Old Habits Die Hard.

Yes, I realize it's been a couple of months. I also look at what I wrote and realize that web site redesign is still not even begun.

But one of the old habits I'm pushing away is the one of useless worrying. Instead of berating myself for not doing it yet, I'm doing it now. Accepting that things in the last couple of months have been in a state of emotional chaos for me, that is finally leveling out.

I never cease to be amazed at how I seek out the music to suit my moods, and sometimes how huge experiences in my life coincide with new releases from some of my favorite artists. This latter tendency results in albums like Depeche Mode's "Ultra" being able to immediately send me back to the place I was when I first heard them and those things happened.

Depeche Mode just released "Sounds of the Universe" and I'm somewhat torn. Dave's lyrical skills (and rhyming tendencies) can be really weak sometimes, but I still feel the emotion in what he's expressing. They've always been about the dance between two people in all its facets (yes, even the happy ones) and I'm always a sucker for that. I love the way they've gone back to the analog synths and some of the sounds (like the tinkly ones that sound like toy pianos, for example) just make me warm all over.

Sometimes sounds have the capacity to evoke certain emotions for me - maybe you've felt it, too. I remember hearing someone on NPR talking about how they had mapped a vast array of chords (majors, minors and all the variations of diminished and augmented and so on) to specific emotions like "melancholy with a fear of death" or something like that. Maybe I'm totally getting the context bolloxed up - it might have been about how the church or someone dictated that certain chords were forbidden because they evoked those emotions, it's been a while. But what stuck with me was this idea that you could actually label A Maj or C Min as pushing a button and getting a certain emotional tone. That really appealed to me and made a certain kind of sense. Maybe there are musical archetypes in the form of chord progressions that we will fall back on to make us feel longing or desolation. Or maybe it's like any psychology - a combination of nature and nurture that has our experiences and the parts in our brain that are hardwired resulting in a specific feeling for a song.

I saw the NIN/JA show in Mansfield this Wednesday (one of the few things I'll miss my duties at the Cantab for) and at one point Trent Reznor made a speech that touched on his past struggles with depression, suicide and how he's now come through that and is indeed getting married for the first time (congratulations!) in the same place where he wrote only one song for an entire year and daily contemplated and resisted suicide. That song, which he then played, was "La Mer" from "The Fragile" which always was and still remains my personal favorite NIN album. That specific song is one I've always been drawn to, and it's been in two different mixes that are emotionally resonant for me - the "Eris, Aphrodite and Athena" mix and the current one I'm working on that's had a working title of "Subspace."

"Eris, Aphrodite and Athena" was one I called a breakup, wallow and get over it mix. I created it at a time when I had to acknowledge that my marriage had fallen apart and I didn't know how to extricate myself from the wreckage. I never really acknowledged that until now, and as with a lot of things, I didn't consciously identify the real sources for my inspiration at the time. "La Mer" was toward the beginning, and it signified a sense of loss and grief, but with a sense of peace in a way that urges one toward healing energy - whether it's anger or introspection or just a burst of activity to get out of a deep trough. It was a natural fit for me, and realizing what it represented for the artist who created it, that makes me wonder how much we can draw from music by itself, even without words.

With "Subspace," "La Mer" brings me to a sense of longing and the nature of the way sadness can pull at us in quiet moments and bring a complexity to a feeling of attraction and desire. This music is the same, but in the context of an overall musical journey, it takes on the color of where it's placed and where the narrative arc is going. Of course, you could just make it simple and say that it all sounds really sexy when you put it together, and that's fine, too. But when you're looking at it more deeply, you get a satisfying richness of emotional resonance that can be so rewarding.

I've actually got more to say on all of this and other aspects of the interconnectedness of music and emotion, but I've got to get other things done. My goal this weekend is to try and hammer out a proper mix of "Subspace" from its iterations on the playlist, and post it on the site. I don't try to think I'll have a website redesign this weekend, but I'm moving toward it, and in the meantime, things will change on the site as I move forward. I'm thinking about what direction I want to take to start playing out again in a more directly artistic sense with proper sets. My exploration of BDSM and how it fits into my life is a part of this thinking, and I really believe there's yet another venue for DJs that could stand to be reinterpreted with the unique sensibility of yours truly.

