Sound Architecture

Cold and unknown beneath the water a small makeshift home but the bath would overflow and you couldn't keep from flooding

Little time to write. We’re busy filling orders for M.H’s new album, Soft Hate. 

I knew immediately that I loved Rey’s Theme. I was taken aback by how modern it it is; coming from J.W. after all. In an olive-colored shag-rug sea of crusty seventies orchestration(I mean that in a good way, actually), this piece not only holds its own, but signals a new light(ahem, ray)-- much like the new cast themeselves--ready to carry the series to far away places. 

I had worked out a piano arrangement, but in truth, my piano is on it’s last legs, and I just can’t get the sounds I’m after any longer--thus putting a damper on some of my new material.

Yet, I didn’t want to waste the arrangement, and so, as I’ve been toying around with some 8-bit sounds to accompany a project my nephew and I are working on, I decided to explore how silly/absurd Rey’s Theme would sound in this mode. 

Now, I know there was a Star Wars game on the Atari, which I never played. There was one on the NES that I had played, once, at a friend’s house. But the one that I owned was the SNES Empire Strikes Back game, and though the samples became more dynamic in this era of gaming orchestration, I”ve enjoyed picturing running around Hoth as 8-Bit Luke getting absolutely wrecked by Wampas, Snowtroopers, and other such space assholes. Man, I hate thqt game.

i. Find me on Bandcamp, nothing ever happens there.

ii. Memoryhouse is releasing an album this week. It’s like the operation was a success, but the patient died.

iii. Slide into my DM’s on Instagram. 

Odd and unfortunate timing led to my much-adored rabbit, BB, falling ill mere days into Memoryhouse’s charity Christmas album, benefitting rabbit shelters. 

Perhaps she didn’t like that the attention was off her for a brief period. At any rate, she is most fortunately on the mend, and we managed to sleep through the night without incident for the first time in four days. Still, the level of grief when tending to something so close to your soul, is simply unsurpassed. We got sick with her-- we hunched over in pain beside her--and mercifully, we settled ourselves down, as did she. And holy actual fuck, is giving your rabbit medication difficult. 

I’d been playing a lot of Nintendo games recently--mostly due to having more free time as a result of completing the Great American Novel. Upon completing something that took so many years to finish, your self-perception can get lost in the process; the result of which feels like some comatose blend of contentment, and yes, more grief. Comatose Blend, $4.99. Seasonal.

This is all directing me towards the game I recently finished. Majora’s Mask. I had it as a kid, but slowly grew out of video-games at the time--it remained unfinished. After a passenger on my ultralong flight to Italy shared his 3DS with me, I felt a real urge to finish it.

And so, Majora’s Mask, the key tenet of which is grief, and the ways we cope with it(denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and if you’re lucky, acceptance) became a quest of sorts to process my own grief. And I treated it as such. My girlfriend would ask, firmly, “what are you doing today?”, to which I would respond, at 9:15am on a Tuesday, just to give a clear picture of where everything’s at, “trying to figure out what the hell to do in the Great Bay Temple”.

True, perhaps there are more emotionally mature ways to work through the knotty chemistry of grief and fulfillment. Grief Fullfilment; you’re blindfolded, and someone flicks your face at a constantly changing metre as you oscillate through the Five Stages. Perfect. 

Or maybe, as our hero of time so generously does for the creatures he encounters, we could simply play the Song of Healing, and everything will be ok.

This track is a recomposed version of Song of Time, originally appearing in Majora’s Mask, arranged and performed by me. Cool.

Check me out on Bandcamp. I never release anything.

Memoryhouse has a new record called Soft Hate coming, stay up to date on news and shit we’re trying to sell.

On Instagram, so slide in my DMs.

$1.30 gets you a Memoryhouse Christmas album, which will go to rabbit shelters. Deal alert.

Pleased to have finished a two-part piece, which is up on bandcamp. This is part II. Click here, there, everywhere.

So there’s this corny line, in this corny movie, and it’s something like, “What's your dog's name? I don't know. He never told me.”

