News
Killing Time
‘Leisure time’ lacks both intensity of life and contemplation. It is a time that we kill so as not to get bored. It is not free, living time; it is dead time.
Inactivity constitutes the human. The inactivity involved in any doing is what makes the doing something genuinely human. Without moments of pause or hesitation, acting deteriorates into blind action and reaction. Without calm, a new barbarism emerges.
When life follows the rule of stimulus–response, need–satisfaction and goal–action, it atrophies into pure survival: naked biological life.
If we lose the ability to be inactive, we begin to resemble machines that must simply function.
My taste in music doesn’t often align with Warren Ellis but I always pay attention to what he is reading. I have read many of the books he recommended.
Killing time so as not to get bored, when that inactivity is in fact what makes us human. Throwing away the moments and getting nothing in return. The beauty of witnessing the movement of light, the movement of clouds, the flicker of shadows. Staring into space is precious time. I don’t remember the last time I was bored. I suppose I may have a unusually high boredom threshold. Even in a plane, waiting to get out at last, I’ll happily stand there, glad not to be sitting any longer, while other people scroll furiously to catch up with that which cannot ever be caught up.
In the past few years I have often contemplated getting a dumb phone. There is even a website for that: https://dumbwireless.com. But every single time I come to the conclusion that rather than replacing my phone I need to learn to live with it. I plan much of our tours on the phone, carry confirmation numbers, boarding passes, location info, etc. I need maps, need messaging with the touring group… and I love the camera and ability to carry music with me. When you’re going through hell don’t stop, keep going.
Here is another quote from the book by Byung-Chul Han, who is a South Korean-born philosopher and cultural theorist living in Germany.
With digitalization, availability reaches new heights. By bringing about total producibility, digitalization suspends facticity itself. The digital regime does not acknowledge an unavailable ground of being. Its motto is: being is information. Information makes being fully available. When everything is readily available and consumable, contemplative attention is impossible. Like a hunter, the gaze screens its surroundings.
I am in the process of changing my attitude about analog music containers, such as vinyl LPs and Music Cassettes. While I don’t like the use of material, such as plastic and paper, I have come to realize that these containers are important for human culture. I am learning about getting LPs and MCs made–there has never been an LP of my music because even in 1990 NF was released only as CD and MC. Any advice you can impart to me please leave in a comment or send me an email. Bare Wood 2 would be a fine first LP release, I think.
PS: Killing Time is such a powerful combination of just two words. Is it Killing Time, a time for killing something or someone, or is it Killing Time, and time itself needs to be killed.
Rafael Toral
Portuguese musician Rafael Toral playing guitar and electronics.
Rafael Toral, born in Lisbon, 1967 has been intrigued by the potential of sound and the functions of music since he was a teenager. As a producer, composer and performer, he has been deeply involved with Rock, Ambient, Contemporary, Electronic and Free Jazz music in different periods of his life.
Prelude in Am
I found this yesterday, while searching for something else. It’s an old live recording of the late Baden Powell playing (his?) Prelude in Am. I can’t seem to find the music on any of his albums. Does anyone know more about this piece?
Still. Life.
Jon released a new album and I am loving it. For years I have been telling everyone willing to listen (Ha! that probably means you can find it on this blog somewhere) that the best thing that could possibly come out of this era of musicians getting squeezed by Silicon Valley would be that they make the music they want to make… because when it’s not likely that we can make money, we might as well make something that we want to hear… without considering what an audience might want or how to promote a song for radio etc.etc…
This album is 100% Jon Gagan. He even took the photo himself! You absolutely do not have to be a bass player or bass aficionado to enjoy these pieces! Play these tracks and read what he wrote about the recording. I think you will agree, it absolutely lovely.
Still. Life. is a collection of sketches that were done on electric bass between 2020 and 2024.
With each piece, I began by simply recording whatever came to me in the moment. I would then overdub another bass part or two and in some cases add Rhodes or percussion, often using the bass as a percussion instrument or source of a sound effect.
During the shutdown in 2020, my daily rhythm became one of waking up at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning and playing bass in the studio until the sun came up. I kept something of this habit in subsequent years, and Still. Life. was recorded during this time of day.
With the work having been done in the pre dawn hours it didn’t surprise me when I noticed a certain calm quality emerge as a theme from piece to piece. Without planning it, I realized I had been able to express the feeling of unhurriedness that was emblematic of the pause in the rush of modern life for me.
Big Smoke Rings
Longplayer
Longplayer is a one thousand year long musical composition. It began playing at midnight on the 31st of December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again. Conceived and composed by Jem Finer, it was originally produced as an Artangel commission, and is now in the care of the Longplayer Trust.
