There are some differences between the blog in its original form and the frozen form in which it appears below.

Most importantly the posts now offer the finished versions of the pieces as they appear on our CD, since we feel it would make no sense to offer you anything less than our very best.

Also the posts now appear in chronological order, rather than as before when the most recent ones were on top.  Done this way they shed more light on where we were at as we struggled to bring this CD into existence, while the posts we wrote to accompany our songs still help make what we were trying to sing even clearer.

To read the full text of any post, just click on the blue “Read more”  link at the bottom of the portion displayed on this page.

*

*
After releasing our second CD, in 2005 we went broke and had no choice but to back off from our music.

Instead, for nearly 4 years we concentrated on digging ourselves out with a long detour through the world of Japanese>English commercial translation, while dust gathered on our instruments and Microsoft Office not wave files danced through our computers.

Now for reasons beyond our control the stream of our translation jobs has dwindled to near nothing, and again we are facing financial ruin.  Fortunately thanks to our ample credit card limits, the flip side of this is that at least temporarily we once more have time for our music.  ( Doing Music Differently )

And this blog, where we plan to regularly post pieces of our Work-In-Progress music, is the first fruit of this renewed focus….

While  ”bbqq” is the first of these pieces…..
*

bbqq :  A bass bowus, dotara, boxus quartus, boardus quartus quartet

*

“bbqq” stands for bowus-bowus, quartus-quartus and refers to the 4 magical instruments with which we recorded the piece ( Our Instruments ).  It is the first music recorded with our new equipment and the first that we edited with our new software.
( Our Recording )

As befits a first try, it’s full of all sorts of minor warts and blemishes, but once we set aside our editing hats ( that is set aside the hypercritical mode of listening that concentrates on finding defects and which is absolutely essential for editing ), we were more than pleased to discover that our music had grown mightily during our four-year layoff.   ( Unspecialized )

Obviously the vein of positive quiet and active chill that we had mined with our second CD has not petered out.  Indeed the first new stuff we got down turned out to be so rich with magic, it makes us suspect that whoever or whatever it is that’s in charge of this strange show wants us to get back to our music, and that our translation career vanished because we are not supposed to waste our time doing something that will soon be done primarily by machines….

But to move beyond such metaphysical observations, Bbqq is the first time we recorded each of our individual instruments on a separate track, and we were blown away by the astonishing things that this allowed us to do.

For example we discovered that when several instruments were playing, often it was possible to simply delete a nasty noise from the problem track without this being audible to a listener.  And when one instrument got too loud, we found that after the fact we could decrease the gain on that portion of its track, and then like magic, suddenly there were all the other instruments with their sounds still intact.

Of course tricks like these must be common knowledge to anyone who has done any serious recording, but since we avoided studying “how to record” because we prefer finding our own way of doing things, these insights burst upon us as exciting new kenshos ( “Kensho” – a temporary incomplete satori….. which we strongly suspect is  the only type of enlightenment that actually exists. )

Bbqq was also our first try at overdubbing.  First we recorded 50 minutes of the two of us playing our bowus instuments
( 2-string dotara and 8 ft. long 1-string ektara.  Check out our Bowus Family page for pictures and information about these instruments ), then we edited the file down to 30 cleaned-up minutes, and finally we recorded our two quartertone kalimbas (Kalimba Family ) on top of the Bowus tracks.

In fact until recording Bbqq we didn’t really understand the meaning of overdubbing.  It was merely something that we knew we wanted to try, just another of those words that one somewhat mechanically throws into a sentence as a kind of mental placeholder.

So the first time we tried to overdub, we were quite disconcerted to discover how different it was from when the two of us are just playing together.

Still once we got used to the novelty, overdubbing turned out to be intoxicating.  Even though our music is improvised and unfolds without plan, since we were playing along with previously recorded tracks that we ourselves had layed down, it was uncanny easy to feel our way in……

While with 4 instruments going, the richly involved patterns often seemed like some peculiar type of counterpoint, not to mention that there was just so much sound !!!

Of course a purist listening to the most complicated sections of Bbqq might insist that there the music gets a little bit busy, and to be truthful we feel that way too.  Still we think that on this one it’s correct to cut ourselves a little bit of slack, on the grounds that it was quite human to get carried away when we first tasted the astonishing power of multi-track recording.

Similarly, on the technical side, though it may have been a bit materialistic to have leapt directly to 4 instruments ( each of which we double miked, so in the end we were working with 8 tracks ), we feel it was cool and brave to immediately test the full capabilities of our new equipment.  Also we figured that if we started with a seriously difficult project, we’d make lots of mistakes in a hurry, and so jump start the learning process.

And certainly we did make our share of mistakes.  For example with hindsight we can see that we positioned our condenser microphones too far away from our instruments, and were forced to compensate for this by upping some of our mike preamps to the point where they made our instruments sound unnecessarily harsh and introduced bothersome hiss into two tracks.

Still we’re ecstatic that we’re finally at a point where we’re facing problems like these, and feel that just having such problems means we’re in an excellent situation.

Not to mention that it would have been both anticlimactic and downright stifling, if we’d gotten everything just right on our first try.

*

Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog
Home ***Buy Our Music
*

]]> http://untravelledpath.com/2009/10/heading-back-up-the-mountain/feed/ 0 http://untravelledpath.com/2009/10/dynasties-fall/ http://untravelledpath.com/2009/10/dynasties-fall/#comments Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:29:59 +0000 untravelledpath http://untravelledpath.com/blogsite/?p=461 2009-10-18

*

Dynasties Fall is our first try at recording words on top of our own instruments. Way back in 2001 when we put out Huhnandhuhn, our first CD, we did include two songs recorded with our guitars and Indian drums, but singing with a conventionally tuned instrument is altogether different from what we tried here…..
*

Dynasties Fall :  Sung on top of a bass bowus, dotara, boxus quartus, boardus quartus quartet
*

Dynasties Fall

dead leaves rustle across the gravel,
with it, the wind carries a hint of winter.

merit is exhausted, dynasties fall.

growing older contradictions surface,
problems long unfixed swell and bloom.
frost burned leaves flutter from the trees,
freezing water rips potholes in the road.

merit is exhausted, dynasties fall.

one more time those who never work
come home from vacation,
turn around,  go out to grab a bite to eat
that’s cooked by someone else.

merit is exhausted, dynasties fall.

stunted by too easy lives,
those at the top are shallow, weak, and fearful,
sucked dry by their ungrateful children,
who impatient wait for them to clear the way,
while ready to strip their still warm corpses,
their wives dance with bloody hands.

merit is exhausted, dynasties fall.

but while the top’s been busy rotting,
the bottom’s been big ground down,
and everywhere a terrible sameness.

can one doubt that soon a cold stone wind
will roar through the bare branches,
and clean quiet snow
will cover all with white.

merit is exhausted, dynasties fall.
merit is exhausted, dynasties fall……

*

For several weeks we sweated over the words to this song, but before recording it, I never practiced singing it on top of our music, not even once.  So the version we have posted is our very first take, and before I had the mike in my hand I actually had no idea of what I was going to do, of how I was going to fit the words to the music.  I did sing it a second time, and that take too turned out lovely and was more than good enough to post, but we liked the wildness of my first try, so that’s the one we went with.

Thanks to clean power of our M-Audio preamps, we were able to use one of our Shure dynamic microphones for my voice, but since we prefer the sound of our voices when we’re singing softly, I still had to stay very close to the mike. Fortunately I banged into it only a few times, and with micro-deletes we were able to eliminate these noises plus my few explosive “p’s” and “t’s”. ( Our Recording )

The underlying music is a different section of the recording session from which we crafted bbqq.  We did it this way, rather than recording our first song on top of some completely different music, because we are overloaded with far too many projects that must come to completion simultaneously.  At the same time we are learning to use our new recording equipment and software, getting back into musical shape after a summer wasted knocking on the doors of a million unresponsive translation agencies, and using complicated software to put together our new website and blog….

Struggling to keep these different balls in the air has already pushed our poor little brains well past the red line, and often by the time we finish our day we can smell the sizzling neurons.  So when we realized we could reduce our work load by using underlying music from the same session for our first song, we jumped at it.

To get in the right mood for singing Dynasties Fall, I’ve been reading the the Chinese “Book of Songs”, the classic collection of odes dating from the very dawn of Yellow River Valley Civilization.  Like the Iliad and the Odyssey, they come from a time when the contradictions of civilization had not yet become so evident, when it was still possible to hope that the technological advances which were ripping ancient society from its stable rural mode, would also lead to a more profound understanding of the world, richer culture, and better lives.
*

They also come from a time in Chinese culture when poetry and music had not yet become separate art forms.
( Until the late Han dynasty, 1,000 years later, Chinese poetry was always sung. )  So I felt the odes would be a good thing to have running through my mind as I was looking for a way to sing words on top of our music.
This was in line with my suspicion that what I had to do was to find my way back into a bardic mode….
*

But while this implies that both the Book of Songs and Homer are in some sense innocent, it would certainly be a mistake to consider either primitive.  In fact the the characters in them are bigger more aware humans than us modern folks.  One could even say they were more sophisticated since they fooled themselves less.  When they were angry, they knew it. When they lusted, they knew what to do.  When they were hungry, they were under no illusion that it didn’t matter.

In part this must have been because they lived closer to nature ( even a rich person had to be physically together enough to ride a horse, whereas self-indulgent moderns can just plunk their fat butts down on automobile seats ), and also since everyone had to do many different types of things, they were able to accumulate the rich experience one needs to grow
( Unspecialized ).

Not to mention that since they weren’t hung up by trying to be “clear thinkers”, they tended to communicate with strings of images rather than with so-called logical arguments, and therefore did a much better job of expressing themselves. Back then almost everyone was a poet, and professors hadn’t yet been invented ( Notation ).
*

I’ve been enjoying the Songs in Robert Payne’s anthology of Chinese Poetry, “The White Pony”.  Previously I’d only read Arthur Waley’s translations, but those in the White Pony feel somehow realer and less processed, perhaps because they were all done by native Chinese speakers.

