I don’t have any recollection of how I stumbled upon this. I was doing a series of non-event sonic wallpaper gigs as solo guitarist at local cafes and coffee shops around the Detroit-area and working crummy temp jobs during the day. There was no plan. There were no real goals except to not to have to get a full-time job not doing music. I was kind of in between colleges, but that infers I knew where I was going, but really had no idea where the next educational stop was to be. I had never heard of ambient music, and the closest I had gotten to exploring contemplative music was Pink Floyd and some of my own exploratory jams with my first band.

Around that time, I worked at a bank… I remember this only because it was very boring, and I had to be there all day. Because I only had about a half-hour of cumulative work throughout the day, they let me read on the job, so  I did a lot of reading. One of the books that I ended up reading was David Toop’s Ocean of Sound.

I was reminded of this book recently while doing some random perusing of my favorite Web sites and found a link to a PDF of David Toop’s Ocean of Sound… I didn’t think about it a lot, but I did quickly move to take a look at it, for old time’s sake. As I clicked on the PDF and started to look at a flood of memories came rushing in.

I remember the book as being odd, almost impressionistic. There were contemplative writings and impressions on John Cage, Terry Riley (this was where I discovered In C), and LaMonte Young, Brian Eno, and this was where I read about Satie’s Vexations and his ideas of Furniture Music.

I quickly realized that this book, that had consciously left me with the vaguest of impressions had actually left an indelible mark on all that followed my reading it. Ocean of Sound came to influence, rather subconsciously much of my work and my outlook on the sound, music and experiences that I strive for today.

I haven’t gone back and read it, except for a few brief passages, and parts of it are dated, as it preceded the 2000ish blow up of electronic music in the US, and was published near the peak of dance and rave culture in Europe, but, this book, that’s half treatise and half poetry on the experience of sound, is an overlooked classic.

I’ve dedicated a large swath of my life to thinking about music, sound and the experience of it. It’s curious to me now and worthy of investigation on my part, to  just how much of what I read in David Toop’s Ocean of Sound affected my worldview and my perspective on music. Anything and everything that I think about from the perspective of sound and music is touched on in this book.

Thinking of the experience of sound, I reflect on how sound, noise and acoustic ecology are not things that have caught on here in the United States… these things have caught on elsewhere, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, but not as much here; this is important, because central to what I’ve taken from Ocean of Sound, is that we’re living in an ocean of sound, and the more noise that is injected into our sonic lives the more we turn to our iPods or whatever to tune in to our own sonic environment and tune out the world’s. That’s just fine, but what’s lost is the ability to collectively tune-in to the soundworld around us, collectively, and focus on it, which is at the core of what David Toop writes about, being enveloped by sound and the experience of it.

Sound and music is not to just be heard, it’s to be experienced, whether in a performance hall, or standing under buzzing power lines or enjoying a busker doing a rendition of All Along the Watchtower on a city street; the idea of this came to me as I reflected after reading Ocean of Sound. I became more conscious of sound. I found a vocabulary and a context for things I had experienced and felt while listening to music, and also realized that I could make a music where this kind of music/sound experience wasn’t just serendipity, but was the focal point of the work.

All this is to say, reading Ocean of Sound changed me, and it changed the way I hear and listen. Discovering this book again reminds me of that, and it also reminds me that before I discovered this I was missing a large chunk of what was going on around me.

That’s the phrase that runs across my mind as I think about a performance that I just did with saxophonist and musician Michael Teager at the Wanderer’s Tea House in East Lansing.

As I’ve talked about in the last few months on here my focus has been doing more of a singer/songwriter thing in the form of Teag and PK, which is the duo that Michael Teager and myself have put together. However, after a particularly exhausting performance in February and a few in January, I decided that singing, and sort of, exposing myself emotionally in that way while people either looked on in disinterest, or in the case of cafe/restaurant gigs, just tried to talk over the music — was creating an emotional exhaustion in me that I could imagine only the most desperate of narcissist would want to pursue, I think of Jane Krakowski’s Jenna Maroney character on the popular TV show, 30Rock, and more than a few singer/songwriters I’ve known and watched with disdain. No thanks, not me…  I have to say I was also moved by attending a Charles Lloyd performance that was just like two straight hours of mind-blowing jazz and sonic immersion, where at one point I turned and looked around and everyone was fixated – LISTENING!