There's nothing I like better than hearing "I've never heard/seen someone do it like that, but I really like it." Who doesn't?

Finally!

I went back in the studio yesterday and began working in earnest toward new mixes.

The idea came from a friend who suggested something based on an emotional state. It's similar to what I imagine you'd feel when you're meditating, with a very sensual overtone.

The first step was throwing down song titles and artists to get started. Sort of like throwing a lump of clay on the wheel. I'd forgotten how good this feels. Then I had a step I didn't have before - I had to start pulling those songs onto my studio computer. I still don't have Traktor loaded on that machine, and have to do it - that's going to be how I set it up.

Another new step - loading the songs onto a playlist in iTunes. This is a good thing, because it allows me to pull the pieces around and get an idea of how transitions will work. I like this method - once you've got them all in the computer and on the playlist, it's easy to move things around. In the old days, I'd have to switch CDs (or records) around to get an idea. It really makes things easier.

As I was doing this (oh, how I love time in the studio, it's been too long), I kept thinking of other songs to add. How could I have forgotten Depeche Mode's "Songs of Faith and Devotion" for example. At this point, the playlist is up to almost 3 hours. That's another good thing about the playlist method - I can get an idea of how long I'm looking at. Then it gives me ideas about how I want to trim the list, how many mixes I make, and then it started morphing into an idea for an additional mix with a much more aggressive feel. Sort of like what I imagine they'd play at Manray or something like that (ah, Manray, RIP).

I'm thinking I'm going to scrub the website and start again. Need to begin researching CSS and easier methods for updating than FTP of individual pages. I know that method is out there, I just need to research.

What I've realized is I need to set up studio time and get in there for the full time and work. It will help immensely. As I worked yesterday, I felt the old excitement about creating, and vowed I'd keep doing that. It will give me a much healthier outlet for my concentration and I'll create new things in the process.

So looking forward to all of this.

Music from that certain time...

Music has the power to transport you back to a certain time in a way quite unlike anything else. Yes, they say smell is one of those senses inextricably linked to memory, and I agree. There's a certain Avon perfume that when I smell it on someone I think of my beloved second-grade teacher. I have no clue what it is, but I know she wore it and I remember it.

Music, though - so much about the memory thing. In the encoding, I've taken a brief detour to encode some Smiths CDs. The Erotic Poetry night, an annual event at the Cantab, is taking place tomorrow. Some of the things I wanted for this decidedly bitter, angsty night are on those Smiths CDs. When I was encoding the compilation Louder Than Bombs, I was reminded of the first time I heard "Asleep" on a cassette tape playing in a guy's van (no, I wasn't in the back at the time!) - I had no real clue who the Smiths were - it was the tail end of the 80s and I was just discovering the Cure, the Smiths and Depeche Mode.

Although I was only 45 minutes from Boston where I grew up, I might as well have been 4500 miles away. The radio stations that we got up in our small town in North Central Massachusetts were limited to the local (at that time) rock station WAAF and KISS 108, which did a lot of disco and R&B stuff in those days. I got a few cool New Wave songs like the Human League's "Don't You Want Me Baby" and there was, of course, "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugar Hill gang - these came from the DJ at the skating rink in Leominster where I went pretty much every weekend in my high school years, or at least as often as I could pester my mother into taking me there. This was probably a good indication of where I'd go in the future, but I was completely oblivious to things like the Cure, who were very much a staple of college and alternative radio at the time. Of course there was WBCN (I'm pretty sure it was around back then) and probably the Emerson station, but their signal didn't reach out into the sticks where I was. This was way pre-internet, so we didn't have any of that to get music. Think you've got it tough? Ha! Imagine no MySpace, no bittorrent, no MTV (yes, this was early MTV days when they still played videos, and our cable provider didn't offer it - that was around the time of the "I want my MTV" campaign).

