my weblog

Googlezon... (an oldie but a goodie)

admin (mailto:osonic@osonics.com) — 2010-09-01T13:00:53

Some sort of update will come soon. In the meantime... this is an oldie but a goodie. I first saw this in 2002 or 2003. Its obviously off about a few things... but its still good for provoking thought.

Do no evil... with exceptions for new forms of evil...

2010-08-09T20:51:20

Keeping track of the Google / Verizon net neutrality kerfuffle the following quote is taken from this New York Times article.

"The proposal says Internet providers should treat all providers of Internet content the same, and should not be able to block them or offer them a paid “fast lane.” It says the Federal Communications Commission should have the authority to stop or fine those who break the rules.

But the proposal includes exceptions for wireless Internet access and for potential new services that broadband providers could offer, including things like “advanced educational services, or new entertainment and gaming options.”

Applying the logic expressed in the quote above to Google’s long standing “Do no evil” philosophy would seem to yield the following outcome: Do no evil... with exceptions for new forms of evil that broadband providers could offer...

Castles made of Sand ... fall in the sea... Eventually

admin (mailto:osonic@osonics.com) — 2010-08-06T17:43:19

This is terrible. Not sure if it makes to rant or ramble... but given the subtext of this site this news comes like a gigantic wave crashing down on my beautiful little sandcastle.

Summer news

admin (mailto:osonic@osonics.com) — 2010-08-02T16:47:52

Greetings! The site traffic has been picking up lately... which is fine by me... though kind of surprising. Lots of folks in the Netherlands... awesome! Anyway... Just wanted to post a note that the site is not dead... and music proceeds apace. I will try to get some sort of update posted by the end of August. Musically I have a few irons in the fire, though obviously, I’m also a working stiff, and so the music all gets handled in discrete pockets of time. Playing with a few people... and there are even mumbles of writing as a group rather than just indiscriminately jamming. Then there is also the music I’ve been making on my own. These things make it difficult to know where I am on the creative map, or how long the gestation period will be until the next posting of music. If people start arguing, or if the rehearsal space I have keys for disappears, then I might post some pretty epic improv based things any day... Alternatively if everyone hangs together... then this may all have been just the formative stage of something grander, and sections and segments from jams will get cobbled together into material resulting in a completely different sort of project getting posted many moons from now. Either way the creative process continues unabated, and struggling heroically in the face of rat race hamster wheel employment drudgery. Not that I should complain. Having a job is an increasingly rare thing these days... precarious unto itself. Survival of the fittest... making this music very fit I suppose. Difficult times call for creative commentary... so there is plenty of motivation to continue... so keep checking back. Again I’ll try to provide more details on where things are at the end of summer. Cheers!

Interesting

2010-05-11T13:38:23

Oh Canada!

Q1 2010 update

admin (mailto:osonic@osonics.com) — 2010-04-19T13:44:20

A Q1 2010 update is Up. It can be found here. This time around it features commentary on why there has been no commentary for a while. An old semi musical sspeaking in toungues rant / tirade from 2006, the heart of the Bush years, called “House Searching” is included as the “musical” offering. Also in the news an extensive essay about the spirit form “album” has been posted to the notes section. It can be found here. Lastly there are a couple of new links on the links page. Enjoy

Update on Updates

admin (mailto:osonic@osonics.com) — 2010-04-06T14:10:29

This is an unwelcome development. Its worth keeping track of.

Updates

2010-03-19T12:16:52

It occurs to me there has been no explicit site hawking ... ahem... “fan communication” for a while. The “quarterly reports” seem to have dropped off the face of the earth when last year’s financial crisis hit. Of course since then I’ve posted not one, not two, but three new bits of music... two albums ( spirit form and Rock n' Roll) plus an EP (Kelly Clarkson) ... so the site hasn’t exactly been dead.

Nor will it be... another musician has re-appeared from my personal past... a fantastic kick ass drummer named Jeremy Bartlett ... and we’ve been playing and recording on weekends with Ben Moran. This has been amazing. Jeremy, Ben and I played together in a band at the tail end of the '90s and reuniting after all this time has produced some amazing results... so more music is to come... I’ll try to get some sort of semi quarterly reportish type thingie up ~~by the end of March~~ (before Taxes are due?) or so to let all those who are interested know what’s going on.