I used to believe that poetry was best translated by native speakers of the target language, and I still feel that this often produces more gracious sounding finished words.  But in a case like the Songs, where the source language (ancient Chinese ) is so different from any currently existing language, and where there is not a single important word in the entire book whose meaning has been definitively agreed upon, I’m starting to suspect that the translation is better done by native Chinese speakers.  Because writers who have Chinese culture in their bones, even when they too are unsure of a meaning, can at least follow clues thrown up by their intuition to help them penetrate to what the ancient singers were trying to express.

By contrast Waley brings his western mind to the job of translation, and so his rendering makes the singers sound more primitive even as it makes their songs sound more like western folk music.  I say this although for years I’ve read with great pleasure Waley’s translations of the “newer” Chinese and Japanese classics.  I first met Po Chu I, the great Tang dynasty people’s poet through Waley’s work, and to the best of my knowledge his is the best English translation of “The Tale of Genji”, the wonderful proto-novel written by Lady Murasaki in the spoken language of ninth century Japan, when all her contemporary male Japanese writers were still composing in warmed over Chinese.  ( Before tackling Genji, the western reader might be well advised to peruse Ivan Morris’  ”The World of the Shining Prince” for background information on the very peculiar ancient Japanese society in which Genji is set. )

But I’ve come to suspect that translating The Book of Songs was a stretch too far for Waley, that he just could not find his way into that vanished world.  And I guess I feel the same way about his translations of Confucius and Lao Tsu, that again he just could not feel in his bones what it was like to be a writer in the dawn of Yellow River Valley culture.  I mean the dude knew an enormous amount about China and Japan, but his relationship to them was merely respectful clear understanding, rather than the involuntary appreciation felt by a sufficiently old fashioned native of these countries.  So Waley’s translations of the songs don’t quite come alive.  They read like great ancient Yellow River Valley poems, whereas the translations in Payne’s anthology just read like great poems…..

Indeed one has to suspect that there was something not quite right about Waley’s entire relationship with the Yellow River Valley world.  That he never dared visit either China or Japan, strongly suggests he was afraid to test his insights, afraid to compare his mentally constructed vision of that world with its actual reality.
*

In any case the subject of my song, “merit is exhausted, dynasties fall” is the core concept of classical Chinese written history.  Whenever a new dynasty took power, one of its most important initial tasks was to use court and other records to write the definitive history of its immediate predecessor, and these histories always ended up by concluding that the previous dynasty had been established by big humans, and that when their descendants had become decadent ( i.e., had exhausted their merit ), it had inevitably failed.

One can see this motif not just in the Chinese histories, but also in the two greatest of the classic Chinese novels.

Shui Hu Chuan, the older of them which was translated beautifully into English in 1938 by Pearl Buck under the title “All Men Are Brothers”, grew from a collection of robin hood tales set in the chaotic end of the Sung Dynasty.  It tells of a band of Confucian bandits ( Confucian because they respected their elders, bowed to true moral authority, and never stole from the poor ) who were forced into lives of illegal conduct by the unjust actions of various local rulers, and who subsequently defeated all the forces massed against them by the corrupt government.  Its not so hidden message is that when their merit is exhausted, dynasties fall.

While “The Story of the Stone” ( there’s a good 6 volume penguin translation by David Hawkes and his successors ), traces the playing out of this same cautionary tale in the rise and fall of a great Chinese family.

Not surprisingly it has been suggested that this notion that dynasties fall when their merit is exhausted, occupies a territory in Chinese consciousness similar to the territory occupied by the idea of karma in the Indian mind, and the idea of heaven and hell in Western thought.  Which sounds quite reasonable to us…..  Relevant too, since clearly we’re living through one of those “merit is exhausted, dynasties fall” periods.  Like I sing in my song, the top of our society is rotten, while those who dwell there are shallow, weak and fearful.

But I’ve blabbered on quite long enough, so let me end this post by sharing with you Mitsuko’s reaction to my song.

“It sounds like some sort of strange yellow blues,” she said.

And this I take to be a gigantic compliment.

*

Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog
Home***Buy Our Music

qdss :  A boxus quartus, dotara, shoki, shoki quartet
*

We recorded the foundation tracks for this seriously chilled quartus, dotara, shoki quartet ( or “qdss” – see Our Instruments ) at the end of the seemingly endless period during which we’d been alternately devoting one week to our music and one to building our new WordPress powered web presence.  It was just before the final brain and eyeball numbing push to process all of our pages and sound files, and we wanted to get something down which would help restart our music after the stressful weeks we realized were inevitable before the launch of our new site.

It was definitely a hail Mary situation.  We knew we were totally fried, but we also knew it would be our last chance to record for at least three weeks, and since all during this crazy three month push we’d had the feeling that everything we did was turning out outrageous beautiful only because it was scripted, we figured we might as well go for it.

And so on the very last day when it was possible to record before hunkering down to complete our website, we took a deep breath and pressed the record button.

Which is why we were more than pleased that as soon as we’d played the first few notes we knew that the Force was with us, that one more time the Mountain, Our Lady, Corn Mother, and Krishna had our backs.

Of course it also must have helped that to get back into the swing of the combination, we’d devoted 3 days to playing quartus and dotara amplified, and that during that time we’d worked out new ways of miking both instruments.

The biggest change was the way we positioned the dynamic mikes.  As we explain on our Our Recording page, by the time we recorded our second CD we’d already figured out that placing our dynamic mikes in direct contact with our instruments in effect turned them into pickups.  However back then we were just strapping them across the necks of our Bowus Family instruments, and laying them on top of the keys of our Kalimba Family instruments

But now we realized that since our Shure SM-57’s were highly directional, it made more sense to have their noses actually touching our instruments, and since we didn’t have any clips or stands which would make this possible, we decided to do it with the aid of gravity.

……and of course with the aid of a few books, bookends, and rubber bands.

Which feels totally appropriate since we’d been already using stacks of books to prop up the necks of our bowus instruments, because we live surrounded by books, and because especially old books are absolutely critical for our sanity.

And lo and behold it worked !!  The weight of the microphones held them tightly enough to the instruments so that they didn’t rattle, and with the new positioning they picked up so much sound that we could dial down our preamps and still record a rich big signal.

We also made a small but significant change in the placement of our AKG C2000 condenser mikes by nudging them much closer to the instruments so we could reduce the amplification of our M-audio’s ( Our Recording ) and thereby cut the hiss that these inexpensive condenser mikes ( the cheapest that would even somewhat work….and the most expensive that we could afford, making this an area where when we have a bit more bread, that is when we can pay our rent with real not borrowed money, we’d love to do some upgrading ) introduced as soon as we turned the preamp knobs much beyond 12 o’clock.

Together these changes greatly improved the behavior of our recorded signal.  We no longer were always flirting with  the red, while the troublesome hiss which in previous posts had bedeviled our condenser microphone tracks was greatly reduced.

Equally wonderful, our new miking arrangement made dotara sound much warmer.  Of course part of this may have been because the new positioning allowed us to play our instruments more softly, and we always sound better when we’re playing softly.

This was particularly evident in the instrument’s plucked sound, but you won’t hear that in this particular quartet because our first editing move was to separate out all of the plucked sections and to set them aside for the vocal piece which we will be posting in about three weeks.  In part this is because the plucked and bowed sections sound so very different, but also since we’re still trying to quickly build this blog up to the point where it has four posts ( each centered around a new piece of music ), whenever we can save a little time we go for it.

Also when we had proceeded in this fashion for our previous two posts, it worked nicely because the wilder bowed sounds helped make “Bbqq” an exciting instrumental, while it was easy to sing the words of “Dynasties Fall” on top of the more chilled plucked sections.

Indeed though initially it was just a move to speed the process of populating our blog, we may again use this method of crafting both an instrumental and a song from a single fundamental track recording session.  So far as we know, there’s no law against this, and especially since we’re exploring our own untravelledpath, even if such a law existed, we would feel free to disregard it. ( Doing Music Differently )

We also tried a new and simpler miking arrangement for our shokis ( Shoki Family ) which involved using just one condenser microphone placed on a pad of cloth with its face turned towards the side of the instrument. Our hope was positioning the mike this way where it would not directly be hit by air blown through the flute would reduce nasty sibilant noises, and this turned out to be the case.  Not only that, this placement produced so much signal that it was unnecessary to dial our M-audios past 12:30, which meant our shoki tracks also were relatively hiss free.  However since we were still not pleased by the number of speaker rattling shoki booms, at the final stage of editing we struggled for many hours to control these wolf notes by tweaking the equalizer settings and volume levels for dozens of individual clips.  Though at first it didn’t look as though we were making much progress, in the end we got them under control, and in the process took a few more steps towards figuring out our 4-band equalizer.

In any case and as we’ve already noted, when we recorded our basic quartus-dotara foundation tracks the Force was with us and they turned out to be as clean and artistically interesting as anything we’d ever previously recorded, but still two weeks ago when it came time to start overdubbing the shoki tracks, we were both very nervous.  It had been nearly a month since we had done any recording ( though during that period we had done quite a lot of sound editing ), and since we hadn’t been playing any shoki, our lips were nowhere.  Also we were far from sure that our shokis would sound good on top of the extremely chilled quartus-dotara foundation tracks.

But one more time, within seconds of hitting the record button we knew we had another winner.  And later when we listened to the shoki tracks we’d each recorded that day, not only did they sound remarkably good on top of the quartus-dotara foundation, there were even sections where they worked when simultaneously played on top of the foundation !!

So despite our anxiety, our very first overdubbed shoki tracks turned out to be good enough to use.  However since we can’t afford to fail, we each recorded overdubbed shoki tracks two more times, and in the end the piece offered with this post turned out to be crafted with material from all six of these tries.  Of course weaving together so many different tracks is easier to say than it was to do, but as with tweaking all of those individual clips, the process of meshing so many different tracks took us into a whole new realm of sound editing…….

Focusing on recording our shokis also got us back into our old habit of playing them for at least a few minutes every day.  Now the longest and lowest pitch one again lives in our living room where we can pick it up whenever the impulse hits, representing both a welcome return of an old friend and an unexpected and delightful result of restoring music to the center of our lives. Of course since we plan to use shokis on future cuts, that’s another good reason to be playing them regularly, because it’s difficult for us to get good shoki tone unless we have our breathing and lips in shape.