Now, let me stop there, all that I’ve ever wanted was for people to listen, as many of my friends and colleagues have heard me say, “I just want to get to ears, for people to listen”… in the age of the iPod this is no simple task, and our particular epoch has played a role, too, as we’ve all learned to block out sounds and noises and music to focus on other things.

So with this gig booked at the excellent and cozy Wanderer’s Tea House, I was unsure how to proceed. I turned inward, and for the six weeks between our last gig and this one, I dug into my roots, the contemplative ambient music and I worked up various tones and textures that I had not pursued before…. things that I could do in a “live” setting without a laptop and a lot of pre-recorded sounds.

As we showed up to the gig and got set up, Michael leaned over and asked me “what are we thinking for tonight?” Over the previous few days I had teased him with the idea that I might be feeling the need for an ambient direction. An expert improviser, musician and collaborator, Michael has more than learned that sometimes even I don’t know what the plan is… We had rehearsed and played upwards of thirty songs, but on this night, I just wasn’t feeling it. I looked at him, with concern, but also unable to meet his gaze because I was feeling insecure and I said, “I’m thinking improvisation and some ambient kind of stuff…” vague as shit; as he processed that I went back to busying myself with set up.

The Tea House was full, finals week at Michigan State University, right off the campus…laptops and notebooks abound. Having not done an ambient music performance in a setting like this, well, ever… I was concerned…  the owners of Wanderer’s Tea House are friends of mine… was I going to clear out their business on a peak business night with my ambient noises… concerned, I thought: probably, but I had to be true to myself…

I struck the first note…

As the sound opened up and rushed into the room, I just looked at the ground… not wanting to make eye contact with anyone. The sound of chatting and kettles brewing was replaced by wave after wave of calming, evocative and contemplative sound.

After thirty minutes of my own immersion, I looked up, to find smiles, congratulatory nods and overall looks of satisfaction. The few empty tables that there were had become occupied. Nobody had left, everybody was engaged and listening.

Surely, this is a fluke… I thought to myself, but as we moved into the first hour and then the second hour, the room filled more, people became engaged and were listening, or so it seemed.

They can’t really be listening, can they?

As we rounded off the second hour and the last notes subsided into the quiet of the evening and the closing of the Tea House, I was confounded.

People had stuck around, seemingly enjoyed themselves, and we played, what I would consider a far less accessible and mainstream music performance than the songs I’d been singing for the last 10 months…

Before I could unplug my first cable, my suspicions about the performance were confirmed. First one person, then another and then another, came up to Michael and myself and praised us and the music. As I type these lines, I’m as confounded by this pleasant response as I was in the minutes following the gig. I still don’t know quite what to think… and I’m hoping for an, as of yet not forthcoming bit of insight, through the process of writing it out…

Before we wrapped up that night and before anybody stopped by to complement our work, I felt proud and musically satisfied, more so than I have in the last 20 gigs that had preceded this one. It felt right. I was true to myself. So having folks come up and tell us they enjoyed it and they thought it was great and for us to continue to get praise for the performance was just something that I had to tell people about.

When I booked my first ambient gig in 1999, it was called experimental, noise, ambient, space music, space rock, art music, electronic, electro-acoustic, gothic, even… I didn’t give a shit what they called it as long as I could get a gig bringing this music to receptive ears. Years later that’s still all I want and it’s a rarer and rarer occasion, but I kind of feel like if we can do this here in East Lansing, Michigan on the Michigan State University campus, a nice place to live, but far from the cultural epicenters I’ve traveled to to get to open ears and open minds for this music, then maybe, just maybe… the time for this music has come, a music that (as Jack the non Music Journalist aptly refers to it) emphasises the creation and maintenance of a powerful surrounding mood above all other artistic goals… I don’t know… stay tuned….

