(Phaysis)

If you’ve known me for long, you know that I really, really like the band Rush. Of the handful of arena shows I’ve been to, Rush has been the most frequent. I have all their studio albums, a stack of T-shirts, concert videos and a documentary or two. To say I am a fanatic is an understatement.

This week, among my internet friends and some sites I frequent, I’ve seen references to a lot of Rush stuff. A lot. Their current concert tour. A friend’s overview of their show this week in Dallas. An intimate interview with the band on Canada’s “Studio Q“. An interview with CNN before a show.  The full-blown documentary of the band released earlier this year. And in the news today is an article on the new Guitar Hero video game featuring the entire “2112″ suite (all 21 minutes), required to unlock a “Demi-God” to slay “The Beast” during the game’s Quest mode (how cool is that?). That’s a lot of Rush news.

These guys have been going at their thing for 40 years now, and that’s a huge achievement. But during most of that time, they’ve toiled in some level of obscurity. They have a gaggle of radio-friendly hits, but by and large their musical and lyrical content borders the fringe of what the mass culture is willing to accept. The main consumers of Rush music are the nerdier ones among us. That’s been the joke for a long while, but every joke has a thread of truth.

So, if they’ve been in the fringe for so long, enjoyed mostly by those who get their jollies on the weirder stuff, then why all the sudden press from the band?

Ah, yes, the press. Ever notice when disparate threads come together in your head and tie themselves together into a larger narrative? All the talk of the band this week reached a critical mass with me where it confessed the story of a band propelled back into the Limelight by a very skilled public relations firm whose sole job is to reestablish, in the public’s mind, the importance of their works and their worth to rock music at large.

I don’t need convincing, but apparently more outside people do. I can’t begrudge them that. If the Rolling Stones can keep going, selling out stadiums for more than $100 a pop (cheap seats), if U2 can still make an impact and elevate the people lucky enough to get a ticket to a show before it sells out in an hour, then why should Rush languish in the shadow? It’s noteworthy that the band even referenced these and other bands in their interviews, tying themselves and their career to the cannon of rock-and-roll. It’s a clever play.

The members have a certain level of humility in their interviews, and it’s somewhat refreshing to see a band of their caliber have that. But there’s also a subtle subtext of seeking recognition, of increasing the brand awareness, of getting the rewards they merit by sticking to it for so long. Of a band making a push to rocket into the stratosphere where the rock gods live. Of going out in a blaze of glory.

Our better natures seek elevation.
A refuge for the coming night.
No one gets to their heaven without a fight.

As much as I dislike The Eagles during their “country” period, this morning while listening to Johnny Cash’s cover of “Desperado”, I finally got it. This whole time, I’ve been disengaged from the song, ignoring the lyrics, pressing “next” or switching stations. It’s a painfully slow ballad. But as I ate breakfast, I let the song play, and the lyrics sank in.

The gist of the song is that you can’t go on for too long straddling the fence on finding a lifelong love. Comes a point in life where it gets so difficult to catch the one you want that it’s far better to get caught by the one you’re with. Settling, in a word. Let somebody love you before it’s too late.

The Queen of Hearts is always your best bet.

(Yeah, I just learned some wisdom from Glenn Fry and Don Henley. Dammit.)

During my downtime the past few nights, I’ve been listening to and reading up on a pair of phenomena that involve strange radio transmissions.

Have you ever heard of Numbers Stations? These are radio stations on the shortwave band whose only job is to transmit a random-sounding series of numbers either by voice, Morse code, or noises. It is theorized that they are used by governments to send coded messages to their operatives out in the field, yet no single government will admit to using them. A Ham listener can use signal triangulation to locate the transmitting antenna, but there’s no clear way of knowing who the station serves and what its message is.

The use of Numbers Stations is actually growing even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War (some would argue that the Cold War never actually ended). Even in this day and age of high-speed communications and strong encryption, the fact that clandestine activities still happen with this antiquated technology bears testament to the fact that this is probably the only truely anonymous form of communication.

Since the last few decades of last century, there’s been growing public awareness and concern regarding Numbers Stations, and various researchers, Ham operators, and writers have taken to the cause of documenting these stations, logging their existence, writing down the patterns of numbers, and making audio recordings for a wider distribution outside the amateur radio realm. One such collection was compiled by the Irdial netlabel of England on a 4-CD set called the “The Conet Project – Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations“. Irdial has been kind enough to release this collection for public download at Archive.org. I suggest you read the Wikipedia article, grab the collection, and take a listen. It’s chilling, haunting, and a thrill to hear.

The next phenomenon, though not as clandestine, is still sharply related to the first. Mankind has been hearing strange noises ever since the first 20-mile telegraph line. Operators would hear clicks, pops, whistles and chirps coming out of their receiver sets in between all of the buzzer noises of the telegraph transmission. What they didn’t know at the time, and what we’ve discovered over the last century since the telegraph, is that they were hearing electromagnetic noises generated by the Earth. Every lightning strike, every Aurora Borealis, every solar particle, cosmic ray, burst of energy that strikes the Earth, emits a broad range of electromagnetic noise across the whole frequency spectrum, from DC current up to visible light.

But the electromagnetic frequencies clustered within our human range of hearing (called VLF, or Very Low Frequency) are the most interesting. With the right radio receiver — essentially a large antenna to pick up the noise, an amplifier, an audio filter, and an amp to power a speaker or headphones  — you can listen to these pops and whistles yourself. Researchers have been building these radios and studying the noises for decades, making years-worth of audio recordings. Irdial published a collection of recordings called “Electric Enigma: The VLF Recordings of Stephen P. McGreevy” (also found on Archive.org), gathered by McGreevy on his outings around the Northern hemisphere using equipment he built himself. I suggest you grab it too; the sounds are incredible.