No wait, it’s, “Your heart is diseased[actually]! You need a new one.”

..

J.D. from Heathers contends “But this is my heart! I'm afraid that if they take it away I won't be able to love you the same.”

Ok, so it’s awful. It’s one of those movies that speaks exclusively in romantic platitudes, and a lot of them don’t make sense, and maybe, maaaybe this movie single-handedly brought Belle & Sebastian into existence(proof: they didn’t exist before this film came out), and really, Christian Slater--he of an orphaned[whoops, literally, again] baboon heart-- should just take the heart transplant, live, and over time, teach his new, untainted heart to love Marisa Tomei, whose heart is also tainted. So much taint in this movie.

Actually, is this even that far removed from say, Joyce’s “The Dead”? Michael Furey--who for all intents and purposes, had his fate sealed—chose early[earlier, actually][or actually, some degree of super-untimely][very unfortunate] death for his love, Gretta, as opposed to dying later, in a hospital. It’s more gesture than anything, but you know, now I have to get into this.

Ok, so Gretta’s husband is named Gabriel, and he’s like you and me; spends most of his time dicking around with his music player, avoiding deep and/or spiritual connection in favor of a more externalized, pictorial expression of love(insert @Instagram tag). So, actually that’s what started the whole Michael Furey thing. He played a song on his Gen 1 iPod(humour!) and his wife—that’s Gretta—she remembers Furey. We, as in Gabriel, hear the story, and we get to thinking—and I am paraphrasing here—that if this act, this dying in the snow for the chance to see Gretta once more, is truly the essence of love, then I in fact, have never truly loved. Something like that. Roll credits.

Ok actually, so now the movie, the Christian Slater one, is coming into light. Slater gets truth-bombed by Tomei: You love with your mind and soul, not actually with your heart. It's just a saying.

Instead of dropping the mic and walking off-screen, she continues to say this exact thing in some-kind of Ephronian feedback-loop for what seems like forever, but the point is evident-ish; love is a conscious choice that you make in spite of fate, or fear, or culture, or whatever, science. You can fall, listlessly, in love, but you have to be brave enough to allow your soul, that winged, diaphanous creature(#mysoulisabutterfly) access.

Which brings me to the actual quote from this movie. Ok, these were all quotes from the movie, but this is the actual quote:

I am going to fall in love with you. You don't have to love me back. I am going to give you my heart.

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Links:

Help me pay off my gambling debts by purchasing You Don’t Have to Love Me Back, and others.

If Memoryhouse’s Facebook page gets to 50,000 likes by the end of today, little Jimmy will be saved. Do you really need any more blood on your hands?

Slide into my DM’s, on Instagram.

Keeping up with my prodigous output of one new song a year. Thought it'd be fitting to release it on my birthday. Thanks to everyone for listening and following along, Denise and I have been working incredibly hard on the new Memoryhouse record. 

Not a day goes by where I don't wish I could just set the new Memoryhouse record free, and unleash it's awesomeness to the masses. We're incredibly proud of it, and very close, but we need to make sure it's right to us, and when it is, it'll be there for anyone who cares to listen #ipromise

In the mean time, check out some instrumental work on bandcamp

https://evanabeelemusic.bandcamp.com

"There can be no thought of finishing..."

So begins Dr. Robert Goddard's letter to science fiction magnate H.G. Wells. Goddard, somewhat of a Howard Hughes of the Space Age, spoke of endless, indelible ambition. An impact whose resonance would occupy "generations" in both scope and magnitude.

At some point you set off on a path where the distinction of passion over principle grows increasingly distant. A principle--something to live by--something "fundamental" that you hold close because it's something you understand, can stabilize you in ways that passion never could.

To submit to passion is understanding that there can never be enough. As Goddard portends, "...no matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just beginning". The thrill, an endless cycle of death-then-un-death can function in ways as to make the casual minutiae of mere daily coherence at times painful, and super-significant; often overlapping as if to create a Venn diagram out of the human spectrum of emotions, all shooting off, drunkenly, infinitely, in every direction.