Which is perhaps just another way of saying that our shokis make it abundantly clear that the instruments which we are really playing are ourselves.

So it was both auspicious and correct that during the past two weeks when we’ve been struggling with this piece, we also found the time to rake the fallen aspen leaves from the beds and walks around our house, to fill our frig with fresh cooked food and fresh baked banana bread, and to hike our favorite trail up into the mountains. Without these vitally important activities, we would never have been ready to cruise and qdss would never have grown into such  beauty.
( Unspecialized )

*

Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog
Home***Buy Our Music
*

*

*

When I tried to compose this my first song in Japanese, my native tongue, I quickly became acutely dissatisfied and even felt that I was just translating ideas which had originally come to me in English into clumsy Japanese.  So after struggling for a while I gave up trying to write it in Japanese, and was pleased that then the new song started to come more easily.  This also feels like a correct move because now more of our friends and a larger audience can understand what I am singing, rather than just hearing my Japanese words as pretty sounds.  So here is my first song, “I’m a Little Worried.”
*

I’m a Little Worried :  Sung on top of a boxus quartus, dotara duet
*

I’m a Little Worried

in a bowl of water,
apache plumes slow open into flowers,
white petals glow translucent,
in warm autumn light,

while full grown children over thirty,
for skills they will never use,
waste time at fancy schools.

no way these kids try
like the determined budding plumes.

deep in the forest,
sprinkled by icy streams,
royal blue columbines hide,
while high above them from sharp dry rocks,
their brave brothers raise proud heads.

those too good to clean their own homes,
too important to cook their own food,
do they deserve the respect
due this noble flower?

by the shore dandies dream to wave songs,
above the trees their golden petals tremble in the storm.

my enemies, I pull them from our garden,
but in the sweet spring,
smiling brilliant in the midst of dirty snow,
they make me want to bow.

the too proud dude in the tailored suit,
stuffed from a power lunch, tired from a hard trip on business class,
at home in jeans and a bandana, plays blues on his concert grand,
and dreams he’s right down there with the struggling masses.

he’s so much smaller than the humble glowing bloom.

if it’s humans like these who now truly hold the reins,
if such “masters of the universe” really are the ones in charge,
well I’m a little worried,
I’m a little worried…….

*

Once I had completed the first draft of the song, Arthur and I worked together on it right through to the end of our recording and editing process, and for this I cannot thank Arthur enough.  Not only did I rely on his native speaker intuition about things like where “the” should be used instead of “a”, and where singular was better than plural, but as we went back and forth many times about each verse, my song started to more accurately express my meaning even as the words got easier to deliver…

…..Of course some people might say that if Arthur was so involved with my song, it’s not really mine.  And it’s true that if I had been writing an English song just for the fun of it and to improve my English writing skills, I might have waited until I had struggled to exhaustion before I showed it to him.  But since our goal was to get my song ready for posting on our blog, it made sense to take advantage of his developed writing skills, and in any case I feel this cooperative process jump started my English song writing.  Also, working together is just the way we do things……
*

Years ago when we were singing with our guitar and pakawaj ( Doing Music Differently ), everything I sang, either my own words or those of my favorite songs, was in Japanese, and I still feel strongly that this was a very smart move because singing in Japanese gave me a chance to explore the relation between my emotions and the Japanese language.

However, since for the last 20 years I have been living my life in English, my ideas from these years have come in English, so nowadays whenever I try to express such thoughts in Japanese it’s not a matter of just replacing English with Japanese words, I have to search for a way of expressing the same ideas in Japanese.  Which of course is far from automatic, and sometimes downright impossible…..

Furthermore, during the years when we were translating hundreds of Japanese commercial documents, in order to render them into coherent English, it was really necessary for me to understand what the worthless corporate prose meant to say ( which was not necessarily what the words actually said ), and as a result this finally taught me to read non-fiction.

I’ve long been a serious reader of fiction, but non-fiction such as philosophy, psychology and sociology, regardless of the language, somehow always gave me trouble, possibly because such non-fiction tends to be written in abstract intellectual language that did not give me any concrete images.  So it was gratifying to discover that if I tried very hard, I could also make sense out of non-fiction.  But still I continue to prefer fiction…..
*

Living my life in English has certainly opened my world and broadened my perspective, as has reading widely in English. Of course, considering that such a very small part of the global population speaks Japanese, it’s remarkable how much world literature has been translated into Japanese ( thanks mainly to the hard work of late 19th and early 20th century scholars and translators ).  However since so much more is available in English, being able to read English still feels like a gigantic gift from heaven.

Furthermore, though I’ve always liked reading old stuff, perhaps because of the mechanical way that Japanese and Chinese classics were taught in Japan, sadly I had developed an allergic dislike of them, and another lovely result of learning to read English has been that it’s helped me get back into Japanese and Chinese classics.
*

Let me explain myself……. to enjoy reading in English I had to give up all hope of understanding everything and instead had to learn to guess the meaning of words from their context rather than always looking them up in a dictionary.  Indeed, only after I had accepted that I would not understand everything in my first read, was I able to enjoy myself.  Which is just fine since I tend to reread my favorite books anyway, and I’ve come to believe that any book worth reading at all, is worth reading more than once.  I mean how can anyone think he’s understood a book by Dickens fully after just one read?  To think this way is merely to deceive oneself.

Well what I realized was how much more true this is about books written many centuries ago in what amounts to a foreign language ( classical Japanese )!

So with this new attitude I took another run at the Japanese classics.  The first thing I read was “The Tale of Genji” which is mentioned in Arthur’s “Dynasties Fall” post.  As part of our personal book club, Arthur read Waley’s English translation while I read Tanizaki’s translation into somewhat modern spoken Japanese.  And amazingly I enjoyed it so much that I am looking forward to reading it again.

As for the Chinese classics, since I have abandoned entirely the idea of learning either ancient or modern Chinese, I’ve been enjoying them in English translations.  Of course I remain open to finding translations of them into clear simple Japanese, but so far I have failed to find acceptable Japanese versions of Chinese poetry, the I Ching, the Analects, Lao tsu, etc.  In the meantime reading them in lovely English translations has kept me quite happy.  ( This lack of good modern Japanese translations may be a left over from the days when in Japan studying meant memorizing the Confucian classics, and when “educated” people wanted to insure that their “learning” remained inaccessible to ordinary people. )
*

But to go back to my song, “I’m a Little Worried” expresses our long standing amazement that so many humans manage to believe that they are smarter, better, and more self-aware than other life forms.  In this song I talk about plants, but when we lived in India ( The Indian Music Scene ), it was obvious that monkeys could tell good humans from bad humans while to humans all monkeys looked the same.  Here in Taos we are quite sure that the magpies hanging out in our garden know us as individuals and are curious about us, even though to us they all look like indistinguishable gorgeous black and white birds.  In the same spirit we’ve noticed that plants immediately start looking different the day after a solstice, that animals and plants know when they are hungry and thirsty, that they want what they need, and that given a chance, they do their best to be whatever they are….

Do we so-called “Lords of Creation”, do as good a job of being humans as these creatures do of being themselves?  Do we know what we need and then provide ourselves with it?  Do we try to be fully human? ( Unspecialized )

You must know someone who is similar to one of the humans described in my song….and once you start thinking about it, if this person really is one of the “Hopes for humanity”……..

…..you too, will be a little worried………..

*

Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog
Home***Buy Our Music
*

*

]]> http://untravelledpath.com/2009/12/im-a-little-worried/feed/ 0 http://untravelledpath.com/2010/01/slow-music-and-other-reasons-to-avoid-materialism/ http://untravelledpath.com/2010/01/slow-music-and-other-reasons-to-avoid-materialism/#comments Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:47:28 +0000 untravelledpath http://untravelledpath.com/?p=1421 2010-01-14

bowus – quartus :  A bass bowus, boardus quartus duet
*

When we’re chilled, our music often leads us to a stillness rich with magic.  Then our notes hang in a golden silence and fall like jeweled drops through twisting fields of invisible energy.  Then our music finds its structure in the silent breathing of our minds and its unity in the warm cohabitation of our souls.  Mysterious even to us, then our music flows not from counting, not from thinking clearly, not from memory, and not even from some determination to seek quiet, but rather from listening to almost silent cues and from the shared joy of feeling sounds being born from nothing. ( Notation )

A passage of somewhat purple prose, but if you were listening to this post’s music while you read it you will probably admit that I was merely stretching language as part of a legitimate attempt to talk about music which really can not be described by more conventional musical terms.

Indeed there’s so much weird and wonderful about this piece, that the only things that one can for sure say about it are that it does strange things to a listener’s time sense and that it is very very very slow ( Slow, Low, And Varied ).

So it’s downright amazing that even now when we know we’re deeply stressed, our music still seems determined to move in this direction.

However we were far from certain this would be the case when last fall, for the first time in 4 years, we again started recording.  Indeed, since we live in a time when it’s best to be suspicious of old solutions, we tried to stay open to the possibility that during this new round of recording we would record tracks that moved to a quicker pace.

But as we gradually grew more used to our new kit and came to be more comfortable with always playing amplified
( Our Recording ), it became clear that once again we were headed towards slowness, until now for this post with bass bowus ( Bowus Family ) and boardus quartus ( Kalimba Family ) we have recorded some of our slowest ever music…….

Which is just fine with us.  As we wrote in the jacket notes for Sweet Heresy and on the Slow, Low, And Varied page of this website, there’s more than enough music out there that jacks you up.  In this society where at the top nothing ever gets done, even as the flimsy folks who live there fill their appointment calendars with endless silly meetings and events; and where the people below them who actually do the work are bullied into working faster and faster for less and less reward, the obvious need is for music that slows you down.

Also the last thing we want to do is to buy into the stupidly materialist view that playing more notes faster makes music better and more powerful.

In this same anti-materialist spirit that more is not always better, with this piece we have also taken a step back to the comfortable simplicity of our earlier recordings.  So unlike all of the other pieces which we’ve so far posted on this blog, this one was done without overdubbing.