These restore my faith that, even at my age, there still might be some wonder left in this world.

Three. One. Seven. Five. Nine.

Lyrics websites — those sites that appear on the first page of search engine results when you type a song name followed by “lyrics” — have proven themselves useful to me from time to time. Since my CD collection is locked away at home, when I need to look up the lyrics to Manfred Mann’s “Blinded By the Light” [Google], I can pick a site, any site (none of which I’ll link to here since they are so widespread, yet deceivingly similar),and I’ll see that Manfred is singing “Revved up like a deuce”. Rather handy.

My problem with these lyric sites is that they are essentially traps for personal information. Every one of these sites is set up to entice unknowing users into giving up their personal contact info. Every link suggesting you “download this as a ringtone”, “send this song to your phone”, “download this song”, “share this song with a friend”, “add to library”, is a trick to get the user to divulge their cellphone number, their email address, name, contact information of a friend, sometimes even the user’s secret login details on a social networking site. If it’s data, they want it for free.

I’m wary enough that I don’t provide them with any info, but not everyone is savvy enough to catch wise to the ruse. The promise of musical rewards in exchange for a verified bit of info is the bitwise equivalent of a Nigerian 419 scam, where the victim must put up something valuable first before the deal can go through. That deal never goes through. What happens, instead, is the victim’s contact info is collected, used and sold for unsolicited advertising. What you expect is a ringtone; what you get is marketing texts that won’t stop. What you expect is to share your favorite song with your best friend; what you get is you and your bestie dumped on by a mountain of spam.

Personally, I hope my friends and family are wise to this, but that is seldom the case. And that scares me.

My final complaint about the lyrics sites is that they are predatory money-mills for their owners. They’ve figured out the formula for maximizing ad revenue and minimizing cost per click by publishing these sites in bulk. Each site has its own domain name and templates, but they’re run on the same servers by the same companies. There are centralized databases of song lyrics behind whole groups of them; the same content is served by all of a group’s sites. There are companies whose only product is an interface to return lyrics for plugging into a webpage. The lyrics now mean nothing; they are bait. They are just a draw to expose users to a page full of advertisements. Each time an ad is served and presented to a user, that’s pennies in the bank. Draw enough users, and the site owner is raking in good income. Run enough websites, each as disposable as the one before it, and you are guaranteed a heavy income for almost nothing.

Honestly, I can’t begrudge anyone their ability to make money. We all have to survive. It’s just that I see it as a cheap move, and part of me is pissed that I’ve never been able to drop my morals low enough to try this kind of income stream. Slime molds grow on any surface. I don’t see an end to this kind of business model any time soon; the model of using a shedload of cheap, disposable gateway sites to lead the user (and their wallets) to a pyramidding series of websites has been around since the early days of Internet porn, and exists in some parts in the spamming world. As long as it’s cheap enough to flood the market with worthless content on cheap websites, each referencing the other in order to bump up their PageRank on the search engines, while raking in the cash while serving advertising, then this kind of model will persist.

It appears I’m developing a gear fetish. Been feeling the itch to make music again, and my recent acquisition of music equipment is apparently spurring that. It started years ago with a MIDI controller and a softsynth. Then, two years ago, a microphone, an audio interface and a drum machine. Then, in the past year, a mixer, a sound module, and a PC I built for audio work. That got me going for a while.

And then my latest conquests: a 1984-vintage analog synth and a 1992-vintage sampler. When I count those with my 1987-vintage non-MIDI keyboard (from high school) and my 1991 sound module, it becomes clear to me that most of my equipment was not made in this century. Meaning I can truly, without studio fakery, create the Vintage sound.

For the first time in a while, I have sonic and artistic freedom. I have outboard gear that I can tweak and explore. I’m not spending hours getting frustrated with software synths. You turn it on, turn it up, and play; it’s really exciting. I’ve barely scratched the surface of what is possible, and that freaks me out. Every time I punch buttons, I should be pressing “Record”. I started doing that, calling the recordings “Noodle Sessions”, since they essentially are that. But I need to do more. Real songs, complete songs.

And that’s the problem. It’s a Thing now. I need to record. I need to make new music. Glass Door has been rather dormant this past decade, and that’s a travesty. My friend Jared demands new music, and I’d rather like to oblige him. I’d love to get the project flowing again. But I’m having difficulty.

I think one of my problems with creativity is getting it going. It’s that standing friction. Getting it rolling reduces the problem down to rolling friction, which offers much, much less resistance. Having a friend, a cohort, a fellow musician working alongside would really help. It makes sense that some of the best electronic bands are composed of two guys; one bounces ideas off of the other, and the productivity flows.

But the nexus of my creativity problem, though, stems from the source of creativity itself. From which well does creativity flow, and how does it flow? Should it flow out freely of its own accord, like an artesian well, or do you have to draw it out yourself? How do you dip your bucket to draw it out? Once it’s out, should the water pool like a lake, or flow against its constraints like a stream?

Do you punch buttons and play melodies and overlay them until you feel like you’re done, and hope for the best? That seems rather random and subject to the environment surrounding the moment of creation. Do you wait until a good idea forms, and then try muddling your way through it until you get a shadowy facsimile of what you intended? I’m between these extremes, and like the hungry mule equally between two identical stacks of hay, my creativity is dying of starvation due to the indecision.

I can only hope that I make some motion soon before the current urge to create eats itself and dies.