MUSIC MUSIC NOTE

A SHORT LETTER TO MUSIC. THANK YOU, MUSIC.

Of late I have been beating myself up due to an inability to calmly pause and collect my thoughts into a decent stream of consciousness.  I have been failing miserably.  Times have been uncertain and thus increasingly uncomfortable, I know that I am not alone in this discomfort. All of my thoughts have veered toward negative feelings and that's not me. I have lived an exceedingly adventurous and lucky life. I am not the negative person that my thoughts are leading me to feel like of late. I have searched deeply within myself to attempt to get to the source of that other thing. My divining light so to speak. Other than being gifted the fathomless honor to be my daughter's father, I owe the majority of the bliss that I have experienced in my life to my unwavering love of music–magic. 

Before I attempt to place words unto what a gift music has been for my life's trajectory, I am going to share this one negative thought I endured as it has stuck with me:

Things are not looking good for the future that almost none of us are capable of dreaming about anymore. 

That thought struck me, as I have previously always been able to dream.  I don't feel the need to interpersonally get into the minutiae as to what drew that thought out of my mind as I lay here in my current thrice weekly ritual of post physical therapy icing. Instead I hope to try to get out what it is and has always been about music–the relationships I have been gifted and able to foster around the globe–owed wholly to my life being devoted in one way or another  to the boundless alchemy of manifesting music into this world.  I do this in hopes to rekindle that burning dream within me that has always led me to seek out more. And more. And more. Wherever and however it may manifest.

Recently in the light of the aforementioned uncertainty of the current moment we are all trudging through, largely via our screens, in the western world, I have forced myself to remember what purpose music has always served in my life.  Aside from the obvious, a gift of human thought and emotion willed out of its creators minds through the various soundwave form manipulating devices,  music has always been a ship to sail upon to open new pathways to very real life interpersonal exchanges and experiences for better and worse. I think to some degree every thought I have scrawled out on this web bog has outlined this as such. I have tried to remember the source of this inextinguishable flame within myself. The first experience with sound that had me dreaming for more.  

I remember having an auditory screening assessment when I was very young. The clinical, quiet room, clunky early 80s sound canceling headphones placed on my head by someone in medical garb. I don't remember being explained to do anything other than to click when I heard a sound and in what ear it was occurring within. I remember this aspect of the experience wholly and completely, as the results colored my future experiences forevermore.  The assessment determined that I had very bad hearing in my right ear, something like fifty percent deaf in my right hemisphere. I think this was kindergarten, I could be wrong but I was definitely very new to life and being told that I was half deaf in half of the set of tools that I was given to navigate this world. Initial challenge accepted. Looking back, I think that this unconsciously was the first moment wherein I hyper focused things that were being told to me about being "different", or "challenged", or some such thing. I took the information in, as a toddler, and accepted this reality.  Forevermore, I would listen with all of my abilities as acutely as I possibly could. Growing up in a musical home, I was always aware that this defecit was something that I would have to be acutely aware of.  I learned to hear in the way that I physically could and never put much thought into it again. Now, at 47, I only notice the discrepancy when I am in some stupid bar or some such other louder than usual place and I struggle to hear something that someone sitting to the right of me is saying.  Not a huge deal. 

This early experience was the moment wherein I began a love affair with sounds, all of em’. I have a set of home made Mixtapes from when I was five years old to, well, to the present I suppose.  I can't recall a day in my life where I didn't take a moment to meditate with some form of sound as my place of peace. Maybe it was to compensate for being told that I didn't hear it like others, I, however, don't think it was that deep. I think I just feel deeply in love with this magical thing that I was told I hear half as well as the general population. 