Until then please keep on checking back in. There are lots of musical ‘spinning plates’ twirling in the background at all times. I could decide something is “finished” and post it soon... or not... but that’s the reason to check back in every now and again.

Peace... and thanks for your ongoing interest.

A lava lamp in Grand Central Station

admin (mailto:osonic@osonics.com) — 2010-01-29T20:54:47

A lava lamp in Grand Central Station

Part of the inspiration for A lava lamp in grand central station came from a CD called Dream by U Srinivas and Michael Brook. This is a great album on the Real World label that I can’t recommend highly enough.

The compositions on that album are all extended, and listening to it for the first time, I was reminded of listening to tracks like “Echoes” by Pink Floyd, or Pangaea by Miles Davis.

It wasn’t so much that I decided to try and emulate these albums when I made Lava lamp. Instead listening to Dream with it’s free form collision of Indian mandolin, and Infinite guitar influenced me to reconsider some extended experiments and free form improvisations I had already recorded which might not have seen the light of day otherwise.

The title track on Lava lamp represents a block of time spent experimenting with an analog synth or two with no real goal apart from putting them through their paces. The foundation for this track was recorded when I got a new Synth on ebay and simply decided to take a night to doodle with it and some effects. That doodle was originally about 40 minutes. It remained stuck on my hard drives until one night further down the road when I started noodling with an old Dat tape I had recorded years previously containing sounds recorded in various locations around Grand Central Station.

Experimenting, I ran the tape through various ad hoc effects chains (pedals, processors and software) until they became little more than triggers for the effects, matching and merging with the synthesizers in eerie unpredictable ways .

Not long after I had a hankering to play electric guitar, so I turned to this strange collage of found sounds and synth when I needed something to play over.

A few months later I was in the mood to play first some drums, and then later some bass, and so on, and so on.

In this way I inadvertently backed into composing something like Conversations with Myself by Bill Evans. It didn’t really occur to me to “finish” it, or polish it off, by editing and “composing” it down to about 13 minutes, until I heard the Dream album. Hearing that disc opened me up to the idea of broad open soundscapes with no immediately clear structure, but an internal logic of their own.

It changed my approach to the sonic doodle which evolved in to the “Lava lamp” track. It made me realize that it would be silly not to finish this block of music which had evloved in the least self-conscious way possible with no expectation that it would ever be taken seriously by anyone, including myself.

“Morning Commute” happened in a similar way to “lava lamp”. The track evolved slowly over time, never really distinguishing itself in my mind until an evening spent playing snare parts which just fell into place and animated the piece way beyond anything I could have sequenced.

“State of Mind” is the resident ringer on the album. This is a song that I completed a few years ago, but then jazzed up with a slightly fuller mix.

Well, there you have it, some notes about A lava lamp in grand central station.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read them

Rock n' Roll

admin (mailto:osonic@osonics.com) — 2010-01-29T18:26:26

Rock n' Roll

"Cinema verite? I got into audio verite..... Hey, I’ve made records where you analyze everything you do 3,000 times and it’s perfect. I’m sick of it. I want to make a record that’s totally stark naked. Raw. I don’t wanna fix any of it. I don’t care if it’s totally out of tune, man, let’s play. Fuck it.... I like the idea of capturing something. Record something that happened. I’m a musician. I don’t wanna sit there and build a record. I built a couple of records. "
-Neil Young

About a year ago I was walking down around Ludlow Street Guitars in New York city looking at Phaser pedals when I overheard some 20 something with a highly vertical haircut talking on his cell phone : “So he tells me he’s getting married and that he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to spend so much time on the road… So I told him… Listen Man If you can’t spend time on the road then you can’t be in the band.”

This really struck me. Oh John wants to get married to Yoko?… screw it… then he can’t be in the band!

“You jackass!!!” I wanted to tell this nimrod with Vertical hair. “Bands aren’t lego sets. You can’t just mix and match people and pretend it’s the same Band!” How is it everyone has gotten so caught up in the delusionary fantasy of becoming stars on some inhuman mass marketing scale that no one understands the timeless rewards and tribal level human intimacy that comes from... you know... an actual band…

No one seems to understand the importance of *THE BAND* anymore. I’m not speaking specifically of Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson here… I’m thinking more of a band of brothers, a group of people who have lived, grown and suffered with each other. A group not only with their own individual memories, but collective memories to draw from and share.

