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8-6-2003

What book do you casually put out on your coffee table to impress visitors?

If I had a coffee table, this week it would be Siddartha by Herman Hesse, for the simple reason that I have been experiencing a great deal of similar themes in my life lately. I was the innocent seeker, then I became the young upstart, then came the egocentric bastard with a rather cruel streak, and then I noticed how inhuman I was acting and remembered my favorite quote from the novel. When Siddartha basically casts aside his old life, he seeks the wisdom of a boat man he met a long time ago. He seeks the answering voice of the river, which is the now in all its shimmering beauty. One of the most influential novellas of my early 20's, and still it carries itself with me.

If you could meet one person dead or alive, who would that be?

Walt Whitman, because I want some of his personal, unwritten insight into the nature of the poetic universe. Out of all the poets, beat and otherwise, he was the most universal and spoke a more ancient tongue of images and heavens. Whitman was a man and not an egocentric pop-star, yet he was famous in his lifetime for celebrating what was worth celebrating and speaking the truth of things instead of cowering behind money, power, ego, fear and selfishness. Whitman embraced everything that is noble and disgraceful, he was an endless supply of clarity in the human experience, and he transposed it to words in such a way that will never be forgotten.

What is your primary motivation to create music?

To express the tumult of energies and emotions that I feel in response to the life that I live, and to create some sort of aural language out of the madness that goes on inside me that has no other language. Communication.

What advise do you have for beginning musicians/artists?

It's more of an exercise than a bit of advice. Take any word, hippo for instance, and repeat it like a mantra until it loses all connection with meaning. When there is no little grey picture of a hippo in your head, keep chanting hippo and explore the strangeness of the sound. Breathe in and out, notice the feelings in your body, relax, then scramble for an inkpen or a computer keyboard and start typing the words that come rising out of your unconscious. Don't stop to read or make things sensible; don't stop for punctuation or to pretty up anything. Let it all out. Take the gooey, nasty, filthy stuff that's inside and let it go. Take the sappy, emotional stuff and let it go. Pollute that page with the raw entrails of your fervent mind, and only stop when you are about to pass out from sheer exhaustion or dizziness.

You will feel like a million bucks afterward, and you might just learn something in the process. What you are writing is in fact the state of the universe at that very moment. You are practicing the divination of your own being. Since you can do this so effectively, you can translate this strange juxtaposition, this chunk of surreal beauty, this truth into sound or images or vision or noise and produce something truly beautiful out of it.

Is there a fellow musician you would like to work with? If so, in what capacity?

I'm currently jabbering with some lifelong friends about collaborating on things. It's only a matter of time before that comes into fruition, one way or another.

In all honesty, I don't particularly have a desire to work with anyone for any other purpose than to make something beautiful. The people don't matter. I don't matter, they don't matter. What matters is the third mind that is formed out of the duet (a phrase coined by brion gysin and w.s. burroughs). If there is a split in the shared consciousness, any ego-friction getting in the way of innovation, then it's not making music. It's merely piecing two ideas together.

I'm all about collaborating, but I really don't have a single musician I'd pick out of the bunch. But maybe in a few years this will change.

What are you looking forward to right now?

I've been working nonstop on the new album (No Empty Spaces). As much as I enjoy the process of final mixdowns and pre-mastering, I really want to get this thing done so I can start on another project. But I don't want to rush it, because that will show up in the end result. Because the next project is so much more eclectic than the album I'm building right now, I'm yearning for it on a deeper level. That's just me; I'm always a step ahead of myself. I'm past this album already. In my mind, it's already out there and doing it's thing, stirring up other people and stretching my inner worlds into other people's realities.

I really need to work in living in the now. But that goes against the nature of the question...

Are there any bands/musicians you're excited about right now?

Recently, my good friend Matt introduced me to a wave of new electro bands. It's great to hear this stuff evolving (devolving), getting clever, and splitting off into billions of sub-genres like it always does. But the most memorable 'new' thing I've heard lately is Boards of Canada. Mostly because they speak my language in a way that no other artists have done in a long time. Not since discovering p-funk, miles davis and early experimental music have I been so blown away by a single artist. There's just something elastic about them. Like a comfortable pair of underwear, or standing in awe of great mountains in the spring time. Or driving at night in a strange land ...