Listen here.
Three Act Play
Music of Sound showed a play for our time in three acts on this post.
Act one, in which a tech bro wants to convince the musician to release on Spotify:
Act two, in which the musician is reluctant and the tech bro makes grand claims to win him over:
Act three, in which the tech bro finds out that musicians aren’t stupid and is schooled.
THE END
6k ≠ 200k.
Musicians can’t just grow an audience.
Streaming as a business model doesn’t benefit musicians and may not be around for very long because even the streaming companies are not making any money – except the CEOs, of course.
I am actually contemplating releasing a music cassette next… :-)
Bamboo, AI, and ProTools
Good morning. This post might be a little longer and you might want to make yourself a bowl of tea or a cup of coffee. I’ll wait.
Let’s go in alphabetical order. AI first. I heard that WordPress has made a deal, or may be in the process of making a deal, to allow one or more AI companies to scrape all of the blogs and websites that use the WP platform at wordpress.com. I don’t know whether this is true or not but think it is quite likely, because money.
Much of my website runs on WordPress, but it’s wordpress.org and not wordpress.com. The former is open source software, the latter a for profit hosted platform using that software. That means whatever WP decides to do does not affect this site. However, since this here is an open and public blog it means that there is no barrier to stop AI from scraping it. No laws exist to stop AI from ingesting this blog that has entries going back 30 years.
I came up four possibilities:
- do nothing and let AI be trained
- archive the free diary (/latest), lock it up behind a password, and keep it to myself
- archive the free diary and make it only available to Backstage members
- archive the free diary and password protect it with something only a fan would know – example: what was the name of the studio the album Opium was recorded in
I sent these thoughts to Canton and asked “maybe there are more options that I can’t see?”
Canton and I have been working on this website for about 30 years, having started with Pandoras Box in 1995. He often dispenses valuable wisdom, as he did in his reply (I asked permission to quote from his email):
All depends on what your mission is! If your mission is to just not have anything to do with AI, then I’d do #1. Just ignore it. Don’t use it, and don’t be fussed that your public posts will be scraped by yet another system. (All your public stuff is already scraped multiple times per week by various services and systems.) The cat is out of the bag. The horse has left the barn. The robot has rolled off the assembly line.
If your mission is to bodily throw yourself on the gears of this machine and put energy into defeating AI then you might have to do something more active than erect barriers, like try to poison the AIs. Leverage the fact that your public website has a high search engine ranking and decades of content about your music. Rewrite every of your public posts so that flamenco appears to be a kind of custard similar to flan. Get a few other prominent guitarists to do the same and maybe Chat GPT version 4.5 will slightly confuse flamenco and flan. When asked how to make a good custard maybe future GPT will answer that it all starts with a good rasgueado…
Speaking more as your friend and less as your web hosting provider, what I really recommend is making peace with AI so that it doesn’t poison your own brain space. There’s so much superficial noise and clamor around AI I find it hard to keep a balanced view on (1) what is useful and amazing about AI, and (2) what is truly destructive and diminishing about AI, where we should apply the brakes.
Do you know or know of Josh Schrei, the young musician and Yoga practitioner who grew up in Santa Fe? More or less my age? He has this absolutely fantastic homemade podcast called “The Emerald” which I’ve been eating up. It’s a wide-ranging discourse on all sorts of topics through an animist mytho-poetic lens. Full of heart, nature, and wisdom: A really good balance for all the nerdy stuff I listen to.
Here’s his episode on AI, “So you want to be a sorcerer in the age of mythic powers…”
I think he does a good job to reframe AI in the context of millennia of human history, along with good precautions and insights.
That second paragraph is so very Canton. It’s one of the reasons why I enjoy his company so much.
So, the toothpaste has been squeezed out of the tube and can’t be put back. That’s fine. I can control what I can and that’s the path forward.
