Tuesday morning and I’m sitting half-lotus in my bed in Seminole. Yesterday was my first real day of absolute productivity and the productivity was all in the form of music. Naiad threatens to be a great piece upon completion, even if I toss aside some of my bolder noise experiments because I simply do not know how to get them to function in the mix correctly. Perhaps I should take a page (as the Druids said back in the day) out of Thalassa with its sudden drop in volume to create contrast. I’ll go with my churning gut later this morning.

On the subject of productivity, my days have been so far devoid of it in the form of programming. I know I should introduce myself once again into Martin’s projects, but I’m finding it difficult to emerge from the so-called “programming stupor” after a week of torpor. Perhaps completing a smaller personal project first could be motivation. Unfortunately, not a ONE comes to mind, volečku! Ha!

Getting back into a semblance of routine writing is also a chore. My mind doesn’t want to direct itself to the task. One might ask whether I have anything worthwhile to write about to begin with and if this is the seed of struggle. One might also ask what is the measure of worthiness. If I read back, some of my most enjoyable blog entries have been concerned with the absurd and I’ve told myself time and again throughout life that self-amusement is one of the primary ways to hold the existential dread at bay. So, those “one might asks” are rendered rhetorical. In fact, I just reminded myself of a task I’d set myself last time I was in this parched berg that some of its denizens surely call a settlement. I was going to go through my jottings during walks in Pagan Park over the epochs and elaborate on any flashy or spiky insight that occurred to me. Any at all. This I shall follow up on.

Later today, I drive to Seminole to deposit my casino winnings into my bank so they can swim the tiny wires to Europe, as is the way of things.

Now shower. Breakfast. And to Pagan Park for a “stroll” amongst the stasis there.

I’ve been on Naiad for approximately forty days and forty nights now, enough to see Thalassa looming through the sky twice, and I must admit that more than anything else, I miss my cat. My “office” is adjacent to the greenhouse and atmospherically controlled at a temperature much more to my liking than when I’m strolling among the flora. Humidity has never been my bag, having grown up in a parched wasteland. There are some scabs of youth one can never quite pick away.

We designed the greenhouse here to capture the eerie glow of Neptune and bend its light into something akin to a living metrical pattern. That is to say, it pulses like arrhythmia and the flora, on their alien stalks, sway to the pattern and apparently flourish. I’ll count out its repeating phrase time and again though mostly in my subconscious. I’m fairly sure it will persist in my dreams even after my return to home and to my cat.

That’s still fifteen passes of Thalassa away.

The idea has been lurking in the recesses of my mind for multitudinous epochs now, but it’s just at this moment that I shall come out and state it. I have no interest in human history in general. Walking around the Valle dei Templi yesterday sealed the idea in stone. Fossilized it, even, and given the multitudinous fossils embedded in the once sunken remains of rock near Agrigento, it’s an apt analogy.

What most would term history in the “educational sense” has little to offer me. Mostly my disinterest revolves around the “great achievements” of humanity. In contrast, geological and astronomical history do still have something to offer to my weary mind and I will likely be found on one of my many deathbeds perusing various tomes concerning those topics. The overall achievement of our species seems diminished in contrast to their grandeur. Or at least to their SPAN.

Thus, it’s the general history of the deeds of mankind that has not held my interest for generations now. Possibly for epochs. Millennia.

The walk through Valle dei Templi did turn my mind to more narrow bands of history that do tug at me, and in some ways, very forcefully. I’m deeply invested in the history of music - very much a deed of mankind, I realize, but a very SPECIFIC one. I’m willing to invest myself in the history of certain technologies, and especially the history of computation. I can read about the history of computation for generations on end, or even epochs on end, or millennia and never tire.

Therefore, as I’ve scribed before, as I merge with the age of the decrepit and frail of body and mind, I narrow my range of interests to dive deeper into the ones that are important.

