My First.

I really love to reflect on the warm memories of my roots in music production. I can still very vividly remember assembling a drum set out of trash cans and metal pot lids to jam with my cousin on his electric guitar in the basement of his home in North Carolina. Oh the fun times...

Every year since about 7th grade I would make a trip to visit him and we would spend every day for a straight week locked away in his basement recording funk/rock music with his iBook G4 using Garageband. He would play guitar, piano, and sing. I would play bass and his friend would play drums. It was possibly the most exciting part of my summers when I was growing up.

I love to reflect on those times and see how far I've matured both as a person and as a professional in music production. Comparing the quality of the songs I recorded and mixed back then to what I am able to put out now is so interesting. I think it's really cool that I have a record through music of literally being able to see the progression of improvement I have undergone.

I still go visit my cousin every year. He's now a jazz guitarist attending school at Oberlein Conservatory, and every once in a while we still get to record using our new Macbooks. :D

Immersing Myself in Music Through Dance.

For a few years, I was a dancer/performer in an Independent Winterguard based in San Marcos called Identity. A winterguard, for the many who have never heard of it, is a competitive and artist sport that blends contemporary and modern dance with the utilization of flags, rifles and sabers set to music or sounds. The group I performed with was very much like a family to me, and we spent over 20 hours a weekend training, dancing and rehearsing for competitions around the state and the country.

An exercise we frequently did was dance improvisation – My instructor would stage us around a dance studio, give us little to no direction and put on a song for us to improvise to, using each other as partners, or just being by ourselves. There was one song in particular that she put on towards the end of our competitive season – and one of my last performances ever, and I never knew the name of it. You see, these improvisation exercises were to get us in the correct mind set before an actual performance so that we are in character and are “checked in” to the show, and right after the exercise, there were little to no words and we lined up to go to the performance site and do our thing. I didn’t really get the chance to ask what the song was, and it didn’t have any words. However, I will always remember quite vividly how it made me feel.

Our performance song was Falling Slowly by The Swell Season, so our improvisation songs were sad, romantic and very, very beautiful. I was feeling particularly emotional at this show, and was trying hard not to cry while I was improvising to this one anonymous song. I had to completely immerse myself in the music, feel it, and interpret it in my movements. It made me realize in a physical sense something I’ve always known about music and sound – it can not only affect how you feel and how you think, but it can also be used to *express* to others how you feel and think, be it through dance, or moving picture, or even just by itself.

My Driveway Moment

The closest I have ever had to a "driveway" moment was in my apartment, running late, throwing my school things into my bag and taking hurried sips of coffee. My BBC podcast, which I play every morning, was rolling in the background, streaming in spats of world news into my apartment in Austin, my home of late. 

The BBC Global News podcast condenses the most interesting world news stories into a 30 minute segment. My favorite is the first person, man on the street interviews that journalists conduct and include in their stories, allowing me to enjoy a local perspective from Iran or China while I brush my hair and slip on my shoes in Texas. 

This morning, a story from Haiti stopped me in my tracks.  This audio story was a segment from the BBC's World Have Your Say program. It was a follow up story to the earthquake in Haiti, featuring it's forgotten victims: women who were increasingly victims of rape in the overcrowded tents that housed too many after the natural disaster. A local woman told her story about how two generations of her family members had been raped.  She spoke Haitian -- a fiery burst of conviction as she condemned these crimes. As more women shared their stories, including one about a one-year-old baby who had been raped, the male interviewer paused. I could feel the constriction of his throat -- the painful well of tears that were kept tightly at bay: they were my own. 

Afterward, I shared the story with friends in effort to help build awareness about this crises. Audio stories such as these keep me connected to the world via sheer empathy. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00fd291

a dark room, a record player and a box full of vinyl

Three years ago, I began an informal "listening club" with my only two friends who appreciated an eclectic array of music. This was also right about the time when vinyl was making a resurgence, and my very kind aunt bequeathed unto me her 30-year-old turntable, a spare needle, and the remaining scraps of what used to be quite a formidable record collection (Abbey Road, Sgt. Pepper, etc). On top of this, I dug out my mom's old collection (some David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, etc) and began searching for some obscure records on eBay – modern, experimental/ambient albums, rather than the standard pop records of the 60s/70s.