Here is what I have in mind. In terms of writing, this /latest blog will become more of an announcement blog. News of a tour, news of a review, a new album finished, and so on. Everything else will happen on Backstage. I understand that everyone (including me) is tired of subscriptions. (Ha, that’s why I call it a membership!) Like all of you I have to juggle subscriptions. My rule is super simple. Does something delight me? Does it make me smile? For that reason I subscribe to a search engine! I use Kage.com because I enjoy not having to wade through the ads on Google and DuckDuckGo, I enjoy getting more relevant answers, more quickly. Much more quickly! I stopped using Evernote, which I had subscribed to since 2009, when they doubled their price. I switched to open source Joplin, which may not be quite as polished as Evernote but does nearly everything I need. Subscriptions have to be tended to every year. Some need to be pruned, others become more necessary. It’s an orchard of subscriptions! :-)
Before I move on to my second topic I am going to take a moment to make this announcement:
In April the digital distribution deal for HuHeartDrive is up for renewal. After Higher Octave 1990-1992, Sony/Epic Records 1992-2001, SSRI 2001-2018, HHD is my fourth label and the only one where I have 100% control over the distribution. HHD released Fete in 2019, two versions of vision 2020, Bare Wood 2, several Dance 4 Me remix singles, guitar + pipe (from the video I made for the Dallas Museum of Art) and all of this music is currently available from all digital distributors and streaming platforms. I intend to end the distribution deal in April, which means that while the music will continue to be available from Bandcamp it will disappear from Spotify and Apple Music and all other such platforms. This move could very well mean that I will earn less money. I think that a lot of people are in the habit of listening to playlists–either their own or their stream provider’s–and they may not even notice that my new music is no longer part of that rotation. This is fine. What I am doing is what I want to do. I feel it in my bones.
My second topic is Bamboo, the album I am currently working on. I am have five pieces in different stages. I enjoyed creating shorter pieces for Rain Poems, which Culture Court called Audio Haikus in this piece that imagines a long conversation about the subject:
Short tracks. Beautiful, atmospheric pieces that celebrate the sound of water like audio haiku verses.
I am planning on carrying on like that for this new Bamboo project: mostly shorter pieces. But, looking ahead, I’d like to do an album of longer pieces next, after Bamboo. I love how the guitars shift on African Rain because I play around with shifting accents. That I would like to dive deeper into. Cool rhythms that shift subtly, arpeggios and melodies that change shape through changing accents… like flowing water or a murmuration of starlings.
Yesterday I read Gioia’s new post regarding the dopamine culture. (Ted Gioia is another subscription that I am happy to pay for.) Last month he started with The State of the Culture, 2024, which was followed by 13 Observations on Ritual and the latest post is How to Break Free from Dopamine Culture. These three articles are full of gold and I think most of them can be accessed by non-subscribers.
Here is a quote from the newest of the three posts:
Even before this scroll-and-swipe mania, I was telling people they should listen to longer music tracks—at least ten minutes in duration.
I originally got this idea from researching the practices of shamans around the world. I noticed that it typically took 10-15 minutes of drumming or singing before the shaman entered an altered mindstate. I later gathered scientific evidence from other fields (neuroscience, biology, etc.) that also suggested a ten minute threshold.
That fits nicely with my intention of creating longer pieces. I imagine pieces that are about 9-11 minutes each but will see how it feels and what the muses command.
Gioia mentioned the 42 minute orchestral composition Become Ocean, by John Luther Adams, in his piece: link to Wikipedia entry about the music, link to a recording on Apple Music. I would love to hear that performed live someday.
Pro Tools is the last topic. I saw this post by Tim Prebble, who recorded all of the rain sounds on Rain Poems. He wrote:
AvidLink, which I have zero use for, is using 96.6% of my Macs CPU!
I Force Quit it and my Mac becomes responsive again…
My next thought: can I delete AvidLink? What use is it?“Avid Link is a free app for anyone looking to find, connect, and collaborate with other creatives, promote your work, stream video, purchase and manage products—all in one interface”
No thanks.
But rather than delete it, for now I’ll follow this advice of how to stop it auto-launching Stop Avid Link from starting at boot
There you have it, some good advice for any of you using Pro Tools.
That’s it, end of post. I hope you will enjoy a very fine day.
Japan Movies
Wednesday evening I went to a movie theater that was showing Perfect Days, by Wim Wenders. It was the first time I went to a cinema in years but I like Wim Wenders’ work and wanted to see this movie in a theater. The seats were large and comfortable and I counted only seven other people in the audience.
This is my kind of movie. I love everything about it, the pace, the camera work, the use of music.
There is a good interview on the Academy’s Guide to Movies, because Japan picked Perfect Days as their official entry for the 96th Oscars.
Wim Wenders Talks ‘Perfect Days,’ ‘Anselm,’ and Why He Continues to Embrace 3D (Exclusive) | A.frame:
The other film is Perfect Days, a character study centered on a middle-aged Tokyo toilet cleaner (played by Kôji Yakusho, who won Best Actor at Cannes). Unalike as they may be, the two projects exemplify the filmmaker’s visionary approach to experimenting with format and function: Perfect Days was conceived of and shot like a documentary, while Anselm utilizes cutting-edge technology and pushes the boundaries on stylistic choices.