We came to this decision as soon as we listened to this piece’s raw unedited file and it became obvious that recording anything on top of it would be gilding a lily, and would just detract from the force and beauty of what was already there.  But to read a more abstract principle into it, we also realized that though our new equipment and editing software make overdubbing easy ( Our Recording ), it would be downright greedy to always overdub, and that to do so would be to fall into the stupidly materialistic modern attitutude that more is always better, that multiple overlapping musical lines are inherently more interesting and powerful.

Even beyond this, it’s also true that we’re always happy when we can produce beauty by behaving in an old fashioned way ( in this case recording without overdubbing ), that we tend to find beauty in simplicity, and that we’re always suspicious of technique.

But before letting myself get too carried away by the various exalted reasons why we decided to not overdub this piece, I should probably admit that in a very real sense we had no choice since this month we just  had no time to lay down extra tracks.  So it was great good fortune that the four initial tracks we recorded were strong enough to stand on their own.

We were so busy because last month just days after this blog had reached its planned four post/four piece full strength, we suddenly were hit by our first significant translation job in 6 months, and since then we’ve been glued to our computers turning 23,000 words of Japanese e-mails and corporate reports into correct readable English prose.

As we explain on our Doing Music Differently page, for three years we’d been paying our bills with this kind of work, but then last spring, for reasons beyond our control the stream of our jobs dried up.  ( The global economy tanked, language memory programs like Trados grew in popularity because even though translations done with them are so inaccurate as to be virtually useless……they’re cheap, while Madoff stole the promised inheritance of the dude who’d been giving us the bulk of our work, which along with the expense of swapping his wife for a younger chick with a daughter, turned him into a money hungry madman who when everyone else was dumping on him, got pleasure from using his position of power to dump on us. )

Since we have no secret funds, no financial assets ( we’re renters driving a 23 year old car….. ), no investments,  and no supportive parents, this was not a good development.  ( I’m 66 and my parents are long dead, while Mitsuko’s wealthy 80-year-old parents, acting in a spirit of misunderstood Confucian fundamentalism, are only interested in helping her brother and their grandson, their worthless male heirs.  So much so that ten years ago when we were completely broke and for the first and only time asked them for a loan, they flat refused and instead lectured us on how we should “bite the rock”. )

And so armed with the strength of desperation, for months we spun our wheels sending resumes and making phone calls to hundreds of translation agencies, but though in fact we turn out excellent Japanese>English  translations for far less than the going rate, no doors opened and our only success was to make ourselves miserable and uptight.

Which meant it was a great relief when last August we finally decided to stop wasting our time worrying, and to instead spend through our credit cards while we switched our energy to creating this blog/website and recording new music.

And as this website and the music on it emerged, it became clear that this had been a smart or at least a noble move.

However by last month we’d nearly spent through our credit and were again starting to get big worried.  So we were pleased and grateful when from out of the blue, one of the agencies which we’d approached last summer suddenly offerred us so much work that this past month we more than broke even.

Now our fingers and toes are crossed that this continues, even though spending so many days translating of course means that we have much less time for our music.

But what to do.  Though we love our music, we still need to eat and pay our rent.

Not to mention that it would also feel good to start paying off at least some of the $13,000 debt which we accumulated this year…… ( Buy Our Music )
*

For our new recording, that is for the music which we are now posting on this blog, we’ve made yet another anti-
materialistic move by backing away from our previous commitment to always seek the highest possible fidelity.  To say this a bit differently, while for our previous CDs we were actually proud of not limiting and not filtering our sound, now we understand it was both stupid and arrogant to always go for the least massaged and the so-called most “accurate” sound.

We reached this insight after realizing that most of our audience listens to our music through small speakers or minimal headphones, and that music recorded with the widest possible range the way we used to do it, rattles such inexpensive equipment and leads to unpleasantly distorted sound.

So now we listen to all of our recorded tracks not just through our quite acceptable Koss PortaPro headphones and lovely  M-Audio AV-40 speakers, but also through some tiny old Sony self amplified speakers which were terrible when we bought them 20 years ago, and which got much worse after enduring years of soaking wet heat with us in India and then rotting with us in the decaying trailer where we lived in perpetually soggy Mendocino. ( Doing Music Differently )

So now when something we’ve recorded sets the Sonys to rattling, we play with low and high pass settings, fiddle with our equalizers, and add filters, until even they put out acceptable sound.  Because now we understand that we want to record music that sounds good on any equipment and that we’re not after an exclusive “audiophile” audience.

Especially since we’ve come to feel that most “audiophiles” are really just buying into an Emperor’s Clothes kind of rap. And that’s to put a friendly gloss on it, since when we’re in a harsher mood it feels more like they’re acting in the spirit of what Veblen called “conspicuous consumption”.

For example we’re pretty discriminating listeners and we’re quite convinced that our $130 AV-40 self-amplified speakers sound damn near as good as any expensive system which we’ve ever heard in the living room of a friend.  Not to mention that even when we listen to our limited, filtered, and compressed MP3 files, their sound quality is almost up to that of CDs we’ve heard played through high end speakers.

Of course partly this must be because our environment is so quiet ( we live surrounded by alfalfa fields and the nearest paved two-lane road is a half mile away ), but this only emphasizes that the noise level of the environment must be treated as an important factor.  For this reason a person living in an expensive high-rise in Manhattan, who listens to music through $1,000 speakers attached to state of the art electronics, is just wasting money.  While, in some sense the sound coming out of their system may be high quality, since it’s competing with traffic roar, sirens, ventilation  noises, and their kid’s TV, their actual listening experience is lousy.

One should also not forget that most people living in our incredibly noisy society have badly damaged hearing  ( this is especially true of “audiophiles” who tend to enjoy cranking the volume of  their systems to enjoy “their full power” ), and so it’s absolutely pointless for them to buy high end equipment.  For these folks, what limits their listening experience is not the quality of their speakers but the quality of their ears…….

Having said all of this I still want to make clear that we have not by any means given up on our pursuit of high sound quality for our recordings.  Rather we are looking for the actual “experienced and heard” sound quality which we still feel is very important, and abandoning our search for the somewhat meaningless quality which exists only in the “specs”.

So by putting the head of a dynamic microphone in direct contact with the top of boardus quartus ( Kalimba Family ) in the same way as we described in our earlier post Creative Microphone Placement ( two posts down the page from this one ), and tucking a condenser microphone directly underneath the instrument, we finally managed to record a satisfactory signal from this instrument.

And even before that, we improved the sound of the actual boardus quartus instrument by using two pipe clamps to tighten the long wedge which holds its keys in place by tension.  Now the instrument has a much larger and more bell-like tone, and all of its annoying little buzzes have disappeared.  ( When we had our bar clamps out, we also used them to tighten the wedge of our original quartertone kalimba, and though we did not use that instrument for this piece, its sound quality was similarly improved. )

Similarly we are now positioning the bass bowus ( Bowus Family ) dynamic microphone the same way that the dotara dynamic was positioned for the Creative Microphone Placement piece.

*

Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog
Home***Buy Our Music
*

*

Dark Clouds :  Sung on top of a bass bowus, boardus quartus duet
*

Dark Clouds

dark clouds hang heavy over the mountain,
birds circle silent in the sky.

shielded from the world by unearned wealth,
our old friends stayed teens until their 60’s,
faces unlined, hands soft,
they joined professions, raised children, without ever growing up.

mistaking stunted growth for everlasting youth,
untested and untempered by life,
ripe for the abuse of prescription drugs
and the grand promises of elective surgery.

they fear us because we don’t believe their rap,
they try to think their money makes them better humans,
but in their hearts they know we’ve outgrown them,
know we still live a glory they’ve hoped was just unreal dream.

grimly smiling through pickets of implanted teeth, they hang to the essential lie,
if only they’d had our privilege, they too would be doing something with their lives.

they refuse to see our fortune has been having less to spend,
has been knowing which modern madness to avoid.
they’ve forgotten good books train the brain to build a world,
that cooking feeds more than just the belly,
that doing something is different from having something done.

mornings we drink mugs of sweet hot chai,
afternoons there are pots of strong green tea.

every evening after dinner,
on one knee I ask her for her hand.

twenty years now our shared life has grown in magic,
where she ends and I begin, we long ago forgot.

another full day finished,
we wait for our sheets to warm.

outside wind sighs thru the aspens,
above stars burn in the deep cold night.

*

This song was born in sorrow and in anger.

Sorrow that so many people whom we’ve known for so many years are now so very miserable, bored, terrified, and preyed upon by their herds of damaged children.

Anger that so many of them have grown from their seeming early promise and integrity into large fatty self protective lumps.

Sorrow that so many of our old friends are obviously such ignorant, arrogant, unaccomplished, and uninteresting adults that albeit reluctantly we’ve been forced to chuck virtually all of them.

Anger that most of them have stubbornly refused to relate to us as humans with elegant, self reliant, and creative lives, preferring instead to see us as only lazy, privileged, failed refugees.

Still all of this powerful negative emotion should not in any way be surprising.  After all I’m not singing about some abstract group, I’m singing about dear old friends, people I’ve known for years and decades who are now crashed and burning on the expensive rocks at the bottom of their expensive cliffs.

But grim though this situation is, and while occasionally we still kick ourselves for being so slow to understand it, really we must be thankful to have finally come to our senses, to have finally started seeing things for the way they are…….

Because it’s absolutely clear that many of our friends have managed to turn winning into losing hands, and that despite being gifted with wealth, brains, and often even beauty, they’ve done astonishingly little with their lives.  Even worse, by failing miserably to take advantage of their huge privilege, they’ve ended up by becoming shamefully tiny humans.
*

They live in a world where no one tries hard, indeed in a world where it’s distinctly uncool to do more than give the appearance of trying hard.  It’s a world afflicted by a chronic fatigue syndrome of the spirit, a world where the aim of the game is to slide through on one’s inherited privilege until the finish line.

Of course all these folks who pat themselves on the back for being clever enough to correctly read the tea leaves and for refusing to be carried away by immature enthusiasm, are in fact making a terrible error.  Even those who manage to tread their way into financially secure old age, arrive there without the tools or toughness to confront the terrifying problems against which money is powerless; boredom, meaninglessness, loneliness, weakness, and pain.  Since for them everything has always been easy, when the going, as is inevitable, gets more difficult, since they’ve had no practice dealing with problems they’re just out of luck.