I’m always interested in creativity and inspiration, so when the article “Want to be more Creative? Get Bored” popped up in my daily Fast Company email and I saved it to take a look. I have to admit, though, I did this with a bit of skepticism about the idea boredom doing anything for creativity. I thought: “well, maybe, this is just some kind of provocative title of contrasts meant to engage”… It was not, not really, anyway…

Here’s quote from Martin Lindstrom’s Fast Company article:

I know it sounds strange, but I welcome boredom. It forces me to ponder. But to make sure we’re on the same page, when I speak of boredom, I’m not referring to killing time on your smartphone, your iPad or your laptop. I’m not even talking about paging through a book. I mean bored as in doing absolutely nothing.

Because here’s the rub–when we’re at our most bored we’re forced to push our creative boundaries, and unearth the root of whatever problem we’re working on. A quick glance around and you’ll notice that it’s almost impossible to be bored in our 21st-century environment. Every bar now has at least one television blaring. And just as night follows day, your eyes will be drawn to the moving pictures above, sapping whatever creative thoughts you could be having. Or take, for example, the last time you were alone at a restaurant waiting for a friend to join you. Chances are you reached for your phone and did something with it, anything to avoid appearing the lonely loser in the corner.

For me, this snippet is the nugget, the meat of his point. And Mr. Lindstrom sure has much more of a creativity consultant kind of pedigree than I do, but I do the work. I think that’s the difference and it’s one of the differences I’ve observed between the people who do the creative work and write about it vs. those people whose work seems to be writing about creativity. I don’t fault anyone for that, but I do feel that it brings in a different perspective.

When I’m bored nothing happens. If I’m doing personal work when I’m bored it’s usually uninspired and shows. When I’m on the clock, bored and need to bring out a creative idea I have to get unbored quickly because the lack of interest, inspiration and enthusiasm comes out in the work.

That’s not to say, of course, that Mr. Lindstrom’s idea of being bored, ‘doing absolutely nothing’ isn’t a good one, but I think that the provocative title of the article is meant more to get clicks than it is to be the thesis for this article, because our society does struggle with having too much going on, too many distractions and that space that Mr. Lindstrom refers to, is the space, where creativity, inspiration and imagination blooms, but I don’t think of that as boredom, as much as I think of that as still contemplation or presence. Maybe that’s the point that he’s trying to make, I don’t know. Either way, I’m glad that the article was put out there, because it gave me a chance to really think about where boredom falls in my creative process, otherwise, it’s probably not something that I would have given much thought to.

Let the light shine
and don’t hold it back,
don’t hide it in shadows,
don’t keeps its rays
and glow from reaching in.

What is it that separates the artist, whether it’s a painter, a plumber or a sandwich maker from the non-artist in any field? The answer is that the artist is an emotional laborer. It’s up to the emotional laborer to do the work that comes from your heart and your gut, not your muscles and not even intellect alone.

As I’ve read and tried to learn more about the origin of the concept of emotional labor, I’ve been troubled by some of the things that I’ve read. This article here makes most of the arguments against emotional labor, but it seems that definition of emotional labor here is something where an organization “forces”  a certain kind of positive or negative facade depending on whatever the outcome is that an organization is looking for… And… I’ve found many articles that have said that this can lead to strain, stress and the detriment of an employee’s health… no kidding!? Really!!!?

When I talk about emotional labor, I’m not talking about some disingenuous bullshit facade where you parrot back positive statements or mirror some kind of phoniness…. man, that’s about as far in the other direction of what I’m talking about as things can get.

Emotional labor, for me, means feeling the fire in your gut, that visceral feeling to just do really good work, to bring your vision forth, to make something, do something, be something that the world has not witness in *your* way before.

After doing some of this reading, I felt that I really needed to clarify how I define emotional labor and most of you probably got my perspective, anyway.

The artist can use mystique to great effect, because mystique creates something that familiarity destroys. Mystique allows for a romanticism to fill in the spaces that would otherwise be filled in with basic life facts that leave nothing to the imagination except details.