I don’t want to write more because I don’t want to spoil the movie for you. It’s a lovely film and I hope you will see it. I will rewatch it soon. :-)
On the subject of Japanese movies I saw Beat Takeshi’s 1999 film Kikujiro on Mubi yesterday. I did not know that he is a comedian, too, as I only knew him from his tough guy roles. Which is why this movie surprised me so much. I laughed a lot.
Jon Gagan
Jon asked me to take some photos of him and we took these at the Sofia in Sacramento. Thanks to Stephen who made him laugh, I think. I couldn’t see what was going on because I didn’t want to miss Jon’s reaction.
Stephen suggested that I make one long mix of Jon’s bass solos during our performances of Butterfly Dream. Every one of those solos is really great and I think the tempo is always very similar. So, challenge accepted. Will dig through the live recordings and have a go at this.
Rain Poems CD Update
Turn off the alarm on March 1st, the CD won’t be going on sale on that day. :-)
Here is what’s been happening. Found the Verbatim CD upon my return last night. Burned a copy this morning. It played in two out of three of my players. I know that this third player is thirty years old and has always been finicky, but still. I will go over to every friend and acquaintance and will ask them to put the CD into their player to test it… If it plays in everything, great. If not, I will have to rethink. Not many people still have CD players, I have noticed.
I remember always writing with a sharpie directly on a CD-R in the studio but those CDs were used to check the recording or a mix and were not meant to last. The ink probably leaches into the plastic over time. So I’ll probably have to buy blank CD labels that I can attach to the top of each CD for me to write on. I know, I know, I could have these CD made for much less money than what this is going to cost, and having them made will be a last resort, but I would prefer to have the CD look homemade, with a handwritten label.
I’ll keep you posted.
I have been giving a lot of thought to containers, especially as they pertain to music. There is the LP and the cardboard cover. Substantial, legible, large images. Then there are the music cassette and the compact disc, both invented by Philips and Sony. Not much visually, rather small, but nice containers. Part of the joy of these objects lies in opening and closing the container. This action turns listening into a ritual. A ritual must have a beginning and an end. An opening and then the closure. That’s very different from playing something from a streaming service.
What could a digital music container look like? It could be a virtual container or an actual container… perhaps something that has a flash drive attached. Whether the container is real or virtual, it would need a way to open and close it. I am going to work on a flash drive (with regular USB plus USB-C connectors) that comes in a book. Perhaps the drive could be skinny and made to look like a bookmark. Or maybe the drive could be connected to a large paper clip that allows it to be attached to a page of the book. Or there can be a number of pages in the back of the book that have the paper cut away to allow the drive to rest in the book. Maybe I should design the book pages to leave a hole in the center for the drive. Lots to play with, for sure.
What would a virtual container look like? It should open and close. It should contain a virtual booklet. It should be able to play all of the music contained in the proper sequence…
Voyager
Voyager kept going, and kept going, until it was over 15 billion kilometers away. At the speed of light, the Moon is one and a half seconds away. The Sun is about 8 minutes away. Voyager is twenty-two hours away. Send a radio signal to it at lunch on Monday, and you’ll get a response back Wednesday morning.
Great post about Voyager, which has been flying through space since 1977. It flew past Saturn. It officially left the Solar System and entered interstellar space in 2012.
Voyager Mission Control used to be a couple of big rooms full of busy people, computers, giant screens. Now it’s a single room in a small office building in the San Gabriel Valley, in between a dog training school and a McDonalds. The Mission Control team is a handful of people, none of them young, several well past retirement age.
…between a dog training school and a Micky D!!
AI
Ted Gioia shared the above book cover and Tim posted it on his blog – here.
My name is fairly unique. I was usually able to get a handle that was just my first name. I used to be @ottmar at Twitter, for example, before I deleted that account around 2009.
So if you see an album by Ottmar Duros or DiMeola or Ottmar De Lucia, or Ottmar plus any other name… you can be pretty sure it’s got something to do with AI.
Tim wrote a good post about AI on his blog. Check it out.
Encryption
I discovered that I wrote the following into my diary eight years ago, today.
Devices will become smaller and will be used like a secondary brain. They will increasingly contain more and more personal information, like passwords and logins, banking details, info about our health, diary entries etc. Pretty soon they might actually be in/on our body.
In other words we do need to have this discussion now. Is a phone an extension of my person? If yes, is breaking its security equal to torturing me?