So they do what they’ve always done, rush out to the experts who then overmedicate them to control their blood pressure and depression, cut them up to relieve their joint pain, and who for very hefty fees are willing to extend to them false sympathy as they complain about their problems in unthreatening therapeutic situations.

The one thing they would never even think of doing is to make some significant change in their lives.  Because they tell themselves that they have no problems, and in fact that they have done masterful jobs of living in the face of great difficulties.  Indeed they’re quite sure they’ve never made any mistakes ( except perhaps in the dim distant past ) though they may suspect that they have occasionally erred on the side of being too brave, too generous, and too compassionate.

So certain are they of their spiritual stature that they congratulate themselves for accepting everything, loving everyone, being non judgmental and non materialistic, and for being generally open to life.

Of course since the truth is the exact opposite, that is that they’ve had free rides and blown all of their advantages, they can only continue to believe such horseshit because of their highly developed “not seeing” skills.  Even though they all pride themselves on their self awareness, the fact is that they have virtually none.  They ignore their own inner failings and turmoil just as thoroughly as they ignore those of the disasters who are their children. They even manage to ignore the all too obvious unfairness of their economic position.  Like the good Germans who enjoyed their Vienna schnitzel even as Hitler was busy barbecuing, they manage to not see that their doing nothing is only made possible by other poorer people having to do too much.

And of course all this not seeing is just as important for understanding their mediocrity as is their not trying.  In fact the two are cousin brothers.

Because not seeing tends to spread.  What starts as a refusal to see their own problems and mistakes soon grows into a more general not seeing.  And when they stop looking, they stop learning, until finally they even stop thinking.  Which of course means they learn little from experience and never grow up.

But they just don’t want to be disturbed.

Sigh, it’s no wonder that their brains go soft.

It’s also no wonder that they run away from us as soon as they realize we don’t believe their rap.  Because all of this not trying, not doing, not seeing, and not thinking is only sustainable if the foundation of one’s politeness is never questioning anyone else’s story.  After all if one doubts someone else, one opens oneself to having questions asked about one’s own vital lies.

Far better to just take another sip of organic bird-friendly gourmet coffee and to piously mumble, “everyone is different”.
*

But it’s a clear case of better late than never.  At least now having nearly cut our ties to the depressing leftovers of our past, we’re ready to move on into a more human and decent future.

And obviously this break out into freedom from our past is one of the things that all the songs so far posted on this blog have been exploring. ( Work in Progress Frozen mp3 Blog )

Still we feel they have an importance that goes way beyond the merely personal, since the class on which we’ve turned our backs, in addition to including many pitiful and relatively harmless people who are merely rotting while doing almost nothing on their inherited incomes, also includes some of the more dangerous types who have done and are doing real damage as professionals, doctors, professors, business men, politicians, artists, musicians, and media types…..

Because in all of the areas where these types of people are in charge, things are obviously falling apart and no longer running the way they should.  Doctors remove organs belonging to the wrong patients, socks start wearing out after just one wash, pilots fall asleep at 40,000 feet, roads are full of potholes, people have forgotten how to read and think, there’s virtually nothing truly new in art or music, while everywhere folks just keep getting fatter and weaker.

Of course there are also moral arguments to be made about the unworthiness of the folks at the top, since the sad fact is that most of them have attitudes towards the rest of humanity that are downright slimy.  Somehow they manage to live quite comfortably with their unearned privilege and somewhat pathetically they are off scale greedy even though their lack of self awareness means that in general they do a terrible job of buying themselves what they need.  Not to mention that they are materialistic, self-righteous, arrogant, prejudiced, hypocritical, and lazy.
*

This is not the place to go into this in any detail, but as part of their general misunderstanding of life, religion, and spirituality, they completely fail to get the meaning of “self awareness”.   This they think is some sort of quasi magical direct awareness of a hypothetical inner or core being.  A kind of golden glow that comes from breaking one’s identification with one’s body and external socially conditioned self.

In fact it has nothing to do with this, but rather it involves knowing who you are so you can make sensible decisions about what you need and where you are going.  It means learning stuff like what you can and can not do, what you really enjoy doing, what type of friends are good for you, and what type of exercise and activities are necessary to keep your mind and body from decaying…..

As the zen folks put it, it means sleeping when you are sleepy and eating when you are hungry.

So “self awareness” rather than being some sort of mystical blissful state is the most down to earth practical type of knowledge.  In simple language it boils down to wanting what you need.
*

It’s also worth noting that the exploding economic difference between those at the top and those who actually do the work contributes to a terrible prognosis for our civilization.  Like a huge brain tumor, it is a symptom of rotten health, and indeed this sort of disparity has long been singled out as one of the clearest symptoms that a society is in deep trouble and that one way or another it’s about to be ushered off the stage of history.  This seems to be especially true when as is the case during the current ongoing train wreck of the modern world, the unfairly rich have little but the size of their bank accounts to distinguish them from the oppressed masses, that is when the last vestiges of any elite culture have melted away.  Nowadays those at the top watch the same mind numbing TV as our slum dwellers…..

However though we certainly do sing ( and think ) about all of this stuff, we feel that we are even more useful when we speak as individuals who having been raised and who lived our early lives among such “leaders of society” are in an excellent position to point out their human deficiencies.  ( Obviously here we are merely proceeding on the more general principle that art based on personal experience is always the most powerful. )

So our gut feeling continues to be that we should not focus too much of our creative attention on the statistical, economic, political or even moral arguments against inequality, and that instead we should concentrate more on the totally inferior lives led by most of our old friends who are now “enjoying” their fading years at the top.
*

Especially since we would have to agree that so far every effort to reduce inequality, every program of reform, and every revolution has failed when its leaders have deserted to the opposition as soon as they have succeeded ( or inherited ), and have then immediately gone for more subtly hidden and up to date versions of the undeserved and silly luxury which they used to condemn in those that they replaced ( or joined ).

This was certainly true after the failure of the counterculture when the leaders of the politicos, that is the folks who led the demonstrations, sold out before the ink had dried on their manifestos, and moved on to become stockbrokers and professors of revolutionology.  Of course with hindsight it’s obvious that few of these folks ever had any real interest in radical change.  That is they never wanted to change the system so much as they wanted to take over its leadership, or to say the same thing with a terminology we find useful, they were merely rebellious rather than being true revolutionaries…..

And even today you have the pitiful sight of the leaders of the radical left blogosphere being completely comfortable with lifestyles where they eat most of their meals in restaurants ( which they see as providing jobs for many “little people” ), send their kids to private schools ( or so-called “charter schools” which are really just private schools scamming money from the government…the important point is they feel their kids are too good to associate with “inferior” lower class children at public schools ) travel everywhere all the time ( burning up huge amounts of fossil fuels ), use Mac computers ( designed and marketed for those with more money than brains ), turn into raw food faddists ( which is big time expensive and demands intact teeth that have profited from a lifetime of expensive dentistry ), hire personal trainers ( because they lack the discipline to get into shape on their own ), and even more shamefully that these official cheerleaders for change think that they are much better than the “average Joes” whom they feel it is their duty to educate.

However in all fairness most of those from the psychedelic flower child wing of the counterculture, that is most of the folks with whom I hung out and in whom I placed my hopes, sold out almost as completely when without the slightest hint of hesitation they transformed themselves into compassionate sensitive alternatives who bought large houses as soon as they inherited.  These are the folks who support the organic industry by buying organic pastries, steaks, and wine.  These are the hybrid driving folks who drink lattés in coffee shops as they discuss the plight of the homeless.  These are the folks who love brown and yellow people so long as they are safely off on some distant continent, but who never have a friend who does not belong to their same race, or at least to their same wealthy social class…..
*

( Note that because their critique was deeper and because they opened themselves to truly life changing experiences, a small number of ex-flower children have managed to retain their ideals and are still trying to live lives of simple harmony.  By contrast, among the politicos the sell-out rate appears to have been 100%. )
*

Also for the moment at least we’d just as soon avoid arguing over whether the situation has really gotten worse, or whether it has always been this bad.

Certainly there are many from our past who would claim that there’s been no deterioration, and that they live wonderful frugal lives rich with culture and crowned by higher consciousness.  But since these are the same arrogant incompetent folk whom we are now trying to eliminate from our lives, there doesn’t seem to be much point wasting energy trying to convince them of their folly.  Since they are all certain that they are more insightful, spiritual, less privileged, and less materialistic than we are, they would never listen anyway.
*

Of course looking at things from where we are now, it’s pretty obvious that neither one of us ever really fit in with our birth class.  As long ago as when we lived in India we were already being ostracized. It got to the point that the Japanese expats in our neighborhood would literally turn their backs and walk away as soon as they saw us, while in general over time our connection to other foreigners steadily evaporated even as we grew closer and closer to the locals. ( Doing Music Differently, The Indian Music Scene, and The Street Singer )

But it was only shortly before the end of the millennium when we moved back to northern California, an area I’d long thought of as full of high minded types who were sincere about crafting new styles of living, that it started to become absolutely clear we were no longer on the same wavelength as most our old friends.

Because when expecting a warm welcome we moved into a town where I’d lived twice before and where there were still literally hundreds of people whom I had known for decades, we were shocked to discover that almost none of them wanted to have anything to do with us.

Which forced us to realize that most of them had aged past their periods of “voluntary poverty”, and that after having inherited and moved into proper houses had evolved into “higher types” who no longer wanted to have anything to do with “losers” like us.
*

Of course we weren’t really “losers”, and in fact it was an exciting and highly productive period of our life when we were taking our first steps in what empirically seems to be the almost impossible task of building a life in the first world after years of low budget third world expat existence ( in our experience we’ve yet to meet anyone else who has successfully done this ).  It was when our instrument craft was exploding ( Our Instruments ), when we were recording our first CD ( Doing Music Differently ), when we were beginning to create a truly new music (Notation, Slow, Low, And Varied, Performance ), and when we were honing the skills needed in expensive American society to live an elegant life on very little money ( Unspecialized ).