My job requires a certain dedication to passion. I write music, grind that music up, throw a sausage casing over it, wash my hands, and do it again. I can spend eight-to-ten hours a day in various forms of transportation, for three-to-six months a year in order to actualize the passions that lead me down this path. And though these events largely carry-through without much narrative, I'm often left wondering if there will exist a point where I've had enough. The good kind of enough. Like when you go out for Mexican food and decide to pass on the cinnamon churros for dessert because deep down, you know you've had enough, and why spoil that?

The pursuit is unquantifiable. Purportedly endless. Both "literally and figuratively", as our subject of discussion surmises. So it goes.

Todays's selection is another song from my Amor e Domínio da Agua soundtrack.

"Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? 

…Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. (Pause.) I can’t go on! (Pause.) What have I said? ”

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot is by all accounts, an impenetrable work that—as the passage of time itself—carves its way into the heart of our tenuous desire for an understanding of a greater purpose in our life. 

Godot is that person on the bus whom you’d wished you’d introduced yourself to, had you not been pre-occupied with Bejeweled Blitz. Or the email you’re still waiting to receive concerning that Really Important Thing that will ostensibly change your outlook on life.

Godot is 2009 Dwight Howard; you’re really sure he existed, and damn if you’re not going to spend God knows how many hours watching terrible Laker basketball for the slim hope that Godot will return—as was foretold—and everything will make sense once again.

Maybe Godot does exist. Perhaps Dwight Howard, 3x Defensive Player of the Year is alive and well on some fanciful island with 2Pac and Elvis, and they’re sitting around listening to Vince Guaraldi, laughing at MJ’s propensity for oversized cargo jeans.

Wait for someone to find you. Wait for someone or something to explain why you’re like this. Wait for strangers to give you free money to create something because you’re a Good Person, and it’s not your fault you got a Bachelor of Philosophy.

Waiting is the easy part, and really, there is nothing wrong with it. If you’re lucky, you’ll grow thicker skin. You’ll be imbued with the wondrous push/pull tension of anticipation, reminding you that you are indeed a living thing with hopes and dreams, and that waiting or no waiting, you’re going to accomplish something. Just try occupy those brief moments between the elation of meaningful contact, and the inevitable descent back into dread and uncertainty with strength and dignity. And substance, that too.

Two or three times a day, for 20 minutes or so, I escape the confines of my home office and work on my jump-shot. I try to get 50 shots in before my creaky knees collapse, or the ball deflects to some weird part of a neighbouring property that I’m temporarily too embarrassed to retrieve (this happens a lot, and I’m an adult, so it’s really weird).

I do this in spite of the fact that by all means, my window into athletic superstardom has been closed for some time, (side note: can a door that was never open technically be closed, or is that just a wall with a non-functioning door knob on it?) I still place a great deal of importance on getting away from the more self-actualized version of myself. The one with the insatiable fickleness in spite of having a pretty great life.

It's nice to be bad at something. Or perhaps, to be bad at something and be totally ok with it, knowing that you're just doing the thing that makes you happy, and who cares if that weird neighbor kid feels the need to weigh-in on the subject (I hope you're reading this, weird neighbor kid!).

It's a wake-up call. Like when you get to the point in your life where you're so criminally competent, or adequate, or ok(!) with your work, or yourself, or your relationships that you grow ever-consumed by the dread of failure. So you shut-off and stop applying yourself, or going on adventures, or smelling flowers, or taking awful 17-foot jump shots because you're good at exactly what you know, and the speck of light that broke through that sealed door-frame (or wall with a non-functioning door knob) is growing increasinlgy distant.

Here's an instrumental version of something that's been simmering for a while. Lately, I've found myself increasingly interested in textural elements being manipulated into percussion (something I picked up during our collaboration with RZA and Colin Munroe last year). Thus, we get a nice RZA-lite vibe going on in the song.

More to come.

Also, Denise and I are doing a live telecast via-stageit.com this Sunday. So that'll exist. Tickets can be found here.

