Here’s yet another new song I’ve posted to soundcloud. This one is pretty epic – an 8 minute long symphonic style classical piece that moves through several different sections and moods. I’m a little reticent about posting it because I don’t feel it’s finished. But I’ve got a ways to go before I really understand this kind of writing so I figure I might as well put it out there for comments.
Here’s a fairly recent funk instrumental I came up with. Ideally it would be used in a film during a scene where a pimp is strutting down the street checking up on his ‘hos. Because that’s what pimps too. Check up on their ‘hos.
I’ve been thinking a bit lately about what I would call “flow.” What do I mean by flow? I’m glad you asked. I think you should know.
Back when I lived in LA, there was a guitar player I used to see playing with a lot of people. He was pretty good, but had this weird tic; in his lead guitar playing, he was often slightly behind the beat. And not in a groovy John Bonham kind of way but in a distracting, “what’s going on here?” sort of way. The sense I got was that this guy couldn’t really commit to his musical ideas. It was like right before he started playing a lick there were some part of his mind thinking “Wait! Is this really what I should do?”
The reason I was able to recognize this tic was that I had a myself for a while. If you listen back to some of my early guitar work, while it possesses tremendous musicality and skill, it kind of has that behind the beat stutter.
Now, as you have probably figured out, this is an example of the opposite of flow. Flow is being able to mentally commit yourself to a path and then execute it on an almost subconscious level. I think this is what the great sportsmen have, or performance artists, or comedians or whatever. They enter into the moment and don’t allow themselves to be distracted.
Also, I think flow can be applied over the long term, and short-term. For example, you can have flow on a macro level of your life, like, where you say, “I’m going to earn a master’s degree in chemistry and marry a blonde woman with 36 double D-breasts.” and then you execute that plan. And I think you can have flow on a micro level, where you set up a difficult pool shot, commit to it, and make it. (Frankly, whether you make it is really irrelevant — it’s a matter of whether you did not allow for conscious distraction.)
I feel, over the past several years, that I have really increased my flow, especially in music. Lately, I’ve been all about trimming out the unnecessary distractions and just focusing on what I think is important. And, while it’s always bit of a battle, I’ve made progress.
You know who really has flow? Ninjas. They think, “I’m going to approach this guy and use the monkey claw deathblow to cram his nasal bones into his brain.” Then they just execute, pure and simple. We can learn a lot from ninjas.
And you know what that means! Watch my fucking Christmas videos!
Here’s a new tune of mine, part upbeat dance number, part strange piano ballad.
Agent Zero by Wil Forbis
The Christmas season is upon us and, of course, Christmas music is being played all around us. The title for an alternative Christmas song came to mind this morning: “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa’s Balls.”
HAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAW!!!
Merry Christmas Suckers!
Years ago I was watching a “Star Trek: Next Generation” episode and there was a scene where Picard, the sage captain of the space vessel, walked into the room of some impertinent alien prince. The kid was playing this absolutely chaotic, atonal music full of clangs and groans and Picard sort of sighed, presumably thinking something like, “These teenagers and their crazy music!”
I remember wondering “Will that ever be me? Will music get so strange and un-relatable that I’ll be left wondering how anybody could stand it? (And I say this as someone pretty open minded about music.)” Frankly, I think most of us presume this to eventually be the case. And for a while I could kind of sense it coming. All this electronic music with weird names like Techno, or electronica or Dub-Step kept appearing and I didn’t really get it. I was unclear what I was supposed to be listening for. It sounded like music made up of drum loops and chunks of other people’s music with little really being “created.”
But lately I’ve been kind of getting into that kind of music. For instance, I was recenty won over by this video – an ad for nail polish that features equine acrobatics, great dancing and a weird soundtrack which is a song mashing up short samples of music (and raw sound.)
I’ve also, as mentioned, been reading the book “The Great Animal Orchestra” which makes the case that aural enjoyment (NO! Not “oral enjoyment,” you sicko!) can be found in nature, by listening to the raw sounds of the environment. This opens up a rather expanded definition of music, really arguing that it is no more than “organized sound.” (Actually, it might even be unorganized sound if you expand the definition to include the pure sounds of nature, unless you presume nature to have some kind of built in organization.) Oddly, thinking about this led me back to a character I’ve stumbled upon in the past, Skrillex. Skrillex is a DJ (I guess; I’ve never understood what that term means) who makes very modern, unnatural music often made up of equal parts traditional synth music and strange, undulating mechanical groans and chirps. For a long time, I didn’t “get” this kind of music, but I’m beginning to and I’m digging it.
(You have to wait a bit for this song to get weird.)
Lately, I’ve been getting interested in the world of background television music e.g. the score that often plays behind the scene and emphasizes the emotion of the moment. I’ve found myself in particular drawn into the music for the police drama “Law & Order: SVU.” During one show, I noticed a music segment that reminded me of a piece I’d written. And as I watched several episodes, I heard that piece pop up again and again. I realized something that is probably obvious: TV composers often reuse their work. So, if you have a musical piece that denotes a simmering tension, you can play it when detectives are interviewing a rape victim, when they are walking down a dark hallway pursuing a killer, and when someone is anxiously awaiting the results of a pregnancy test. (I should note that the musical bit I often hear recurring on the show is not replayed exactly the same every time. There’s little variations.)
The larger topic here — the art of cueing emotional states via sound — is quite interesting. To think that someone can play a chord on the piano and elicit subtle physiological shifts that will be interpreted as emotion in the listener seems like a very powerful force. It makes one presume that somewhere out there is a “dark chord” — a harmony that will demand such a strong emotional reaction it will drive listeners into a homicidal cannibalistic fury.
An interesting L.A. Times article explores the state of the brain of freestyle rappers!
In an unlikely pairing, two professional rappers have teamed up with researchers from the National Institutes of Health to study what happens in the brain during freestyle rapping. The results, published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, suggest that the process is similar to that of other spontaneous creative acts, including jazz improvisation.
The study was initiated by the Los Angeles-based rappers Daniel Rizik-Baer and Michael Eagle and carried out by Allen Braun and Siyuan Liu of the NIH’s National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. The researchers asked 12 rappers to memorize a set of lyrics that they then rapped while inside of a magnetic resonance imaging machine. The rappers also were asked to freestyle over music while in the MRI scanner. Then the researchers compared the images from the memorized and improvised rapping sessions to see whether the brain activity underlying the two tasks was different.
An indeed it was. Freestyle rapping seems to involve much less executive function from the brain (yes, I know, the jokes write themselves.) This corresponds with something I read in the book, “The User Illusion” which argued that a lot of actions that require on the spot decision making — sports, improvised comedy, music improvisation — seem to require silencing our “thinking” voice and letting a more subconscious persona take over. And, in fact, being too conscious disrupts your “flow.”
Speaking of freestyle rap, here’s a good example from albino rapper Brother Ali.
That’s the name of a new six song indie jazz album released by my pal Allison Marae. You can listen to the whole thing here. (P.S. I play on tracks 3, 4 and 6.)