Touring
Wednesday night we performed at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano. It was the first performance of this tour and, like every first show after a few weeks off, it had some of that glowing and raw quality that comes from trying to remember all of the arrangements, especially new ones. The first performance is a little bit on edge but also full of new ideas, a delicious tentative freshness. We played Duende del Amor for the first time in years. We had a new section for dreamy afternoon that changed the time signature for a break. We also did a medley of Dancing Alone and Uma Dança. We played Arabesk, from Rain Poems, during soundcheck but decided to delay the first performance of that piece. After soundcheck I heard Robby humming the melody from Arabesk, always a good sign. :-)
33 years ago we performed at the Coach House for the first time. The venue opened in 1980 and was already legendary when we arrived in 1991. Hundreds, maybe even around a thousand signed photos line the walls. Everybody has played on that stage. The website mentions B.B. King, Bonnie Raitt, Chris Isaak, Tori Amos, Tom Jones and the Black Crowes by name but there are so many more. Ray Charles, Chick Corea, Joe Walsh… the list is endless. I walked along the walls and looked at the framed 8×10 publicity photos showing performers. Most of the artists are still living, others have already passed. It was like wandering through a museum. In a few years the venue will be fifty years old.
Thursday night we played at Belly Up in Solana Beach. We performed Arabesk for the first time. We play this piece faster than the recorded version, upbeat and catchy.
Love + Hate
What do love and hate matter
when I’m here alone,
listening to the sound of the rain
late in this autumn evening.
–Dogen, from The Zen Poetry of Dogen: Verses from the Mountain of Eternal Peace by Steven Heine
Another layer of this poem is what is meant by the words I’m here alone. If there is no separation between self and universe he is alone with everything. To hate anything means to hate oneself. To love something…. the same.
LOL
Found here.
Rain Poems Limited Edition CD
I will pick up the covers today. Since everything fits together the way I intended I ordered fresh CD media and more envelopes. On Tuesday I will burn a CD and then I will try to play it in every CD player I own and a few I don’t, to make sure the CD works in the widest variety of players. I have a few days before the start of the California tour and should be able to burn a bunch of the CDs before I leave.
Edition of 100. Each CD burned by me, signed and numbered. Offered for sale to Backstage members at $54, which is the price of a CD from the 1980s adjusted for inflation. Anyone who isn’t a Backstage members can buy the CD for the price of $108. Shipping is a flat $20. The album can be purchased on Bandcamp on March 1st. First come first serve. When they are gone they are gone.
Better start a TikTok
Want to sell a book or release an album? Better start a TikTok. – Vox
The internet has made it so that no matter who you are or what you do — from nine-to-five middle managers to astronauts to house cleaners — you cannot escape the tyranny of the personal brand.
For some, it looks like updating your LinkedIn connections whenever you get promoted; for others, it’s asking customers to give you five stars on Google Reviews; for still more, it’s crafting an engaging-but-authentic persona on Instagram. And for people who hope to publish a bestseller or release a hit record, it’s “building a platform” so that execs can use your existing audience to justify the costs of signing a new artist.
and
Corporate consolidation and streaming services have depleted artists’ traditional sources of revenue and decimated cultural industries. While Big Tech sites like Spotify claim they’re “democratizing” culture, they instead demand artists engage in double the labor to make a fraction of what they would have made under the old model. That labor amounts to constant self-promotion in the form of cheap trend-following, ever-changing posting strategies, and the nagging feeling that what you are really doing with your time is marketing, not art. Under the tyranny of algorithmic media distribution, artists, authors — anyone whose work concerns itself with what it means to be human — now have to be entrepreneurs, too.
I added the emphasis.
It’s the industrial revolution all over again, perhaps, only with carpal tunnel and screen addiction instead of black lungs.
The Way
The word Buddhism was only coined by Europeans in the last few hundred years. For two millennia Buddhists were simply known as people who followed the Dharma. The word Dharma, like many Sanskrit words, has a wide range of meanings and can’t be translated into a single English word. However, a general description that works well enough for this purpose is path. It’s a path or prescription that can be followed.
This meaning led to an interesting story when the Dharma arrived in China, because Tao means The Way. Some Taoists believed a story (early conspiracy theory!?) that claimed Laozi traveled east after writing the Tao Te Ching and taught a young man named Siddhartha about the Tao, which later came to be called the Dharma. It was suggested that the Dharma was built on the Tao or, to take the image of a path or road further, that the Dharma connected to the Tao. This is not at all likely but, like all good conspiracy theories, remotely possible. Siddhartha Gautama is said to have been born between 563 and 480 BCE and Laozi was born sometime between the 4th and 6th century BCE.
Something else happened, however… Dharma met Tao in China and became Chan and then Zen. Instead of extending the path into India, a new path was forged.