But we were seriously broke and  living in a lovely but rotting old trailer, and to my old friends for whom money had become the most important value (though of course they would have been furiously insulted if anyone had ever been rude enough to say something like this to them), that was a good enough reason to reject us.  That and as I sing in my song because we were still living a dream they had long ago given up as impossible, a sin we compounded by refusing to believe their raps and preferring instead to look at their realities…..
*

Then there were others who didn’t inherit and for whom the poverty turned out to be real, who had started to lose their teeth because of inadequate dental care, and whose aging bods were no longer comfortable in the humble elegant hippy structures we’d all enjoyed living in during the 70’s.  Well most of this group had been so ground down by physical hardship and the sneers of the voluntary poverty crew that they’d turned bitter and taken up permanent residence in their pain caves.  And of course since we were upbeat and optimistic these folks also shunned us.

It was then that we started to realize the whole alternative rap was just a crock of shit.  That the Green Party crew were for the most part just as firmly in the inherited privilege camp as the most reactionary Republicans………

Now ten years later, having moved from northern California, that hotbed of hypocrisy and “alternative” consciousness, to much less pretentious and more beautiful northern New Mexico, we are pursuing a policy of increasingly complete localization.

The chucking of our past is of course a kind of localization in time, but we’ve also realized that physical localization is just as important for the preservation of our sanity.  So in the past 4 years only once have we gone more than 20 miles from our little town, while 2 days out of three we don’t even leave the property of our lovely rented house.

But why go anywhere when at home we can live in the supremely elegant and delightfully old fashioned world which we have fashioned for ourselves?

Our wonderful home cooked simple food is awesome ( Unspecialized ), we are surrounded by green fields and flowers, the air we breath is clean, and except for our not very noisy refrigerator our environment is dead quiet.  While as icing on our cake we have thought provoking books to read, we have wonderful magical instruments ( Our Instruments ) and a lovely recording system ( Our Recording ), we have an excellent working environment with two very functional computers, we have lovely neighbors, we have the birds, and we have each other.

And this is of course why over time our anger has tended to mellow into sadness.

Our poor old shrinking friends.  They were given so much and they’ve ended up with so little…..

Meanwhile this is a song and a post that struggled to be born, not because of any musical problems, and not because of any troubles with the words, but rather because it was difficult to find the time to take the final steps towards their creation since we were hit by an overwhelming but badly needed flood of translation jobs ( which fortunately for our localization policy we can do at home ) which meant that these past three months we’ve been more than fully busy cranking out nearly 100,000 words of finished translations.
*

Of course our old fashioned belief that it’s not worth doing something unless you do it well, means we work slowly and refuse to cut corners, that is we refuse to “just write something” and we struggle with every knotty poorly written Japanese passage until we’re convinced that we’ve gotten as close to the original meaning as we are capable of getting.  We even take the time to reproduce the formatting of the original text, which is something that many commercial translators flatly refuse to do, preferring instead to just run their translations straight down the lefthand margin.  ( See the “Detour Through Translation” section two thirds of the way down our Doing Music Differently page )
*

But what to do.  We need to eat, and now that we’re making enough money to dream about paying off debt accumulated last fall when the near total absence of work gave us the chance to start recording again and to create this new web presence, we must take it.   There’s no one out there who’s about to help us, and we must just be thankful that in this rotten economy we seem to be in a position to help ourselves.

*

Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog
Home***Buy Our Music
*

*

bowus – bowus :  A bass bowus, dotara duet
*

We know we’re damn lucky we can do the translation work which pays our rent and buys our food at home.

We know that the working conditions here in this quiet elegant space are downright perfect compared to the noisy crowded chaos faced by our friends who earn their living in downtown grocery stores, banks, and post offices.

Unlike them we can pee whenever we want.  Whenever the urge hits I can grab Mitsuko for a hug.  Lunch is whenever we get hungry.  The air we breath is impeccable.  We have no commute.  Our hourly pay (though far less than is earned by even the most incompetent doctors, lawyers, professors, realtors, and brokers….. ) is pretty good.  We don’t need to worry about puffed up guys in suits showing up to inspect us.  And though sometimes when fighting deadlines we work for weeks without a break, often we can take off two or even three consecutive days, which is something for which many of our working friends in town would kill…..

And we also know we’d have crunched long ago if we had to face the humiliation and abuse which this unjust society deals out to them on a daily basis.  Because the fact is that we’re not as tough as they are, since like the rest of our “birth class” (including of course the old friends whom I wrote and sang about chucking in “Dark Clouds” ) we were spoiled by being raised with too much unearned privilege.

But our knowledge that we have it good, still doesn’t change the reality that we’re more than a little ground down.  For nearly 7 months now we’ve been working our butts off to retire the $13,000 of credit card debt accumulated last year when we had no work ( Doing Music Differently ), and the effects of this sort of abuse are cumulative.  It’s been a period when we haven’t had enough sleep, we haven’t had enough fun, and we haven’t been playing enough music.

But at least we are succeeding, and after sweating out 200,000 words of meticulous high quality Japanese to English commercial translations, the finish line is in sight.  In another couple of months we should be completely out of debt, which of course makes us feel more than good, it also makes us feel big proud.
*

By the way, it would be wrong to get the impression that we’ve been translating neat stuff like poetry or literature.  That would be lovely, but I’m afraid the less romantic truth is that we’ve been translating thousands of pages of poorly written e-mails and reports.  In fact these stacks of documents generated by multi-billion dollar companies are full of such astonishing incompetence that they’ve further convinced us the folks at the top of our society don’t really deserve to be there, and that it’s only the accident of having been born in wealthy families, not any real accomplishment, that’s made them so sure they’re big time smarter than everyone else.  Like Mitsuko sings, it’s enough to make one a little worried…..
*

In any case, since we are such flimsy weak types ( and again this is of course compared to our friends working in town, since at this point compared to our old birth class friends we are beasts, both physically and psychically ), and since spending many many days glued to our computers has left us deep fried, perhaps it was a bit arrogant to try for this post to record a bowus-bowus duet ( Bowus Family ), since that’s the most difficult to play combination of our self-created instruments ( Our Instruments ).
*

It’s also a combination that produces some of the weirdest most magical music because the sounds created with these instruments are just so peculiar.  And this is not just because their sounds lie on a continuum rather than along some discrete scale ( which is also true of any fretless conventional string instrument…. ), but rather because their complicated “notes” are so rich with buzzes, throbs, and squeaks, that it’s only by stretching the definition that they can even be called “notes”.
*

Playing our bowus instruments it’s all too easy to produce irritating conspicuous finger noises or to lose control of the sound and have it turn ugly.  Even worse these terrible things usually seem to happen right in the middle of some beautiful passage.  That’s to say right when we’re starting to get carried away, right when the running thoughts related to our too busy days start dying down, and whamm!!!! we blow it and produce an unattractive noise that’s so embedded in a beautiful sound that it can not be removed with our limited editing skills.

In part this is because our decision to keep their string tension low makes it impossible to dominate our bowus instruments.  Forcing them to produce pre-selected sounds ( as is necessary for any instrument designed to play a written down piece….. ) is out of the question, and instead we must gently persuade them to sing.  Or to say this another way, we have no choice but to treat these instruments as equal partners with minds of their own and with their own ideas of where the music should be going.

By contrast our kalimba family instruments are keyboards, albeit very peculiar ones.  This means that though their individual notes are also complicated undisciplined mixes of harmonics, their fundamental frequencies do march in sequential order.  ( Note that despite our calling them “chromatic” and “quartertone” instruments, in fact even their fundamental frequencies are only approximately a half or a quartertone apart, and if you are interested in why this bothers us not in the slightest, you should take a look at our Notation page….).  Furthermore since as keyboards they are quasi machine like, when we stroke their keys with our finger tips, if we don’t blow it too badly the sounds they produce are automatically pretty.

In any case since we were well aware of these technical difficulties, and since we knew that doing so much translation had left our poor little brains deep fried, in preparation for recording this combination we made sure to first squeeze in 10 practice sessions. It was painfully obvious we would need at least that long to get our chops back, to reach the point where our fingers remembered how to lift themselves off the strings without creating too many noises, the point where we’d recovered enough skill so that bowing had again become a pleasure rather than just being a frustration.
*

This of course was not “practice” in any traditional sense, since playing the same things over and over is something we avoid on principle ( Practice ).  Rather it was more like “getting in shape” in somewhat the same spirit as preparing to climb a difficult mountain or to swim across a large body of water.  What we had to do was to recover sufficient skill and musical strength so that playing these particular instruments and this particular combination would again become easy, so that we could start having fun with it, so that we ourselves would again become instruments through which magic would be happy to emerge….
*

However since this was during a period when we were glued to our computers writing the translations which pay our bills, finding the time to do this was not easy.  ( For the same reason putting together this post has taken longer than we would have liked….. )

But what to do.

Still trying to play beautiful music during this excessively busy stretch of months has at least been an excellent test for our belief that being unspecialized is a better way of finding interesting newness than putting our noses to the grindstone and focusing on just one type of task.  As we note on our Unspecialized page, in our experience when we’ve done that, all we’ve ended up with were ground down noses.

And one more time our unspecialized philosophy passed the test.  So even though we were squeezing in our “practice” sessions at the end of long brain draining days of translation, that is even though we were playing our bowus instruments when we were already exhausted, very quickly we started producing some of the deepest and most resonate tones that we have ever managed to coax from these instruments.  Very quickly we found ourselves with the musical strength to play non stop for an hour.  Very quickly patterns started to emerge that were quite different from anything which we had ever played before with the same combination.

And this was because even though we had not been playing so much music, the demands of translation had been forcing us to think very clearly for many hours, and it was this ability to focus which was giving us our musical strength and which helps to explain why this piece is so conceptually intense.

Having written this, there is one thing which I must admit our unspecialized approach was unable to do, and that was to make us feel deeply peaceful during this period when we were spending far too much time cranking out endless pages of translations.  As a result both of us were more than a little disturbed to hear the absence of peacefulness in what we had recorded.  ( Though of course we weren’t really very surprised that playing deeply peaceful music when we were totally fried was not so easy. )

Fortunately since there were more than 50 minutes of music in the raw file, by radically editing it down we were able to create a finished selection that we felt was sufficiently peaceful.  And here one has to score another point for being unspecialized, since it was only because of our immersion in translation that we were in such super editing shape, since in fact we hadn’t done any music editing for at least two months.  Still struggling with hundreds of pages of translation had developed both our ability to spot a problem and our will to persevere until we’d set it right, suggesting that editing really is just editing whether it be of a Wave file or a Word file.