Also, go Spurs.

A simple distraction on a Fender rhodes. I haven’t been able to dedicate a lot of time to my various projects since Memoryhouse began gradually gaining traction on new recorded material. The up-shot is that I feel Denise and I have grown into ourselves in a manner that has allowed us to both re-connect with our past achievements, while forging into something that feels so much more vital, and honest with our present creative ambitions.

All of which is to say that everything feels “better”, and also content on this  audio journal may run a bit light for a few weeks. 

Stream/Purchase Volume II 

Stream Pale King’s “An Airing”

Just something to keep this music-journal going.

All wrapped-up in demo-ing new Memoryhouse material for the next album, which is equal parts gratifying/electric/daunting/anxious/horrifying/challenging/fun. 

Introductions are hard, especially since the internet is one big, loud game of "telephone". So, in light of the typically grandiose, impossibly epic circumstances that most would-be bands find themselves in when they realize they are unsuited for stable employment, I'm just going to try to be as honest and direct as possible. No conjecture, no mythologizing, and alas, no Star Wars.

i. Basically, I've got this music that i've been working on for the past couple of months and I've decided to release it. Simple. The project is called "Pale King". I suggest checking out the song on the linked Bandcamp page, it should sound better.

ii. I don't know if I'd call it a side project, it's more like the thing that I'm doing when I'm not doing the other thing that I'm doing. You get it. On the plus side, the other thing that I'm doing is going to be doing lots of things this summer, in case you missed that thing.

iii. Yes, David Foster Wallace. I know you appreciate him more; non-Major Motion Picture-sticker version of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, curious affection towards doo-rags and long, sexy footnotes. It's OK. 

iv. This track here is the only instrumental, which is great because how exhausting would a full album of that be? It'd be as exhausting as being repeatedly punched in the face by a cloud.

More to come. Cool? 

“It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.” 

Isadora Duncan, pre-cranial decapitation. Though I've had these words scrawled in a notebook for several years, I think I'm only just beginning to reach an understanding. Or perhaps, acceptance.

"When will we know it’s enough?"

The nature of ambition in question. Something I can’t help but obsess over, regardless the pursuit. The sheer multitude of angles/variables/diversions to consider when putting a song together is at once exciting, and daunting. 

"Old Haunts", track 10 from The Slideshow Effect, sought to conclude the album-cycle through meta-narrative, which, for better or worse, is exactly something that we would do. I always felt that we were oddly categorized with the slew of “80’s Saturday morning cartoon sun-kissed fun-times bands”. Our music tended to struggle with the idea of possessing memories you didn’t want to keep (we did sample Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind after all). So while the Garbage Pale Kids, and Hi-C Ecto Coolers, and whatever all of the other easy, nostalgic touchstones that Buzzfeed converts into ad-revenue, do have their place, it isn’t really with us. 

Kept you here beneath my breath/Smooth the sheets upon the bed/Gathered slowly on the steps/Placed an heirloom to forget.

"Old Haunts" wrestles with the idea of coming to terms with your memory and moving forward, effectively bringing an end to that weird chapter in your life, where maybe you started listening to Belle & Sebastian to impress college girls, or awkwardly wore a fedora for two years, or got a tattoo with an Interpol lyric, or decided to buy every season of Scrubs on DVD. All things (good and bad) lead you to the person you’re supposed to be, regardless of those awful early-Facebook conversations with an old flame.

"It’s enough", she yawps. It’s never really enough.

Continuing to strive for a more honest, visceral approach to composition. I spent a number of months struggling with writer's block, so lately my approach has been to just sit at the piano with no pre-conceived notions of form or any ideas of grandeur. This is challenging, as I tend to get hit with everything at once (or worse, lie about getting everything at once and "cheat" by taking the easiest path from point A to B).

The performance of this track, Fauna, is centered on a one-take piano improvisation, with additional arrangements weaving around it. 

I'm going to be announcing a new project in the next two weeks, which is pretty different from everything I've done up until this point. New name and everything. Nervous/exciting times.