(Phaysis)

Despite the recent bottom end of the neurochemical roller coaster, today was OK in comparison to last weekend. Brain juices being what they are, if there’s an excess or absence, it will rectify itself in due time. The strategy is to mediate the extremes by whatever methods are prudent. I chose to take a long walk Sunday night, and that helped a bit. Didn’t clear my head, but the exercise gave me something to do. I think the turning point was the odd cocktail drink I made Monday night with vodka, apples, and cinnamon. I took a picture and posted the recipe on FB, and got a ton of good chatter about it. It was the bellwether towards making life seem bearable again (the intoxication didn’t hurt, but I worry about loving the bottle a bit much lately).

Tonight, I set out to work on my song “Communion” whose lyrics I wrote two years ago during the gray area between awake and asleep. The music’s been knocking around in my head since then. I’ve put it off for far too long, and I’ve had enough. The positive chatter I got regarding “Best Laid Plans” was enough to push me over the edge towards committing something to the songwriting effort. I think I’m proficient enough with my music gear to make it happen without too much frustration.

“Communion” is, chromatically, a dense piece of work, and I’m having no end of confusion about which chords I should use, where I should use them, and how I’m to transition between them. There are phrases that stick out, some things are more solid than others, and I have chunks, pieces that should fit together if only they’d want to fit together. The problem is that I’ve got this thick set of notes, like the bass note would be, say, D#, but the vocal note would be F# (a third), but the tough decision is which I should use as the base of the progression. I know the dominant notes are in the key of F#, but each part of the song seems to have its own soul. The choruses have different chords from the verses, the bridge is distant from the interludes.

It’s a mystery, it’s a puzzle. And the more I play with the pieces, the fuzzier it gets. If I could just see the entire picture on the front of the box, I’d know what to do. I’m hoping to look away long enough to have the parts magically assemble themselves when I’m not looking. The subconscious mind is funny that way; it can take puzzles and solve them when you’re not trying.

Just so you know, I’ve been nerding out pretty hard this past week.

Last Monday, I picked up a very used Roland D-50 keyboard at the pawn shop. Although it was manufactured in 1987, it still output audio and the MIDI still works, but the poor thing has problems (I should’ve talked them down on price, but even still I got a decent deal). All of the keys on the fingerboard worked, but a few of the keys had screwed-up velocity sensitivity. The pitch bend was busted. And some of the panel buttons either don’t work or require a heavy push to get them to work. This poor piece of gear needed some serious TLC.

Knowing what I was up against, I made the due diligence to get some required tools to do the cleanup and minor repairs. Got some paint brushes for dusting, a wire brush to scrape any rust, some 91% rubbing alcohol (because 70% has too much water), and a can of electronic contact cleaner.

Within an evening I had it taken apart. The damned thing had spiderwebs and cat hair in it. No wonder it half worked. Last owner didn’t give a shit, and it shows. I got most of the crap out of the case in short time, but it took another evening to get the fingerboard completely disassembled, and I mean completely, like down to the frame. Pulled the keys off and soaked them in soapy water; they were as nasty as the bottom of a computer mouse.

It took a few evenings, but I got both circuit boards under the keys cleaned, got the rubber contacts wiped down, all the dust and “water damage” (to doctor the truth) are cleaned up. I found proof that the keyboard has been worked on before by someone who didn’t have the smarts or the tools to do the reworks correctly, and that probably accounts for one of the keys reporting full velocity on each press. I redid the rework; hopefully that fixes that.

Yesterday, I decided that I was tired of having sub-par tools to do electronics work. After having the pleasure of working with professional soldering equipment at work, my piss-poor Radio Shack iron just won’t do anymore, so I went to the electronics store and got a good Weller soldering station, a handful of different tips, a bottle of solder flux, a dispenser, and a cheap multimeter to replace the piece-of-shit I’ve had to use for the past 25 years. Nerding hard core.

This afternoon, I pulled the entire unit apart, taking the boards and cable assemblies off of the master frame. Took them to the balcony for dusting and a heavy session with the contact cleaner. Afterwards, more of the panel buttons went non-functional, so I spent part of this evening tracking down replacement parts. I desoldered and removed one of the switches, and I’ll take it to work tomorrow to get its exact dimensions with some proper measuring tools. If it matches the replacement switches I’ve found so far, I’ll be placing an order for an entire panel’s worth of buttons.

This is all very exciting!

Hopefully by next week’s end, I’ll have a fully-functional Roland D-50, refurbished and ready to go. And then the hard part will begin: writing music. D’oh!

It took a few viewings, but now I understand that “Dead Man” (1995) is a palindrome in structure. The movie begins with the protagonist William Blake riding the train in, and ends with him riding a canoe out. Begins with him stumbling through the muddy streets of Machine with the butchers, hunters, mothers, morticians and steel signs, and ends with him stumbling through the muddy village of the boat people with the butchers, hunters, mothers, morticians and wooden totems.