In any case understanding our unspecialized philosophy is absolutely central to understanding our approach to music, since for us music is more than just a specialized skill.  Rather we see it as another expression of our general togetherness, openness, inventiveness, and playfulness.

This is why while we are enormously proud of our music, we’re equally proud of our wild plant gardening, our cooking, our top of the line commercial translations, our self-made furniture and curtains, our impeccable and beautiful house, our reading habits, our methodical but moderate stretching, our consistent frugality which has been coupled with the willingness to buy what we really want and need, our continual enjoyment of each other, and of the bravery and openness to change which has this year allowed us to chuck most of our past.
*

Note that when we speak of chucking the past, we really mean terminating old no longer interesting friendships, which like the barnacles encrusting the keel of a ship that keep it from gliding smoothly through the water, were preventing us from changing, growing, and moving into a future rich with exciting newness.

In fact except for dumping all of these crippling old friendships, we are devotees of the past just as much as we are lovers of newness.

So there are big chunks of this unhappy modern world that we refuse to buy into.  We never eat in restaurants.  Two days out of three our 1987 car just sits in its carport.  We have no television.  Most days our phone never rings.  And at the moment both of us are reading Confucius……
*

Our unspecialized philosophy also helps to explain why these written blog entries have not focused strictly on the technical issues connected to creating and recording our music.  If they did that, they would give the reader a very incomplete and distorted understanding of why our music is so different and so magical.

*

Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog
Home***Buy Our Music
*

*

Hand in Hand :  Sung on top of a boxus quartus, boardus quartus duet
*

Hand in Hand

a pair of magpies settled in our tree.
twig by twig their nest grew.

a season passed before the day
we saw a young one puzzling with its wings
by sunset all were gone…..

I used to fear someday I’d meet someone
who’d smash my front, reveal the ugly me.
then I found my love, who’s loved me just the way I am,
together we’ve helped each other grow.

hand in hand we fell from the world,
where title and money count more than what you can do.

from the world where too much is made too easy,
where with all their wealth,
no one has what they need.

should we laugh or cry or scream
at these small humans,
who think they’ve triumphed,
love everyone, and know everything.

how different from our new world
where what you do counts more than what you have,
where everyone must work endless hours,
must use their bodies and their brains,
but no one even dreams they know everything.

now we too are a bit ground down,
like our tough new friends
we have no time to suffer.
but when we rake the fallen leaves our arms are strong.

before dawn the magpies chatter by our window,
sometimes they hang by their old home.
sweet wise birds,
if we’re still good enough,
next year please build your nest again…….

*

In this modern world being serious is considered naive and unhip.  Still we are glad that we’ve taken our lives seriously.

In “hip enlightened” society ( which also tends to be wealthy ), walking your talk is seen as unsubtle and even rude.  In that world what you say is far more important than what you do, and there is an unspoken agreement that  “I won’t look at your behavior if you don’t look at mine.”

As Arthur sang and wrote in Dark Clouds, noticing that what our old “birth class” friends said and what they did were quite different was the first step towards realizing that we and they have been travelling on separate paths for a long time…..

*
For people born to privilege, unless they are “silly” enough to believe in noble principles such as honesty, integrity and hard work, and to act accordingly, if they just go with the program and become some sort of professional or businessman, then social and financial success in their early adulthood is pretty much guaranteed.  Of course when they decide to go for such easy success, then naturally they prefer to believe they achieved it because of their great brains, integrity, and well thought out sound choices, even though in fact their success was merely the almost inevitable result of doing what they were supposed to do.  Unfortunately once they have convinced themselves that their early success came from their own hard work rather than from riding on a conveyer belt, they seem to immediately lose all critical attitude towards themselves, or to say it differently, they start believing in their own rap.
*

But we don’t seem to have ever learned to adopt this “sensible” attitude.  Instead we prefer to mean what we say and to do what we’ve said we would do.  Even worse, we seem to be unable to avoid seeing the contradictions in other people’s behavior.

Still, so far taking our lives seriously has worked very nicely for us.  Sure we have not yet completely paid off the debt we accumulated last year, which means that every time the flow of translation jobs slows down, we become acutely aware of our financial vulnerability.  But except for this financial anxiety, our life is beyond sweet.  Unlike most couples from the social class which receives higher education, we are each other’s allies not enemies.  Furthermore, the food that’s good for us tastes good to us, our indoor and outdoor living space is both exquisite and functional, and our friends are people whom we like and respect………

All of this wonderful rich life we see as the result of our having for many years taken our lives seriously ( as individuals before we met and since then as a team ).  We never have been tempted to believe that in reality everyone is only interested in making the maximum money for the minimum amount of work….. and that any other attitude is unrealistic and naive.  This is of course the way people from our past feel no matter what they say……..

Even in my involvement with music, it turns out that I have been more serious than many of my fellow students.
*

.…. When I started taking piano lessons as a very young child, I had no idea that the purpose was to prepare me to become a cultured wife for some highly paid company warrior or professional.  I thought I was merely following in the footsteps of my brother who had already started taking music lessons.  ( Actually I would have preferred dance to piano lessons because back then in Japan there were several popular manga series with young ballerinas as their heroines, but with hindsight I am grateful to my parents for choosing music because in view of my personality and abilities, trying to become a dancer would have been a disaster for me. )

Studying piano taught me the joy of working hard to accomplish something very difficult, which I feel is the most valuable lesson I took away from all my years of piano practice, a lesson which proved much more important than any piano specific skills ( Practice ).  Tasting the delicious fruit of working hard and the fact that when I was practicing no one bothered me, was enough to keep me going until eventually I found myself a college student majoring in music.

But since I was far from having the exceptionally fast fingers, the indestructible body, and the super memory, which are necessary to perform classical pieces the way they are supposed to be played ( Performance ), my 4 years in college were neither easy nor straightforward.  So during my senior year I was a bit shocked and didn’t know what to think, when some of my classmates whom I had thought to be much more talented and serious than I was, whom I had even seen as having much more music in them than I did, started to appear wearing diamond engagement rings.  These girls had shed so many tears after their lessons, had persevered in the face of so much physical pain, I had thought they were a bit more ambitious about their music……

( This was not because I’m in any way opposed to marriage, and in fact I have a lot of respect for wives who take their jobs seriously, who are good cooks and impeccable housekeepers.  Indeed, having been trained by my strict mother, I pride myself on having a very together household.  Arthur also grew up in a orderly household, and we evenly share the work needed to keep our home impeccable.  For example Arthur washes and cuts all the vegetables while I take responsibility for cooking and seasoning them, Arthur sweeps the floors and vacuums the rugs while I clean the bathrooms.  We’re happy to do all of this work because we know that doing it ourselves is the only way for us to have a totally together house. )

Then in India we were appalled by the expats who after just a few months of music lessons, felt that they were good enough to perform or even to teach.  These were the same people who as soon as they learned the word “shruti” (which is like absolute tuning that involves microtones) started feeling they were much hipper than those who had merely done “well-tempered” western music.  And this was even though they couldn’t hear an out of tune note in one of the well-tempered scales which they sneered at ( Notation ).  Of course in our innocence at first we believed and were impressed by their claims, but once we discovered they had precious little accomplishment to support their raps, we backed off from the expat music scene.  Music was too important for us to see it as just a step towards becoming something like “the best Indian classical musician in north west Taos county.”  Instead we began our long journey towards the creation of our own music, a journey which 20 years later we feel has still only begun. ( Indian Music Scene and Doing Music Differently )
*

But to return to the lazy people from our past, I suppose it’s human nature to want to do things the quick and easy way.  However having fallen from the world of the privileged, we now know many people who have no choice but to be strict with themselves since if they were not, they would lose their jobs.  So now we find it even more disgusting that those in the privileged class feel they are entitled to get away with doing as little work as possible, and that even their few tasks need be done to no better than the lowest standard which will be accepted.

……Of course, this must be at least part of why the system is finally collapsing……
*

By the way when we say “people at the top”, this includes most of the professionals and small business owners who like to consider themselves part of the struggling “middle class”, despite having for their entire lives been grossly overpaid.  These are people who have often earned less than they inherited and always less than they feel they deserved.

Though they may indeed be struggling in the sense that many of them don’t have quite enough funds to forever support their grown children who are incapable of taking care of themselves, but who still feel they are entitled to very exalted standards of living ( big houses, fancy cars, long vacations, endless graduate school, perpetual therapy….)
*

Anyway as I wrote earlier these privileged people are convinced that in the face of very difficult situations they have lived their lives with honesty and integrity, and that their financial security resulted from their own hard work.  This means they see their success as proof of their superiority, rather than as evidence that they went along with a sleazy unfair system.

And so they have this peculiar idea that anyone poorer than themselves must be either damaged and homeless or a criminal.  Which means they don’t even notice the existence of that huge group of humans who for disgracefully low wages do the work of keeping everything going ( who run the grocery stores, banks, and post offices, who answer the phones at customer service centers…..)  If by some chance they do notice a working class person, they manage to convince themselves that he is struggling so hard to make ends meet only because he was not smart enough to go to graduate school.  Somehow it never occurs to them that these people grew up with less privilege, and that this unfair world gave them no choice but to start supporting themselves immediately after high school.

We are often puzzled that these well-off people are nearly totally blind to the very existence the majority of humans (even though all the time they encounter workers who are cleaning their houses, serving them food, and repairing their cars ), and by their fixed belief that these people, whom we know to be amazingly together, are easily manipulated by media and not nearly as intelligent as themselves.  To the contrary, in our experience it’s the rich, since they have so little contact with reality and so little idea of who they are, who are addicted to and manipulated by media.