So I was woefully underexposed to cool music when I went into the Air Force right out of High School (so much for Berklee when my parents said "hey, if you want to go to this awesome place you got accepted to, you're going to have to pay for it yourself"). But I was lucky enough to have a friend in the dorms in Albuquerque who was from New York City. He turned me onto the Cure (Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me - oh my, I wore that tape out) and also Depeche Mode. For that, Jim will always have a special place in my heart. But I didn't get to hear "Louder Than Bombs" until that trip home from the club one night in the van of a guy who was working the door while his band played inside. That was also the time I first heard Nine Inch Nails and Ministry, and it was all...so much. I listen to NIN pretty much all the time, but the Smiths have settled in to a place in my collection and memory that still has the power to evoke powerful memories of a specific time when I hear them now. It seems so long ago, but I can remember the whirl and thump as those angsty feelings of love and isolation that I felt the first time I heard "Unloveable" or "Asleep." I remember how much simpler and yet so much more complicated things felt back then. Now I stretch back and remember that guy who drove the van - how we ended up friends, where he lived (a strange apartment above a garage), his friends in the band who introduced me to Jane's Addiction's "Nothing's Shocking." Wow.

It's almost Valentine's Day, and I'm still all kinds of single, but not so bitter these days, I think. I'll always have music, which is one of my truest and most faithful loves. It makes me feel so many different things, and brings back so many memories I thought were lost forever - finding them in the chorus, the bridge, the sound of the howling wind at the end of the track. So I'm going to raise a glass to my first and best love - music. It's best when it's shared with others, like that guy in the van, like Jim, like me bringing something to you when you're at the Cantab and then ask me what I'm playing (you really have no idea how happy that makes me every time it happens). I want to share this thing I love with as many people as possible, and even better - it doesn't make me a huge slut or anything. I think.

A Blast of Guitars

When I'm in the mood to really get an aggressive blast of music in my face, my go-to is most always Nine Inch Nails. I've got some Rage Against the Machine (pretty much everything they did back in the day, now that I think of it), and sometimes I'll listen to that. But it's always NIN when I'm feeling that need for in-my-face music.

It's interesting to me that this need for a loud sort of music comes when I'm feeling certain ways emotionally. For that reason, just any blast of metal won't do - I need a particular emotional tenor to the lyrics, and Trent always delivers what I need. A friend of mine says he can't listen to a lot of NIN at a stretch because his lyrics are so depressed in a way that doesn't allow for optimism. That probably encapsulates what I listen to that music for - a kind of anger tinged or even drenched in desperation. It's probably a direct manifestation of the depression I've dealt with for much of my life, and interestingly I find that now I'm looking for something more in this mood - a kind of desperation, yes, but with a heavy dose of hope. A sense that this too will pass when I work through it. It reminds me how much music is linked to my emotions, and how what I choose reflects that.

So I look for certain songs, and something like In This Twilight which is actually a song in the voice of someone living in the aftermath of a nuclear devastation of the earth before they die actually gives me a feeling of optimism. It's probably the way the lyrics are tender in a way - not your standard Trent emotion, you know? Sort of like the guy you dated who isn't really an emotional sort saying "let me get that for you, honey" - not incredibly romantic, but given his usual buttoned up nature, it's like Shakespeare's sonnets.

No, Trent doesn't bring me flowers ever, either. Damned boyfriend.

Happy New Year...the encoding continues.

I'm up to the G portion of my library. Dave Gahan, Peter Gabriel and Gabin (the pile is upside down, so that's why it's backwards). I realized I don't have a copy of So (unlike every other person on the face of the planet who listened to music in the late 80's/early 90's) but I have the soundtrack music for Passion of the Christ and Birdy.

Apple TV works pretty well when I sync it up to my studio server, but playing things that way means they're not scrobbled by LastFm. An alternate method is using Air Tunes to stream the music from my server to the Apple TV, but it can be glitchy on a random basis and I can't control the computer from another room.

My collection has weird gaps where I know I've had things at one point, but they didn't survive to be a part of the collection of CDs I have now. That's part of the fun of this - finding what I have that I forgot about (both of the Gabin albums have tracks that I'll add to my performance laptop collection) and other things I need to add to the library.

So much music. So little time.