ELECTRONIC CELEBRECTOMY!!

Right. Metalhead brothers and sisters – purists – if you're not into electronic music at all, sit this one out!! I've been experimenting again. (DIE PINK FUCKR!!)  No no, read on...  Life's led me on a grand journey, and I've had the good fortune to experience the best of many kinds of music and artwork. As the AI cyborgs continue to hammer out morally questionable yet undeniably breathtaking 2D beauty in Midjourney (Dall-E, etc.) I have been wondering about my love of GOOD electronic music. It's complicated due to my being human, somewhat tribal in musical inspiration, and having devoted a good portion of my life to the guitar. It's also totally so simple!! I am drawn to certain sounds and rhythms and love good music – obviously – and I generally make all my own backing tracks for guitar practice with loop pedals nowadays and looked endlessly for other musicians to jam with before they came along – and still^^ N:Othing beats a good live jam when everyone comes together and things GO OFF. It's the BEST.

Nothing else in my life has compared except perhaps the first time I caught a wave in the ocean at Kings Beach Caloundra onna boogie board in 20 foot swell. Unbelievable.

I love drumming (djembe) along with many styles of electronic music and other drummers. This is my go to at a party where there is EDM happening, aside from dancing!! But something new happened awhile back *(about a month ago) and I decided to conduct an experiment!! MWAHAHAAAA!!! The whole freakin'world is coming to an end and I'm experimenting with music?!!! DAMN RIGHT!!! Seems like a sensible bloody thing to be doing, art in sound and vision being much of what makes the human experience unique and existentially wonderous. It started when I figured out how to knock .wav files into my Boss RC-30 Digital Loopstation. It took awhile, but in the course of studying this epic dual pedal stomp box I learned how it might be possible to download drumtracks, backtrax, and even whole finished songs by other artists. So now, I can run this through my guitar amp at high volumes as long as the gain is turned way down. I began the experiment in order to download drum tracks only, but decided to put in some of my favorite electronic music to jam with just to see how it felt. So with the tracks loaded into the box I footclicked play and proceeded to improvise on the guitar for feel and fit. My initial experiment on track 8 “Chugalug” was exciting, probably because I managed to fit in MASSIVE APOCALYPTIC DISTORTION DIVE BOMBS with the Floyd Rose whammy on my BC Rich which totally fit the track and I kinda wish I'd been recording at the time, because the memory of that sound is EPIC. But as I continued the experiment, immediate inspirational fit became sporadic. Also, it turned out to be more work than making my own loops immediately simply because with live loops made on the spot, you're automatically in tune. This is pretty critical if you're playing on the fly. Tuning is a basic, foundational, critical issue, and since in order to fit the feel of particular tracks the playing style on guitar has to be so radically different including alt. Tunings, sometimes from track to track, it would be challenging to play a live set like this, but not impossible. It would in theory require a lot of planning. I wondered what it might entail...

From this, I ventured to load the same tracks with some of my favorite electronic sounds into a program on the computer where I could add a guitar track *(my own musical ''voice”) as though playing live. I got through 4 tracks before I started thinking about the ethical (&possibly legal!) issues of what I was doing. It would be one thing to pick up a guitar at a house party and play along with some electronic tracks, but intentionally adding guitar for any kind of publication to finished tracks by other artists felt....odd. So I have cancelled the experiment for now. Some of the tracks in this mix utilize live instruments, such as the sitar and tablas in the LSD Trip (track 2). Adding a guitar to this can be interesting, and it can be done well, but it would be ludicrous to present this to others and call it ''yours''. Your voice might be in there if you connected with the musical piece on a metaphysical level, but the work and creativity of the track were completed by another artist. As a genre bender and interdisciplinary student of literature, science, magic(?!!), theology, psychology, philosophy, and agriculture (LOL) it amuses me to challenge the perceptions and boundaries of ''genre''. I suppose it's in part because I always hated the notion of being put in a box – some things are too complex to label and more interesting as such – another downside to the internet and modern commerce in music and art – that everything/everyone has to be a specialized ''something''. Some mystery is lost in this, and human life is indeed mysterious – if you're awake at all!! I'm not about to start producing my own electronic music anytime soon, so I'll save adding my voice to electronica as a neat party trick for special occasions only and get back to drumming, dancing, and playing wicked metal shred guitar, hahaha.....

 

Lining up the conclusions drawn from this musical experience and aligning or using it as a tool to examine the AI-human-cyborg 2D art question - with for example the Midjourney AI doing all the creative work, even if you were to add finishing touches, would it be right to call it ''your work'' if your addition to the completed work was minimal? People are doing this and making piles of money and gaining accolades and respect. Interesting and strange to think of it, and the implications for how we humans perceive art, creativity, beauty, and the source of inspiration....

Is it divine? Is it motivated purely by one's bank account? Is it both?!!

I believe that true inspiration is both divine and holy.

Irrefutable.

Providential.

Sacred.

 

So in conclusion, I terminated the project of adding to these tracks and am simply going to post them here for your enjoyment. They are some of my favorite sounds from electronic artists I respect and appreciate. It's an hour-long journey from tribal spiritual ambience, into the jungle - some dancey drum and bass, a taste of Eastern mysticism, that ecstatic rave sound I've always loved so much, and ending with one last trip 'round the Mystical Sun.

 

DIQUE!! PSYCHE!! I left the guitar in on tracks 1, 3, and 4. See if you can hear me on the guitar in there... There will be some original live songs and covers with the next podcast, and hopefully after that or around that time we'll have some friends drop in for a session. The weather and roads have been pretty gnarly for getting to my distant, isolated, savage, beautiful (!!) neck of the woods, but not for much longer!! The ley lines are shining and a silver lining brightly comes!! The beautiful world of white has turned to mucky slush, AAARRRRRHHHHHHHHG!!! SHOOT the MOON and FLY TRUE!! If you're reading this and would like to comment on any of the thoughts above shoot me a line in FB or digyourownwhole@gmail.com.

 

CHEERS,

S'LAINTE,

SKOL,

PEACE, LOVE, AND ALL GOOD THINGS!!

 

Track Listing:

Ceremony, Deeperworlds

The LSD Trip (ambient mix)

Ninth Sphere, Deeperworlds

B Monkey, Hed phone sex

Pure, Deeperworlds

The Great Drive By

Caminhando Pela Selva, Psychadelic Tribal

Chugalug, 2023: A Bass Odyssey

Superstealth, Atlas/3

Ganan Gidel

Heaven on Earth, Vending Machine

Dragonfly, Deeperworlds