Growing up in a musical environment, my dad loved David Bowie and Jimi Hendrix, my mom played the family piano that I remember rolling down the street from my babysitters home up and down the curb swells that I used to skateboard on as a very young person, daily. She played the same songs for hours.  I remember all of the books of music that she used, Beethoven, The Superman Theme, other various show tunes. I remember them containing a written language that I would someday learn. I did, at first via playing the flute, I was probably five or six. My gateway to the language of written musical notation.  I hated it, immediately. I was impatient and the flute was, to my constantly blasting the local rock radio station on my boom box and Twisted Sister cassettes mind, kinda lame. I switched to clarinet, still not taken. Finally at some point, I proved myself worthy of our lower middle class income to switch to guitar first, then due to injury and desire, drums. I was probably eleven or twelve by then. I remember learning the mixolydian mode being taught a Cat Stevens or Steely Dan song for guitar at this stage. I remember also hating it because I wasn't that in to either artist at this stage, I wanted to learn how to play Iron Maiden songs that were far too difficult for my newly brandished musical tool. I did not last in lessons long, but quickly started playing my own music with the rudimentary knowledge that I did learn in those early lessons.  This led to bedroom recordings, two boom box's with mic inputs plugged in to my Yorx stereo system. I spent the majority of my time alone with these tools. Quiet kid, obsessed with music already. During this same era I shared a paper route with my brother, ALL of my money went to buying new tapes. Most of which I still have. All the while, I, like most lower middle class semi-struggling families was told to not focus too much on music as a dream for my life. So I never did, it became a passion project that would always linger within me, but it could never be my source of income for sustaining my life.  Harsh realism bestowed upon me early on, have it and hold it, but “be realistic” and "don't quit your day job".  I have always carried this within me, tumultuous as it may have been even whilst my day job was funded wholly by music, which it was for many many years.  A gift that a 2/3 hearing ravenously obsessed from the time I was told that I couldn't hear was always to just be that, a gift, of no value. We are seeing that same sentiment play out to the tune of music being devalued to its lowest point, at least in my devoted lifetime, as is imaginable. I suppose that this same inevitable equation has led me to my relationship with how monetary value is placed upon anything in a way.  Whoops. 

All of that stuff said, I have never once wavered in my quest to discover something new. More sound. Yes please. 

I want there to be some grand sweeping positive thesis within this letter, I have one for myself.  It is simple. Even if it is my daughter whispering something into my ear upon my death bed, it is always going to contain music. I owe every experience I've had on this planet from the time I was cognizant of musical sound existing to my desire to seek out and fill myself with more of this magic.  I hid all of my studious choices within a cloak of sound, I studied digital filmmaking because I was obsessed with Carl Dreyer's first film that included sound, Ordet. Hell, that obsession led me to move to Denmark–to drink the water–and study “film” even beyond my undergraduate studies. Dumb luck life.

I feel now with some life and experience behind me that this gift of obsession was not my choice, but what I had to do.  What I continue to have to do. I want to hear it all, compromised as it may be. I also want to share how I hear it with as many people as I can quietly lay down my own bradcrumb trail of sounds will happen to hear it also and be cast in the same light I have been lucky enough to have been gifted. 

Someone recently asked me to share with them my favorite genre of music, I thought about it for a good long while, all I could come up with was, "I am terrible at understanding genres.  I think I just love music that feels like magic." For whatever that is worth. 

Thank you for reading. As always. 

This one felt real self indulgent, however it felt nice to spend some time with how I ended up here in the first place.  Hopefully, I can get the words about my travels in Russia and otherwise out in a more positive light in the near. Hopefully also in the near, myself and my colleagues in this realm don’t feel like death because of the state of things, music related and otherwise.

*My "record label" / not-for-profit art project, smothered under the cozy blanket of music, Ormolycka turns 20 years old in 2025. I have been excorcising some of these thoughts in order to properly celebrate that milestone for myself, and miraculously anyone else along for the twenty year ride.  I have a lot of things being produced as I type this in order to hopefully do so.  Thanks for that too.

**Don't forget to VOTE for the non-apocalytically disgraceful yet still somehow horribly shitty not democratically determined candidate (if you are in one of those swing states that matters) and if you aren't vote for a third party and make your “democratic” voice heard! Lol