There are many historical examples, but one that comes to mind was the psychedelic movement of the 1960s in London that gave birth to Pink Floyd. The band and their friends were trying to recreate what they felt was going on across the world in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene, but really they created something wholly unique, ultimately more timeless than just mimicking a scene. In a time before the Web and instant communication, the folks in London had to rely on second-hand accounts, news stories and of course the music. From that they used their imagination to fill in the blanks for what this must be like… Had there been no mystique, they would have created something altogether different, something that was derivative.

Mystique gives a warm and fuzzy feeling, especially with art, because there’s an unknown quality that isn’t frightening, but rather promising, hopeful, and exciting. I think this is because when we have a positive feeling towards something, or we’re moved in a positive emotional way, we naturally feel like there’s something inherently good or right or beautiful about that which created this feeling.

Another interesting story that comes to mind is the work of Jackson Pollack. In his time folks like to believe that somehow he was in total possession of the muse when he did his splatter paintings, but in reality, and in his own words “…there are no accidents”. Further evidence of this comes through in this interesting Smithsonian article with interactive features that shows that not only were the painting not accidental, but he actually spells his name out in the one featured at the Smithsonian site. In his time, this might have been dismissed as novel, even pablum, but the mystique of his, almost otherwordly, creative state of mind lend itself to creating a mythos of sorts about the artist and how they work.

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction and in some times in lieu of truth we make up our own fiction that far more interesting even after we learn the truth. I think that this mystique, often, lends itself to an enhanced experience. In many ways, such as my post: Talking about myself, where I discuss self promotion, mystique can go a long way towards creating a veil of mystery that keeps us focused more on the power of inspiration and less on the mundane… after all there’s no mystique there.

Shades of light
fold back and inside the
trails and
patterns of
our convictions
and  approaches
only to reach out and
be revealed by
a momentary
light of presence.
Our peace resides
in the heaviness
that’s the everyday.

So for us, as artists, it’s a day-to-day, minute-to-minute battle to keep things going. Entropy is the difference between a one-hit-wonder and Frank Sinatra… The one-hit wonder had a flash, a lucky moment in time, whereas Frank Sinatra had those moments, ten-fold, and also continued to work, plant seeds in the form of relationship, recordings and generally creating a place for himself in the history books. This sustained energy is the difference.

I don’t deal well with entropy. I fight it. I’m constantly working, in spite of my knowing better, to deter it, slow it, fight it, and sometimes giving into it right before I start the whole process again, but really where do we belong where entropy is concerned?

The thing with entropy and life, too, is that when you’re doing a given thing whether it’s making art or making a hamburger, that’s where your energy is directed… entropy decreases naturally, but when the creative urge is over or you’ve consumed the hamburger, entropy increases and the longer I live, the more sure I am that chasing after entropy and trying to slow it or stop it will never happen… Nothing and nobody beats entropy. We can however find peace and beauty in the dissipation and degradation of things and spend our time appreciating the beauty of what is, what was and aware of its, our, decline; welcoming it rather than fighting it.

Western civilization’s idea of art is all about product and output, and who am I to argue with centuries of tradition, but eastern civilization seemed to understand early on that art is about the process. Maybe they understood entropy and rather than developing scores of art restoration practices they let things just fade… In my mind, both have their benefits, but for the artist they’ll never lose the experience creating the art, where the creation and its creator will slowly fade into oblivion.

I think it probably has something to do with the fact that you can spend lifetimes acquiring knowledge, but you can touch the awakened mind right here in this moment. To awaken is to be fully present with life, not fully present with books or knowledge. Awakening lets go of presumptions, preconceived notions, and questions meant to be only an intellectual exercise.

The concern isn’t what the nature of the matter in the water that’s in the stream is, but rather that the water in the stream is and it’s continually flowing — be present with that fact. When I’ve spent time dwelling on these details, I’ve found that I get further away from peace. I become more anxious.

It’s one thing to be curious and explore, but it’s quite another to explore so far that you lose the context of the exploration to begin with.

I say all this within the context of making improvements, whether it’s pursuing a better life, a better state of mind or better ideas — start small. It’s not that you can’t have a grand vision, but there’s so much in the details that when you’re only looking out on the horizon, you miss everything that’s going on in the moment, a place where untold riches are waiting to be revealed.