Friday, May 23, 2014

Silas the Pianist at Cat's Art MusikCircus

The gig did not go as I had hoped but Cat but I don't waste a lot of time on adoration ... unless it's for baby orangutans as they are pretty damn cool.  (Orangutan Outreach:  Adopt an Orangutan)

Silas Scarborough may not be much but he is prettier than an orangutan:


Why do I wear sunglasses all the time?   Why, because I am so damn beautiful I would blind myself without them!


I told Cat I thought the show was sub-optimal and she said right away that she thought the piano bit was beautiful.  This wasn't fishing, tho, as we talked about it for a while.  If I run myself down gratuitously, as is often my habit, she will bust my ass for it.  So we talked about it as I mentioned a week or so ago about playing this bit that became "Immer Einfach" and Yevette came all the way back here to tell me she hoped I had recorded it.  That became the Musical Ideal of what this thing can be so I was disappointed that I did not believe I had reached it.  In fact, I knew I didn't and that's what I said to Cat.  She was then good with it as this was a musical consideration rather than evidence of emotional damage.

It would have sucked huge not to try it.  When I'm writing about risk, I mean it.  Cat knows with every note of it that I'm hanging from a thread and that's a part of gig telepathy that science doesn't have to understand.  We had talked earlier and I said I did not think I would play it again before the show specifically because it has to be a live connection with the Necromancer rather than something remembered.  If I played it before the show then my risk is repeating what I had done previously and that isn't a useful risk at all.

Other Musikers may well think what I do is daft and that's all very well but in this time and space what I do is appropriate to my music.  Making a hit song means nothing to me.  Making a video 'go viral' means something was liked by the same people who like cat videos.  In my life, these things are trivial.

If you're thirty, you're still looking for that tune that will make the big bucks.  That's cool and I hope you do it, young grasshopper.  I am not thirty so my view is different.  This isn't a sign of giving up but rather such things are not relevant to where I am.

It's my specific purpose to get as close as possible to the heart of the music to get it as fresh as it can possibly be but without it sounding like some disordered cacophony.  If you're doing twelve tones, some of it may sound to others as disordered cacophony in any case but, hearing it in context, people will understand.  (I don't recall the name but there is an orchestra in which the 'musicians' are not allowed to know how to play the instruments.   The result is not what you might expect.)

"Immer Einfach" has become my Grand Mission as it has become a metaphor for Everything That's Wrong.  The focus is on the tens of thousands of children who die in the world each day and secondarily on the ones who are killed by war products.  In its most stylized representation, an innocent kid is being killed for his curiosity.  Some kid goes out into a field and sees something.  He plays with it and it turns out to be a mine.  If he's a 'lucky' kid, it will only blow off his arm.  (Please see the sidebar about War Child)

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