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?