……Unfortunately the modern world view that money is everything and that more wealth is always better has infected some of the working class.  So some hard working people buy into the crazy ideas that rich people have about what is necessary for a good life.  Sadly since these people don’t get overpaid and don’t receive huge inheritances, they end up killing themselves working for things they don’t need and may quite possibly never get.  Even worse, as a result of making material wealth their priority, they lose their innocent sweetness and ability to be happy.  We’ve seen this happen even to people who actually managed to achieve financial success through their own hard work, and it is truly painful to see them totally lost and wallowing in uncertainty, just like the rich people from our past………
*

At this point we feel entitled to give ourselves credit for learning to live happily and for not lacking anything important though we spend only a fraction of the money most Americans think they need.  I suspect part of why we’ve learned to live an elegant life on so little is that we’ve been broke most of our adult lives, but also we feel it was great good fortune to start our shared life in India, where many people manage to keep their self-respect while living on almost nothing.  It puts things in perspective to see poor obviously contented Indians ( and here I’m talking about people like pilgrims from poor villages, not beggars ) sleeping on the stone steps leading down into holy Ganga-ji, and enjoying meals of plain white rice cooked on small cow dung open fires.  Here in the developed countries, everyone including us is off scale spoiled compared to these people, but still remembering them has certainly helped prevent us from being totally sucked into modern materialism.
*

…..But enough of this social criticism and back to my song.

Like with my first song, for this one I wrote a rough outline which Arthur then extensively rewrote and polished.  However this doesn’t mean my job was over when I gave my draft to Arthur, rather it means that the serious process of jointly creating the song had finally began.  So every time Arthur made a change in my song, we both looked at it very critically to see if it actually made the song better and if it still said what I had meant to say.
*

This is very similar to the way we translate Japanese business documents into English.  In that process too, I first provide Arthur with an often clumsy initial English translation of the original Japanese, and then he writes in proper English what he thinks I have been trying to say.  Next we together look at his English translation and keep changing it until I am satisfied it has the same meaning as the Japanese original and he is satisfied that the sentence is correct English.

But there is one huge difference between translation and writing our songs ( or writing this post which is also the product of the same sort of collaboration ).  Since translation involves rendering the not always clearly expressed thoughts of someone else whom we have never met, it can take quite a lot of imagination to dig out their meaning.  Indeed often the writing is so ambiguous that we are forced to translate it somewhat literally.  However since our songs ( and this post ) come from our own thoughts, we feel free to say things anyway we want.
*

……The editing process continued all the way through recording my vocal on top of the duet between two quatertone kalimbas ( Kalimba Family ), and in fact some of the most radical changes happened after we started recording my vocal.  Whenever we noticed that I was having difficulty pronouncing a word, we changed it, or when necessary even the whole phrase containing it.  We even ended up rewriting some entire verses just to make them easier for me to sing, but remarkably these changes usually also made the message clearer.

We feel it’s been extremely helpful that our unspecialized approach has allowed us to continue making changes in our songs until we are completely satisfied.  Indeed, since we ourselves invent and build the instruments, play the music, write and sing the songs, and act as our own producers, recording engineers, and editors, we can do whatever we like at any stage of producing the music.

Since we are such primitive types, not clear thinkers, this organic way of creating and recording seems to suit us.  This way we don’t need to know where we are going until we’ve gone through the process of getting there.

So we have no clear idea of what we really want to say in a song until we’ve read it and rewritten it many times, and even then until we have finally finished singing it, we just don’t know………..

*

Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog
Home***Buy Our Music

*

quartus – quartus :  A boxus quartus, boardus quartus duet
*

This piece played on two quartertone kalimbas ( Kalimba Family ) was actually completed nearly 3 months ago, but since then we’ve been so focused on reediting the music which will be going into our next CD
( hopefully to be released by July ), that we couldn’t find the energy to
write a post to go with it.

Still the piece is just too good to languish unheard on our computer’s
hard drive.

Indeed it’s some of the most spacious and crystalline music which we have so far produced, music that in many ways comes close to being “pure” music, to use this word as it’s sometimes been used to describe Bach’s music.

At the same time it’s music that could induce serious headaches in those musicologists who give it a careful listen.  This is because its clarity, superficial simplicity, and apparent lack of discord makes it sound as though it should be easy to analyze with conventional music theory, when in fact since it’s played on instruments tuned roughly in quartertones, and since its tempo and rhythms are continually changing, this might not be so easy to do….  ( Notation, Slow, Low, And Varied, The Conventional Theory of Chords Is Just A Special Case ).

To create this piece we edited until we were blue in the face, because right from when we first listened to its raw recorded file we felt it had the makings of something very special, and we wanted to do everything possible to realize that potential.

In the end this meant that to cut the raw 52 minute file down to the final finished 6 minute piece took 32 separate editing sessions, or a total of about 110 hours of headache inducing eye-straining work.

And the many long intervals filled with nothing but the ring between the notes did not simplify our work.  Instead they made it distressingly easy to hear every defect, either musical ( clumsiness, repetitiveness, lack of beauty ), or technical
( playing and recording noises, background noises like the wind outside the window or the house creaking ).  This of course is quite different from the situation in more conventional music where there’s almost always some played sound to help hide such intrusive noises.

It’s also worth noting that for most musicians hiring someone to take this much time to edit would be prohibitively expensive.  However since in line with our generalized unspecialized philosophy we do all of our editing ourselves on our own computer, it only cost us bucketfuls of nasty computer sweat.  And of course since we were editing our own music we could make musical decisions (changing the levels of or even silencing some clips, etc.) without any cumbersome approval process.  When there was something we thought should be done, we could just go ahead and do it.

Which is not to say that the slowness of our progress has been without financial implications, or that we have been in the fortunate position of being able to take our time without a money worry in our heads.  To the contrary, way back in November of last year the flow of translation jobs on which we have been relying to cover our expenses, again dwindled to a trickle before once more drying up.

This means that rather than being able to retire our remaining debt as we had optimistically predicted in our July post
( Finding the Time for Music ), we have again been tumbling deeper into the hole.  To say this less abstractly, once more we have been buying our food with our credit cards and paying our rent with cash advances.

But since we knew that after completing this piece we would have the 50 minutes of new music that we needed for our next CD, we felt the only choice with heart was to ignore our money related shivers and to proceed bravely.  And so after finishing this piece, rather than putting aside our music and shaking every available tree for new translation work, we plunged onward into the final editing for our new CD.

Behavior like this would of course seem highly irresponsible to many of our old friends and acquaintances.  It’s all too easy to imagine them clucking their tongues and saying, “that Arthur and Mitsuko…..there they go again getting themselves into trouble…..”

But what to do, such people who have always taken what seemed to them to be the easiest least risky course, will inevitably think that way. ( Though as the years roll by and one watches folks floundering through boring and unproductive lives, one realizes that what initially seemed to be the easy route, may turn out to be a hard way or even a dead end…..)

In any case since we’ve been broke many times before, rather than panicking most days we’ve managed to just be thankful that by keeping the jobs away from us, Corn Mother has given us the time we needed to do the best possible job of reediting our music.

Of course sometimes we do worry that she’s overestimating our psychological strength and our ability to do good work in the face of financial anxiety.  But then we remind ourselves that divine love is usually tough love and that the gods are almost always a bit brutal on those they favor.  To believe anything else, clearly is to fool oneself……

So it would be wrong to get the impression that we’ve been freaked and miserable during this period.  To the contrary our life has been so rich that many times every day ( on our good days that is…..) we turn to each other and smilingly agree, “so far so good” ( which is what the guy who had just jumped off the tall building said to himself half way down…….and which of course is the best that any of us can hope for in this life…….)

We’ve never cooked ourselves better meals and every evening we sit down to an exquisite dinner in an environment that’s more elegant, peaceful, and romantic than that offered by the worlds’ most expensive restaurants.

And even though we’ve been too preoccupied to read the heaviest of the world’s great literature ( Virginia Woolf, Proust, the Greeks….) in minutes snatched from our busyness we have been able to immerse ourselves in writers like Confucius, Chu Hsi, Washington Irving, Defoe, Stevenson, Kipling, and Haggard.

And despite my losing yet another tooth ( my last functioning molar ) and in February suffering through 5 days without heat in the coldest weather ever to hit New Mexico ( one morning it was –27 F ), this winter we’ve even managed to avoid getting big sick.

So it really is a case of so far so good…..  It’s just that part of the recipe which has made this possible is that we’ve been willing to face the fact that sometimes we’ve been more than a bit bummed and more than a bit angry……..

In any case it’s clear to us that our exquisite music and bravely truthful words are the natural product of our general togetherness.

That is to say that we play beautiful music because we have a beautiful life.  ( Unspecialized )

Indeed we strongly suspect that the longstanding myth that to create big art one must be sensitively suffering is horseshit, and represents little more than the capture of art by the failed fucked-up offspring of the upper classes.

To be sure Joyce was an alcoholic, but then there’s Homer who must have been a pretty happy dude despite being blind.  And while there have been many drug addicted suicidal musicians, there are counter examples like Bach who was merely overworked…..

So nowadays when we try to read some “sensitive” bit of official literature ( most recently early Mishima and late Kawabata……) it just turns us off.  To us it seems that if you continue to have a taste for that sort of “me me poor little me” stuff after your early 20’s, clearly you’ve failed to do a decent job of growing up.
*

It’s not the claim that suffering itself is a goad towards creativity that’s horseshit.  In fact a certain amount of externally imposed hardship ( such as our economic troubles ) certainly can fuel the search for newness, can make one less satisfied with the same old same old and more inclined take the risk of searching for a different way.

No what’s horseshit is the claim that sensitive suffering, i.e. that which is self imposed and unnecessary, is essential for an artist.  To the contrary, such suffering is at the best a temporary youthful state, and at the worst a disease.

Reading a book, seeing a movie, or hearing a song about how someone who has everything ( money, support system, intelligence, and a functioning body…..) is miserable may make others in the same position feel better about their lameness, but that doesn’t mean that such productions are good art.  More properly they should be categorized as mental masturbation.
*

But I’ve babbled on long enough.

Now it’s time to bring this post to a conclusion so we can get back to work cleaning up the music that will be on our new CD, a CD which already is showing every sign of turning out to be almost scary good.

Rather than sounding in any way “experimental”, the music on it is Palestrina polished, and of course for it we’ve violated all sorts of taboos by singing words that actually speak to adult concerns.

So wish us luck as we take the final steps towards its completion, and then in a couple of months we hope you’ll come back to this website to purchase your copy of  “Work In  Progress”.

*

Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog
Home***Buy Our Music

*