One reason why general history may not be of interest to me any longer (was it ever? - possibly) is that it is a history of the victor. Our lovely ancestors had the tendency to gouge from the earth itself any trace of the ones they conquered, leaving only their story for future folk to ponder over, as if it was the only tale to be told. This CONCEPT, or shall I be so bold as say PRINCIPLE, bothers me. (Has it always? - possibly) - And this is una desvía from the theme at hand, though I am wont to desviar, fuck um.

It’s true that the history of music has also had its “victors” and “downtrodden”, but much more has been recorded to posterity, especially in the age of modernity (meaning post 1885 or so - of which I’m even more interested than in music in general). There is less bias towards forms that have only appealed to the Lowest Common Denominator or that have only appealed to the posh.

Bulbous Lowest Common Denominator.

Bulbous Posh.

In the end, our adventure amongst the temples was rewarding, because I was reminded of some of the things that I do wish to explore in depth. And, besides, I am a fan of long walks amongst whatever type of ruination, simply because the decay of ancient cities into a more natural state - that of higher entropy - always brings a slight smile of satisfaction to my scowling mug.

In times of youth, I relished moving my living corpse about the world from city to city, discovering alehouses, ruined castles, cappuccinos and random still lives constructed spontaneously from arbitrary passer-bys’ droppings. In times of youth, times that are now long in my past, I enjoyed entering a train or even an airplane and finding my living corpse in a state of movement in space. The unknown called me, even though much later I realized that the unknown was actually variations on a gelatinous mass I’d already accumulated from a combination of limited travel, observation, reading and simple perception.

I’m “vacationing” with Marisa in Sicily during these days. Though there are enjoyable moments, strolling about the city, munching on sugary objects and commenting on what an asshole Apollo was, a stone resting at the back of my mind weighs any event down with its pressing mass: what am I doing with my time?

And what’s worse is that it’s not the travel necessarily that is the source. For months now perhaps even a year, I have heard the call of this stone. I have heeded it. It’s pulsing and rushing my days forward. I feel if I’m not using every moment of my time to learn something new and especially to work in my “art” (meaning music), then I am wasting my time.

The stone generates stress that I never had before. The stone is a sense of mortality. How can it be anything else? And more importantly, how do I escape it whilst still retaining the necessity to create music yet not have that necessity overwhelm me when I’m attempting other “diversions” from the existential Boltzmann Brain?

I’m learning ChucK paragraph by paragraph, example by example, and I feel I’m making little progress. It’s surely the bad taste left on my tonsils from my failure to create goodies in Supercollider years back. I abandoned it. Impatience doesn’t help. I have brilliant ideas, but to program them in a fairly new architecture tires me rapidly. Thus, half formed, the sequences and counterpoints I seek to replicate from my endlessly streaming brain come out compromised. Possibly no one else will notice, but surely everything can improve. Betterness can be achieved. But what is betterness but the rejection of the results of my impatience?

The stone combined with the lack of detail oriented discovery at the moment is destroying my sense of HOW to proceed in my musical projects. My sense of mortality compounds the situation. I look at the reality of how long it takes to create an album, even when working alone, and the number of years left until I possibly SNUFF IT, and despair.

There is still so much I want to accomplish, but innumerable possibilities are more limiting than liberating. I need to limit my range of expression. I need constraints. I can’t use every tool that exists to make any sound that enters my mind. The results would be a mishmash of half-baked ideas. They somehow already are.

I have too much equipment. I have too many possibilities to compose and record with.

Constrain constrain constrain.

And melt the stone. Ironically, a metaphorical stone is not an anchor, but acceleration mechanism towards the inevitable blackness of death where all ability to create ceases.

Now to try to enjoy my “vacation”. Now to attempt to shut off my mind.

I had another dream concerning Jeníček last night. It was one of the final dreams before rising from the bed and into my daily routine (I laughingly call it a daily routine). Much of the dream has faded, but several scenes remain vivid. We went to a shop, ostensibly in Praha, to buy a window covering for Jeníček’s house. House, I say? He has a house. Well, why not? Why wouldn’t Jeníček have a house? He was rising on a crescendo into the realm of the well-off last time I interacted with him (not counting the bizarre messages from a few months back) and that was 16 years ago, más o menos.

