Life & Learning update feat. Black Majik
It’s been a hot second since I’ve finished a new chapter, but I am slowly working on boxing up that last oscillator in a more permanent form, as well as taking more time than I had before with old chapters of HEM so as to better incorporate them into actual recording projects, perhaps. It’s been almost 8 months since I’ve graduated, and I’m starting to get back into school mode a little more. Doing “school” when you’re not actually in school is way cooler, by the way. There is absolutely no pressure to succeed or do things a certain way other than what your attention focuses you towards. I’ve started working my way through Schuam’s Basic Circuit Analysis (Second Ed.) and am so excited about using my old graphing calculator/ doing algebra towards something functional that I’ve been taking it with me everywhere I go incase I find time to work through any pages or exercises. When getting my allergy shots earlier this week, the nurse said, “you doing homework?” I grimaced and spluttered something about how no, it’s just like leisure reading except I’m sick of reading so many paragraphs of nothing but words, and then writing more words about those words to interact.
Job-wise, I recently started working at a music store, and am still doing audio and lighting tech on the weekends. So now I get to work in acoustic land and big pro-gear land. I’ve been working at Olympia’s Capitol Theater, a historic building that is so historic that many of its electrical workings haven’t been updated since the 1920s. Its audio and lighting gear were last updated around 1993-ish, I believe. It’s been a second. So I’ve gotten to learn about hooking up, fixing, and compensating with jenky gear- a great way to deepen my understanding of audio systems! I feel extremely lucky to get to be a part of this.
The updating of this gear comes with considerations very unique to the situation of this gorgeous non-profit co-owned theater. While for many venues it would make sense to update everything to the latest greatest gear, we are running off of minimum budget, and important aesthetics. That’s right you heard me. The Capitol Theater hums ésprit and to a certain extent the luddite in me fears that updating anything else to digital (hardly any actual film films are shown there anymore) will speed up rather than slow the demise of its Self. The theater must continue to haunt. I could go on forever about analogue, texture, depth, accelerationism, hearts, etc, but that’s for my other blog. [disclaimer: personal blog; “very net”. The messages are the media ⤻⤺]
At any rate, I’m getting to learn a lot from Jeff, who is heading the theater’s technical updates. I’m tempted to drop names but the point is, this guy is well versed and connected to the needs of big gorgeous touring acts film society could be bringing to Olympia. He is also down to create a tech culture that nurtures learning, and to preserve the distinct “charm” of the theater.
Ultimately, I like to think that the role of the theater’s keepers and volunteers is to balance a preservation of material with bringing in of new life. Which, in this case means updating some of the material that is keeping really cool bands from coming to the theater. To put this another way: objects of old beauty, texture, depth, and thing-ness keep ghosts around. Ghosts speak to souls of the living. Souls of the living desire a balance between ghosts and music (the essence of life). If we can bring in more music that feeds souls and makes hearts beat I think the whole city’s heart would beat faster, course living blood, hum,
This is neither the time nor the screen to unpack what stories lie beneath such sentiments. But trust me tactility and material [texture] have everything to do with handmaking electronic music. Depth is the wholes and ésprits I sometimes write or talk about, and what I like to think true systems-thinkers must be aware of. I’m getting very sleepy and don’t want to think this through that much more. Because, again, words, eh.
Final thought: I read Paul Théberge’s Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/ Consuming Technology about six months ago. It was brought up again when conversing with my music store manager. Don is a guy who will actually discourage people from buying gear from the store if he thinks they’re doing it to procrastinate on practice. He wants to make the store’s new website a place that really promotes lessons and helps parents and students find information about prospective new instruments, towards mastering technique. Unlike Guitar Center, Yenney’s prides its self more on its book selection than its pro audio gear. It is incredible to me that I have come full circle back to this store because I used to take piano lessons there in elementary school. My trumpet instructor of 5 years used to teach there. As did my drum kit instructor. By the end of high school though, I had faded away from practicing instruments every day and towards more recording. Read that book if you’ve had this issue. Also read if you are a girl who doesn’t identify with classical music. I didn’t want to go to college; I wanted to become a producer. I had a free ride through my father though, so I went to Syracuse University for music business. Overall, it was definitely the wrong school for me. Skip ahead to now and I still regret not having taken time away from college to live in the real world and think about how I wanted to use that education. Ultimately, I got more away from music than ever before in those years. The summer after my freshman year there, I came home to my mother’s house, went into the attic to find something, saw my drum set still set up, and actually started crying because I had let drums slip away. I just couldn’t be a music major at that school though. I wasn’t ready; I had to figure out this technology issue. Now that I’ve graduated I’m doing pretty much exactly what I had planned to do when out of high school, that is, work for Pacific Stage, write and perform songs, be in a band, and figure out how to best use the recording gear I already have to make cool shit. I still struggle with getting myself to practice drums every day but I’m finally playing that and trumpet again, in my band. Though electronic circuitry is perhaps some sort of perversity of just playing instruments, I get a lot out out of making them. And it is making instruments and sounds. Jeez. I’m sorry. I’m totally fading. I can’t remember what point I was trying to make there. At the end of the day, a lot of why I’m doing this stuff is still just because it holds my attention, period. There is also a logical component that tells me I can make a lot of money on this stuff and thus get to work less hours and thus have more time to learn more of it and make more art. There is also an illogical component that just wants to set a goal so high that it will take me decades to accomplish. This may or may not be set. My brain is such that I can’t just go to school to become an electrician right now; I have to prepare myself in a lot of ways. And by the time I’ve prepared myself I might be ready something else. Though I am a fairly logical thinker, my actual actions and focus tends to be governed by highly uncommon sense. If I try to tell you my goals with anything less than a continua of actions, they will become sentences instead.
