River just southeast of Grand Boulevard. The whole thing was elaborately painted and decorated with mirrors, stones, and mosaics; also the entire sidewalk around the place was inscribed with art and African names... then I went down the dead-end street it was on and there was a vacant lot filled with scrap metal and rusted tractors and such twisted into art, with the inscription "IRON TEACHING ROCK HOW TO RUST" spelled out in colored stones... then I looked across the lot and saw on the far side an abandoned building decorated all over in the same style as the first. Here's an image from www.freep.com, with the artist:

Update 9/18: another picture from an article in the latest Metro Times:


Yesterday I was randomly biking around and I came across the strangest little neighborhood I've ever seen... it was just this one little dead-end street, only half a block, stuck between I-94, the Lodge Freeway, Henry Ford Hospital, and some Wayne State buildings. The street was a mass of filled potholes, like the proverbial sock that was mended till none of the original material remained... a narrow street with old houses and apartment buildings crowded close on each side, and again there were bits of art in random places, also a little stage in a yard. When I got home I found that the street was known as a bohemian enclave and they hosted the 4th Street Fair every summer.

It seems like there's this notion of taking advantage of the gradual abandonment of the city to turn it into a giant canvas for artists to fill... I like the idea of a city where works of art vastly outnumber inhabitants, filling all the empty places between the pockets of habitation; it would be pretty wondrous. But if it got too cool then people might want to come back... in which case we'd have to take up arms :-(