We went into a shop, ostensibly in Praha, to obtain a window covering for Jeníček’s house. We ended up with a type of lattice that folds by pressing on the width-wise sides until the whole is compressed into a narrow, vertical series of bars. Upon unfolding it, rows of rhombuses emerge from between the bars as they move apart. Thus, a lattice. How exactly this could cover a window I distinctly recall wondering within the dream.

The shopkeeper also kept a bakery of sorts in the back. Jeníčěk asked me Are you ready to do Czech, vole?. The shopkeeper looked at me and, in a thick accent, said We share this kind of joke. The pastry in consideration began with the phoneme g or k, but its morphology now escapes me.

I recall a conversation I had with Jeremy in 2013 that can be vaguely associated with the so-called music of the spheres. Jeremy was searching for music with no emotional content. His reasons were slightly different than my own, but the search itself is similar. And in addition to the search itself, I aim to CREATE music without emotional content, or, rather, with an emotional content so vague or abstract that it won’t be something enforced onto the listener. I think Jeremy’s search originated in the distraction he felt from enforced emotion in music. He was looking for two things: music to work to and music for listening that was intellectually stimulating. I don’t discount the fact that he may also look for subtle emotional emanations in his listening preferences, especially those of a dark and disturbing nature, since he is also subject to the annoyance of sloshing chemicals in his brain, but it been clear to me since that time that music that vomits heartfelt wailing isn’t much to his taste.

The connection I mentioned to music exuded from planetary movements is that they are types of bare music. I call it bare music because the lack of emotional content in the music is such that the listener must overlay, whether consciously or not, a layer of feeling onto it. No matter what the pseudo-philosophical poppycock surrounding the music of the spheres might mention, planetary (and even stellar!) movement music, interpreted, of course, by sensors made by mankind, is an extreme example of bare music. There is absolutely no implied emotional content. Any resulting feeling is placed upon it by the listener.

Glancing back at one of the topics of the previous entry, a piece of bare music can be seen as a prompt. How the listener processes the music emotionally (whether they create something accordingly or not) is the result of following the prompt. Prompts are by nature vague, so bare music can be an ideal prompt. I suggest all of you poetry groups on Mastodon (or on / in any other environment) hand out poetry assignments with each Flavigula “piece” on the Gunge album - see the Flavigula Funkwhale - and each one in order. In fact, every piece is likely to inspire a week, a month or even an epoch’s worth of poems. So several lifetimes can be consumed by these bare music prompts. Get to it!

(Flavigula Funkwhale)

For me, the process of creating music must be a vague endeavour. Any mental storyboard could taint the sonic outpouring with personal emotive landscapes, though in truth, I may be the only one to recognize them. Such terrain may be opaque to listeners of the finished piece, resulting just as well with a piece of bare music. So, I take that back. A mental storyboard might work well enough as a template for sonic exploration. I know that my fumbling “friend” Christian associates all sorts of visual and “plottish” elements to the atmospheric and wholly instrumental music he writes. None of these prepared landscapes remain in the results I’ve heard, however. Had he not told me about his composition process, I’d never imagine what he was imagining during the composition process. Thus, in these cases, he produces adequate bare music.

The point is that the focus in composition should be elements that stimulate, though only stimulate abstractly. This is in direct contrast to any emotional wailing (and I’m not just referring to vocals). Avoiding common chord progressions and especially common cadences is recommended. Let melodic phrases be short, repetitious, transformed often and certainly not sing-songy. Sing-songy hovno distracts from abstraction. Sing-songy content has an altogether different purpose, quite distinct from bare music. That’s not to say that melodies should not be memorable. Of course, memorable is a term that differs in reference to music depending on the person and their listening “competence”. It’s certainly possible that a good chunk of the populace only gets sing-songy melodies stuck in their head. This chunk of the populace will soon be consigned to the pit. But, returning to the point - that’s not to say that melodies should not be memorable. A good rule is to just not have them follow too many sequential triadic tones. When I come back to a piece after one of its resting phases and its melodies call to me yet don’t strike me as saccharine, I am satisfied.