In the quote above Neil Young notes wanting to record “something that happened”. What happens when a great band gets together to play is a lowering of defenses… a dropping of barriers… a collective opening of imaginations and blossoming of ideas which conventional egos and the constant competitions of our daily lives normally make impossible. Its something that can only really and truly occur among people with history, trust and friendship.

Neil Young & Crazy Horse

In fact the principle purpose of improvisational musical art forms such as jazz and rock may have less to do with their stylistic elements than with the perpetuation of social congregations where *spontaneity* is possible. Our litigious society is constantly working to mitigate risk... but in the process it also mitigates the capacity of people to engage spontaneously. This is why Mr. Young has elsewhere exhorted us to “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World” and noted of Rock and Roll “There’s more to the picture than meets the eye.” The essence of rock and jazz is not what meets the eye.. or ear… the music per se… but a form of free spontaneous human interaction. Freedom is where the Rock is. If you ain’t rockin’ you ain’t free. Short of an orgy… Rock and jazz are the most socially acceptable ways for people to get together and *let something happen*...

Rock n’ Roll is a collection of things that happened. It’s a collection of magical moments that ‘arrived’ in the middle of jam sessions taking place over the course of 2008 and 2009 at a rehearsal space in Greenpoint Brooklyn. Most of these jams center around Ben Moran on Drums, Peter Kwon on bass and Osonics on guitar and vox. On a few occasions Ben and Osonics also brought in musicians they have both known for over a decade since college. Liam Wood appears on Guitar and Bass on some tracks, and Paul Griffith sits in on kit occasionally to let Ben create on other instruments.

These are not just “songs” but events where we managed to “record something that happened.” What happened were moments of rarity and beauty which only could have taken place by gathering together people who have been friends and musicians for years. While dropping our guards and abandoning all self consciousness, we created music together we never would have come up with if we’d been thinking or trying. Fortunately this all took place while we had some mics up and a hard drive spinning.

Here are some brief notes about each track:

Before our love hurts anyone

I remember this jam clearly. Ebay was ticking down the minutes in an auction for a tape delay unit I wanted to purchase. Was there enough time for one more jam before I headed out to a local bar with wifi access to place my final bid? This was the subtext for the opening throw away lines “What do you say? / Should we continue to play? / Or answer the gratification today?”

Then out of that… out of nowhere… came the most succinct, direct, and to my mind heart breaking encapsulation of a seven year on again off again relationship I had been in with a single mother helping to raise her daughter. “I know its true / that you love me too / but this love must be done / before it hurts anyone” specifically someone “innocent / yet to become”. The child who was being torn apart by the selfish yo-yo dramatics of the relationship itself. Amazing. In just over seven minutes without really thinking about it everything was said that needed to be said about seven of the most harrowing years of my life. That’s art.

Side Take

This is the first of two tunes where the lyrics are almost directly about the process of playing music together. While the tune begins with some lines that summon to mind the lullaby feel of Ben Moran’s brilliant guitar part, pretty fast the offer is being made by the singer to surrender himself completely to the band, and the moment, if everyone will just let go and surrender as well. “No more me / no more mine” I will take your side.

Satellite

The spoken dialog at the start of this track sets the stage pretty clearly. Of all the tunes in this collection this makes the case for spontaneity and unguarded moments most clearly. “Something happened” here, in keeping with the spirit of the Neil Young quote above.

Between the Wars

This track speaks for itself. There are a few vocal overdubs on this take… but the lions share took place in its moment. Where the guitar parts sound layered its because of live use of a Boomerang looper pedal in the original jam.

Bewheare

This is the second tune where the lyrics are being sung directly by singer to band. “We’re going to finally find ourselves a way / find ourselves a way to play” with each other. The dislocated observations about where the singer may or may not be are a logical extension of the surrendering of self which takes place throughout Rock n’ Roll in songs like “Side take” and “Satellite”. There are some early overdubed harmonies for the word “I”, which help add to the David Byrne feel, and the Boomerang gets a work out during the outro to allow for layering a solo on top of a blistering riff.

Exit

A dithyrambic stream of consciousness narration about a night out at Club Exit, a dance club in Greenpoint Brooklyn, well known to the players on this tune for all night trance parties. “I want to break it into two / drop it down with you”. As in the song “Satellite” above, once again a special shout out to our co-author.