I’m still trying to piece together the correlations between the two ends, marking events on the front half and matching them with events from the back half. The plot is episodic in nature, so it’ll take some mulling over in my subconscious to assemble the order and draw parallels.

If you’ve not seen “Dead Man”, you should see it. It’s slow, poetic, and through its sparse use of dialog tells a serious story. A man who’s had a rotten run of luck attempts to make a fresh start. Instead, he reaches the end of the line and through a rotten run of luck reaches the end of the line and makes a fresh start to the next spirit plane.

“The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn from the crow.”

♫ Futurepop, Ambient, Chillout, and Dream / These are a few of my favorite streams! ♫

• Digitally-Imported: DI has a wide-ranging selection of electronic music streams, but the free versions get lower bitrate and jarring advertisement drops.
  • Chillout: “Ambient psy chillout, check out our trippy flavors!”
  • Ambient
  • Trance
• Blue Mars: These streams are the love project of a guy named Lone; they were off the air for a while during the bad old Internet-streaming copyright wars, but are back. His playlists feature a handful of select artists, but sometimes you’ll hear new stuff. Very good for being not in your head.
  • Blue Mars: “In Memory of Earth”. Space music to travel the stars.
  • Cryosleep: “Zero Beat, Guaranteed” This is the most ambient of ambient. Nothing is more mellow.
• Digital Gunfire: “Long Range, Hard Hitting.” Futurepop, Darkwave, Industrial. Sometimes hard, sometimes aggro, sometimes hopeful. I fucking love this station. Listener-supported.
• Soma FM: Unique in that they have a strong selection of electronic and non-electronic streams. Top-notch music directors. Entirely listener-supported. My favorite streams:
  • Drone Zone: “Serve best chilled. Safe with most medications.” My other go-to ambient stream.
  • Doomed: “Dark industrial/ambient music for tortured souls.” You’ll hear stuff on here not even Digital Gunfire will touch.
  • Tag’s Trance Trip: “Progressive house / trance. Tip top tunes.” High-energy stuff.

This question goes out to all you librarians and taxonomists in my readership.

I have a large music collection, and I make every effort to keep all of my file tags as clean, correct and complete as possible. This allows me to easily search my collection and drill down to the artist, album, and song I demand to hear at that moment. If you’ve ever seen my CD collection, you’re aware of my meticulous arranging and sorting by certain criteria. The same is with my electronic collection. Physically, I prefer to sort by artist, then by album release date. Electronically, I can sort by any taxonomy I so choose. Easy enough.

So, going back to my library research orientation in my first year in college, I learned that books are sorted by subject, then by the author’s name, last name first, and then by book title. If the first word of the title is an article like “a”, “an” or “the”, it is moved to the end of the title after a comma and the book is sorted appropriately. So if I were to search for H.G. Well’s “The Time Machine”, I would search in the fiction section under the author “Wells, H.G.”, then for “Time Machine, The” somewhere after “Ten Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”. This makes sense. If the author was a publishing group or authorship can’t be pinned to one author, then it would be sorted under the group name.

I do the same with my music collection. If the album is published under a band name, then it’s sorted alphabetically under the band name. Aerosmith would be sorted before Aphex Twin. But if the album is published under the artist’s name, then it’s sorted by the artist’s name, last name first. So Fiona Apple would be sorted between Aphex Twin and Apples In Stereo under Apple, Fiona. This makes sense.

When I first built my music collection, back when music software wasn’t so smart, I would manually put articles at the end of the album and song titles because the software could clump all of the “The”s together, etcetera. It’s a pain and a hassle to do it manually, and sometimes the “extra album info” features of the software would break because it didn’t recognize the album title, but I lived with it. Luckily, modern music software has gotten smart about the use of articles in the song and album titles and sorts appropriately in the music browser interface.

But the problem comes with the artist names, which I store in my particular, perfectly reasonable way according to my training and my experience with sorting physical media: last name, then first. However, the software doesn’t know that I’m listening to Fiona Apple; it searches the web for Apple, Fiona and finds no data to show. Just like the old days with the title articles, so it is with artist names.

So what do you guys do about this? Is saving the artist name as “Last, First” still viable, or is it a vestigial relic of an older technology? I like to sort by this method because it makes sense to me; I shudder to think about trying to scroll through a page of Michaels just to get to Michael Hedges. I don’t know, maybe doing the “Last, First” method is as obsolete in the electronic realm as typing double spaces after sentences; a complete necessity on technologies now rendered obsolete. Should I get modern and save artist names in the natural format? Most player software has a search box to allow me to jump straight to my desired songs, but I’d have to change my habits.

What’s your thought?