And I write all of this whilst listening to Lifehouse! Ha! It’s certainly distracting.

Ideas that I have of texture and rhythm are not as well formed in the context of bare music. Much like the aforementioned “friend”, I fumble about a bit when it comes to these two things. Perhaps fumble isn’t the correct word. A better description of what I do rhythmically, besides avoiding commonalities, is sparsity and subtle shifting of meter and tempo. I resist adding too much swing, as I find it brings too much focus to the rhythm itself. I also find myself revising rhythmic elements more than harmonic or melodic elements. I haven’t completely found my rhythmic style yet. Texture is another beast, best left to other writings.

Or perhaps Lifehouse has defeated me!

Ah - bandwagons!

Bandwagons, I say!

I shall jump on a bandwagon now. Which bandwagon is this, you ask? It is the prompt bandwagon. I’ve noticed that over the last several months, or perhaps over the last several years or even perhaps over the last several epochs, other humans react to series of words called prompts. These reactions become creations. For example, on the only social network on which I still participate, poetry prompts come up in my “home” timeline frequently. It seems that I follow a good number of other humans who are both fond of poetry and who write poetry. So, the prompt is a impetus for the creation - in this case a poem. Being mostly oblivious to all things “pop culture”, such regularities in others’ habits escape me.

Of course, this concept of prompts isn’t entirely foreign to me. I’ve used such ideas in the past, though not as often as perhaps I should of late. A good example are Schmidt and Eno’s Oblique Strategies. I’ve been known to consult them from time to time even as far back as 1995 (the first time that I clearly remember). As elaborated on i the following paragraph, I’ve been mostly known to use my own prompts. Ah! A twist!

A twist, you say?? So, I shall jump on the prompt bandwagon. The twist is that I shall use a “prompt” I wrote some time ago. You see, I jot. I’ve always jotted and hopefully will continue to jot during the remainder of my mottled existence. And the things that I jot can easily be used as prompts for later writing. I fact, when I am jotting, that’s what I mostly have in mind. So the prompt, then, which I jotted in Pagan Park sometime during the first three eights of last decade, is the following:

People who go to great lengths to find studies and pseudo studies concerning things they like or habitually do to rationalize doing them or try to convince others that their way is “correct”.

Generalizing this, I’ve known people my whole life who go to great lengths to find any error (even the most miniscule) that those around them make (and especially, I’ve found, in chats and emails) and point said errors out with an air of restrained pugnacity. I’ve done it myself, for sure, though I hope that in more recent epochs, I’ve desisted. It is a despicable habit. Sure, it is pedantry, but it is pedantry with malice. It is pedantry with the intention to beat another human down. It is pedantry with a need to make another human feel smaller.

In many cases, I’d guess the reason is lack of self esteem in the culprit. For sure it was for me in epochs passed. In other cases it may be obsessive compulsive disorder, a desire to participate in a mythical intellectual aristocracy or even a direct need to make others miserable. Though I’ve never been obsessive compulsive, I confess the other two misdemeanors at points in my past. It’s a daily meditation to never commit such atrocities.

Atrocities!

As for the original prompt, there are those who wish to remain inside their bubble. You see - their bubble is safe. I’m writing of intellectual (and cultural) bubbles. Ideas that challenge the beliefs held within said bubble upset the status-quo. They upset the equilibrium, no matter how ill founded, of mind. They commit a kind of heresy. Thus, those living in such bubbles, and especially those living in such bubbles with a lower sense of self worth, feel they must find rationale for the ideology that maintains their status-quo.

All of this is very historically familiar.