Anyways, this listening club had a few rules:

Once a record starts, it doesn't stop.

Everyone gets a turn to pick an album.

Do not interrupt the album unless you are dying.

And so, we would gather about once a week in the darkness of each others' basements and worshipped sound together, filling the emptiness with reverberating waves of pure analog aesthetics – scratchy needles, dusty album, the occasional pop or hiss.

One album in particular that was a sheer revelation to all three of us was Bass Communion + Pig's "Live In Mexico" LP. We were all fans of Bass Communion, but had never heard this album before, so we sat in the dark together, anxiously waiting for the sounds to come through our speakers...and then it hit. As if a gaping portal to the underworld opened through the stereo speakers, 120 decibels of pure noise anger flooded the room! It was physically binding. I don't remember blinking, or breathing or thinking, but just basking in this sinister delight.

And it was better than any film, or any concert, or any novel or video game I had yet experienced.

At this point in my life, I already loved music and sound. I was learning about recording, playing various instruments, songwriting, etc. However, it opened my ears to a new way of hearing – a better way of hearing.

When I stripped away all of the distracting elements of usual life, and when I elevated the music to a level above convenience (rather than listening on an mp3 player through cheap earbuds on a busy bus or street or cafe or whatever), and I really, really listened to the sounds, I found there's a real power, a real value in these invisible sound waves.

When I took the time, and the effort, and the inconvenience to appreciate something that dozens of people spent dozens of weeks planning, practicing, producing and perfecting, I found a real respect for the medium. I found something greater than a catchy hook or a cool-sounding guitar tone. It was a step beyond, and I've been searching for it ever since.

(I apologize for the length and for the pseudo-haughtiness of this post; it is moderately tongue in cheek)

Radio Theater

During my day-time theater job at Steppenwolf in Chicago, I listened to This American Life and Third Coast Audio while I ran reports. Inspired by these shows I went to my night-time theater job (by which I mean the one I did for no pay) with the idea of creating a radio ghost story, despite the fact that I had no idea what exactly that meant or how to go about making it. Like with most things, we found our own way. We put the audience in headphones and had them listen to parts of the story while they toured a mansion on the north side. (That's an old picture of it at the top.) We even got a shout out on the Third Coast Audio blog. Since then I've been hooked on integrating sound in my work.

New old show

Rediscovering RTE Ireland's Documentary on One and The Curious Ear.  Good stuff.

By Friday, please post

A short paragraph on a memorable listening or recording experience.  This can be listening to or recording music, voice, performance, a radio show or station, whatever it may be.  Hook us into what you like, what you remember, and how those experiences shape your thoughts on sound.

Here's one from me.

In college I was a DJ for WNUR, which broadcast all across Chicagoland.  I did the blues show on Sunday nights, and played old time blues, primarily pre-electrification/amplification, so a lot of old folk blues, Alan Lomax recordings, Bessie Smith, etc.  But I occasionally would play some artists who did not fit that bill.  I especially liked Koko Taylor, because she had the kind of voice that the classic blues queens had.  One night I got a call from an elderly woman on the South Side.  We chatted a while and she said she had noticed that I hadn't played any Koko Taylor that night, and she asked me to play a certain song.  I realized that she knew I played Koko Taylor almost every week, and that I had not played any that night.  From this, I knew she was a loyal listener.  She paid attention.  I played her song that night, and tried not to forget from there on out.  When I did forget, my friend would call me and let me know about it.  The lesson:  people listen.  Sometimes you think you're creating for no one but yourself, that it doesn't really matter, but there is an audience out there, unknown to you.  Put it out there, and people will pay attention.