When you travel, what do you do for fun?

Since I rarely have any money, I enjoy doing everything that's free in the places I visit. I enjoy history, so I tend to do a lot of museums. I really dig art, especially modern art, so art museums are the places you'll find me on vacation. My wife and I travel together, so we share the sights, and they are always new and different. Especially when you don't have money, because this keeps you away from the tourist-y things that prevent you from actually seeing what is going on.

Probably the greatest thread in my travels of late have been this strange obsession to visit old graveyards. My wife says it has something to do with making me feel more connected to events that span past single lifetimes. She's right, but there's more to it than that. I appreciate the artistry of the earlier tombstones; I see the juxtaposition of the way people honored the dead, say, 100 years ago, as compared to the uniformity and status symbology of the modern age. I read tombstones to find the clever words, the important words, and I love to guess as to what people did in between the two years printed there.

I'm also an amateur ghost hunter. I don't buy fancy hand-held devices or carry dowsing rods, but I do enjoy the tingle in my gut when I know I'm in a place full of otherworldly energy. More than anything, I want to see a ghost so I can be sure that they exist, but whether it's ghosts or not, something in the world is vibrating at a different rhythm.

It's fun, it's real, and it's free. That is the meaning of life.

What do you want the listener to get out of the music?

As many other artists have proclaimed, I make music because I enjoy the way it's put together. I get to explore the textures and express things beyond words in my music, and I always feel better after a good sit-down with the knobs and editors.

But I do want others to get something out of my music. The intent, the drive, of everything that I do is to interpret my inner world, the reflections of my consciousness in response to the experiences I have. This is a language all its own, and I want the listener to hear the translation and take it into themselves. I want the listener to respond, like a conversation, in whatever way they express that same language. Because we all know it deep down inside, the language of aesthetics, of raw, unending emotion, which is our direct connection to everything that is.

People tend to communicate with consentual, rules-based languages formed with tongues and thick textbooks. What they don't always realize is that this is just one form of communication, that other ways to communicate exist that can be much deeper and more profound than speech. Poets know this, which is why they continue to write all the time. Poet's words can never compare to the true language that is spoken in experiences, interludes and moments of perfect aesthetic clarity, so they attempt to keep up the best they can.

What is the greatest sacrifice you've had to make for your music?

All those ridiculous technical manuals for the computer software I should really know how to use have not been read. Instead, I read technical manuals for things like Cubase, Reason, and I hang out with other musicians on the net to discuss the finer points of slicing beats and mixing down.

The end result is, of course, a complete lack of real social life. I have flesh and blood friends, but I don't see them as often as I 'see' my online musician friends. I am perhaps a little over-zealous with my art, as my wife probably doesn't see me as often as she would if I was a plumber or a carpenter. But then again, if I was a plumber, I'd probably be out in the front yard making sculpture out of flaking PVC pipe or something equally bizarre.

Many people feel alienated by music, as opposed to other art forms, because they have this preconception that music is this super, professional package supplied through some fantastic super-industry of art gurus and geniuses. Music is easily misconceived because it doesn't hang static on a gallery wall. It is art, but it isn't lasting art. Music is sand mandala for the ears, easily explored and easily forgotten.

You can't turn off a painting hanging in a gallery, but you can turn off a song on the radio. You can't forget a 1000 page novel written by a dead irishman, but a 4-minute song by some skinny musician in Oklahoma City is easily left behind in memory lane. The sacrifice musicians make is that they are not going to be memorialized in stone for generations, but this is also the benefit. Those less concerned about leaving their mark will be the ones more likely to live in the here and now. And as a musician, this is the greatest sacrifice. Which is liberating, come to think of it.

Music - it is the pouring out of self into temporal jars that can be smashed with the flick of an electric switch. The listener is the master controller, the owner of the experience, and in the end musicians are but the hands and feet of something much more timeless, much more infinite, and much more substantial than the molecules that make up their bodies and minds.