No matter the origin or “credulity” of the rationale, it will be found, be it in a scientific article (peer reviewed or not), in a religious text, in the diary of a friend or respected family member, or from the cryptic scratchings on a stone unearthed in the field beside the sacred lettuce crop.

Sadly, bubble-folk don’t want to expand the membrane bordering their existence. They want to be right.

And comfortable. (Oh! the Peter Hammill song “Comfortable”.)

My friend Christian speaks often of sheep. I’d say he mostly does it in the political sense and in specific concerning vaccines. He has a poor opinion of vaccines in general and this may stem from related illnesses he’s had because of vaccines during his lifetime. It may also stem from other things, but those are matters I’d rather not discuss as no thing political has any place in this blog.

I’ll start again. My friend Christian speaks often of sheep. He’s mostly used the term in the context of someone “blindly” following a rule or vaguely authoritarian mandate.

Since the inception of mine and Jeníček’s now ancient semi-absurd campaign of fucksheep.org, my idea of sheep has been more general and even more abstract than merely blindly following authoritarian mandates. Most likely Christian’s idea is more general, as well, but being a sort-of fluffy, woolen thing himself, one never really knows.

Those whom I (and Jeníček “back in the day”) term as sheep are those who are slaves to ideals and / or aspirations formed during a “lost” childhood or adolescence that they refuse to let be malleable later in life. This includes anyone who follows a religion, philosophy, ideology or methodology without questioning it. Having stated that, there are many exceptions, primarily those who have thought deeply about one of said religions, philosophies, ideologies or whatnot in comparison and contrast to other religions, philosophies, methodologies or whatnot and have elected to follow one of their choosing in any case.

Following without questioning is the problem for me. However, if one makes a decision after having considered alternatives and / or ramifications, even if I personally don’t agree with that decision, then that’s copacetic by me. Not an ovine presence within sight and perhaps not even within hearing. Maybe they choose a path that I wouldn’t choose, but so be it.

Vlasta called me. How she had my number is anyone’s guess. She called me and I was in Prague. Why I was in Prague is anyone’s guess. Come pick me up at the bus station. That’s what she said. Or it wasn’t exactly what she said, but it was close. How close is anyone’s guess.

So I arrived to whichever place she had declared and I picked her up. What did I pick her up in? I picked her up in my arms with an embrace. After all, it had been 18 years since we’d seen each other. She had aged, but not as much as I’d’ve imagined. She was still fit and only mildly crinkled. A good portion of Moravian women age very mildly. Apparently Vlasta was one of them. The first thing she did was offer me a cigarette. I was surprised and guffawed in my socially inappropriate way, that way that the truly important people in one’s life don’t mind. When did you start smoking? I asked. She replied I never started. I bought them for you. Ah yes! During a portion of the epoch when we spent time with each other, I was indeed a smoker. No longer, though. So I guffawed again.

Her Moravian village had been decimated and her family and friends liquefied. She was off gallivanting around in Zlín and therefore missed all the fun. The biggest question in my mind was Why did you choose to contact me instead of multitudinous others in Prague and elsewhere that you know? She said to me It was simply an arbitrary choice. I guess that my name came up in the Lottery of Vlasta. She said to me I’ve spent my whole life meticulously planning every year and every month and every week and every day. All of my efforts are now patches of greasy residue on plots of impotent land. From now on, I make each decision with the roll of a die and I will stay its course.

Kino Aero had been transformed into a hybrid cinema / bar / hotel. We went there. Why we went there I certainly can guess. One of my most embarrassing failures of memory during that epoch of wandering which was my life in the early ’00s was in Kino Aero. I sat with Jana One awaiting the start of a film. Which film it was is anyone’s guess, but I’d bet on Almodóvar. There was an “Almodóvar” festival at the time and Jana One was obsessed with Spanish “culture”. Personally, I’ve come to find Almodóvar’s films irritating at best and repellent at worst, but that’s for some future blog entry (or not). I any case, we sat waiting for the film to start and our protagonist (Vlasta) was sitting with a few friends (who apparently didn’t win the Vlasta lottery) in the row directly behind us. She caught my attention and presented me with a question that I don’t remember after all these years. The point is not the question she asked, however, but the fact that I didn’t remember her at all. My mind was, as some hick in South Carolina that I know likes to say, fuzzled back in that epoch.

