A Song of Solomon
I devour music. It's a constant presence in my life; different styles of music are always playing in each room of the house, and to wander through the house is a bit like traveling through an aural history museum. I cover the twilight genres for an online magazine called earpollution.com where I get to use terms like "glitch" and "micro-house" and "power electronics" and "rhythmic noise" when I talk about music. I hear things that could be the wailing sound of quasars imploding, the static pop of electrons colliding, the groan of industrial machinery eating itself, or polyrhythms mimicking the sound of your internal organs as they gasp and wheeze. I hear all these things, and I call them "music."
Today, I'm thinking about lullabies. My son, Solomon, isn't quite a week old. We've been home for a few days now, introducing him to our environment and, naturally, beginning to introduce him to our music. One of the adages which invariably fall upon new parents is that, at some point, your child will do things to annoy you, and oftentimes this behavior exhibits itself by listening to music that you -- the doddering old fool from the last generation -- won't appreciate or understand. How is my son going to rebel in his musical tastes? What's he going to say if I shout, "Solomon, turn that noise down!"
"But Dad, it's a Merzbow CD," he'll say. "I got it from your collection."
So, lullabies. There is an musique concrete group from Canada named Coin Gutter whose last record, All Your Dreams Are Meaningless, contains a track called "Lullaby." It has a piano melody drawn straight from the dark corners of a tattered carnival and an operatic singer who is going to expire from melancholic consumption when she hits the last note of this song, and the two of them perform a soothing duet -- point, counterpoint, call and response. It's uncomplicated and poignant -- two emotional melodies circling one another. The rest of the instrumentation, however, is digitized bursts of white noise, loops and tones which drain and moan across the aural landscape, and manipulated effects which cause the singer's voice to stutter and loop back on itself. It is, in my mind, a lullaby for the 21st century -- a song suited for a child who will have no concept of archaic devices like the 8-track player and the cassette recorder, who may not be able to understand the distinction between a real instrument and a digital sample, and who may never quite be sure that what he hears or sees hasn't been digitally altered.
I'm going to teach him; it is my understanding of the world which is going to be imprinted on him. I am going to have to tell him how the buzzing static woven through this song is like a field of cicadas on a hot summer night, how the squalls of white noise are like lightning bursts across a gray and articulated sky, and how the skipping unreliability of the singer's voice isn't just the machinery breaking down but also a metaphor of how the voice carries emotion beyond and beneath the words. I'm going to have to teach him how to listen.
The baby monitor is on the desk next to me. My wife is up there right now, singing as she feeds him. The monitor whaps out a regular pulse of noise that lets me know it is working and there is some interference which puts an underlying burr of static. My wife's voice is soft enough beneath this constant thump and sizzle that her song sounds like I'm picking up some radio transmission from the South Seas which has been bouncing around the ionosphere for a few decades. Occasionally he will make some squirrel noise that spikes the readout of the monitor. I want to record what I'm hearing; I want to get an hour of it on CD and give it all of my friends. This, I will say, this is the music of my son's room. And, for a number of them, it will just be random bits of noise. But what I really want to do is play it back for my son when he's old enough to start learning about music. This, I will tell him, this is what music is all about. This moves my heart and that is only criteria that matters.
writing
This is a reasonably comprehensive list of my published work, both virtual and physical.
THE MISFIT LIBRARY
I am Nine of Thirteen, one of the members of the Misfit Library, a writing collective which puts out a quarterly journal of our respective work. We are scattered across the globe and determined to change the face of the planet one story at a time. The link above will take you to Misfit Central where you can acquire copies of the journal as well as read exclusive online material.
SYMBOLIC
I wrote a column for OPi8.com's Transmit blogs: journals of the new dark underground. SYMBOLIC tracked the novel I was working on, referencing the process and the research materials which mad up the backbone of the work. In addition, SYMBOLIC busied itself with ruminations and considerations on the nature of language and communication. And a wee bit of mythology. The first 100 entries of SYMBOLIC can be found here on this site as well as at OPi8.com.
LITERARY REPRESENTATION
I am represented by Scribe Agency as my literary agents. Please contact these gentleman if you have any queries about my work.