It was an embarrassing moment. It still lingers with me.

Vlasta and I sat in the lobby of the transformed Kino Aero. After only a few moments of tiny talk, we fell into a so-called passionate kiss. More like a lustful kiss. Passion and lust are entirely separate phenomena. One should remember that. So, after only a few instants of miniscule talk, we fell into a lustful kiss. We groped each other. We would have gone all the way were in not for the grunting and the clearing-of-the-throating of the receptionist, who then asked if we were about to hrbit. She offered us a room, which turned out to be more of a closet with a cot and I suppose we did hrbit, but that is where the dream terminated.

Why it terminated there is anyone’s guess. Fuck um.

On the drive up to Lubbock from Seminole today for my father’s surgery, I was suddenly gripped by the memory of lying on my back on the floor of Jenn DuBois’s apartment in Galveston. Dave was also present, and later that same evening he appropriated my truck. And luckily, my SHOVEL, which incidentally was one of my brilliant gifts for the beginning of the 23rd year of my life, was in the “toolbox” that stretched from side to side in the bed of the truck. More about that later.

I was lying on my back in Jenn DuBois’s apartment in Galveston. Her stereo system was in front of me, or more accurately, in front of my feet. I was listening to, at some volume, most likely, Here Comes the Flood by Peter Gabriel (the version from his first solo album). I was addled by alcohol. I was proclaiming over and over this is the best song in the history of the universe or some such rot. There’s a high probability that I believed it during that series of moments.

Though I am not completely certain, this was the same evening when Dave “borrowed” my truck to go driving on the beach. I was possibly too addled by alcohol to join him, so I hung out with Jenn. However, I have no clear recollection. During Dave’s adventures on the beach, he got my truck STUCK. That was when the shovel came into play.

I miss that guy.

My name is Shambal Brambel and I enjoy spiking peoples’ urine samples with drops of vodka. You may ask why I would do such a seemingly cruel thing. Well, personally, I don’t find it cruel at all. I consider it one of the most benevolent acts I’ve ever participated in. Participate may be the wrong word to use since I carry out the whole shebang myself, but I shan’t edit the previous sentence because I can also consider the job (spiking peoples’ urine samples with vodka is no longer simply a thing or an act - it is my profession) a way to take part in the humanity around me.

Those that are my victims, though victim may be the wrong word to use since these humans receive a blessing, bring urine samples into our lab for various reasons, but mostly because they are forced to by their employers because in the past they have either been accused of being a “drug” addict or some sort of diseased misfit. I ensure that the results from our “lab” guarantee that the employers continue to find the victims or the blessed soiled. Consequently, the blessed are terminated of their employment - an employment that wasted their time and energy in any case. So, you see, these humans now have all the time allotted them each day to spend with their loved ones or to make art or to worship goats. In other words, they are once again a beneficial part of society.

A side affect of my calling (it is more than a mere job - in fact, it is a direct order for the almighty that I carry out my duty of spiking urine samples with vodka) is that the other “workers” in my lab, all of whom have been at some point in the past some sort of “drug” addict or diseased misfit, in the end cannot resist the temptation and binge on the vodka tainted urine. They stumble helplessly around the lab as I sit in my corner, contented that my deeds bring a soft, gentle glow to the galaxy.

Eventually, these hapless lab-rats of mine wean themselves off the alcoholic urine by moving step by step over to alcohol-free urine. They’ve even opened a “bar” around the corner that sells it on tap. Where they get all that urine, I am not tangibly sure, but I can probably guess.

The world and even the galaxy or so-called universe is a better place.