sonic fragments in the ditches of cold winter banff evening

hello world. we are in the listening room of the banff centre with the expensive, complicated, fancy, algorithm-weighted pre-amps, monitors, speakers, even a crazy room calibrating machine that looks like something straight out from the dr. who show. apparently it shoots out huge noise (really, think black/white salt-pepper old vacuum tube tv after the stations has gone to sleep, as sound...), then receives it back into the monitor, into mad calculation to recalibrate the room... into.. a proper. space. amazing.

noisy. sounds like shooting shrapnels out to the room space and see how they fall.

with the expansive soundscape and expensive ludwig mies van der rohe barcelona chair, 1928 (though it's missing its accomplice, the foot rest! that would add another thousand bucks no problem. oh how i love bauhaus furniture- and how ridiculously expensive they get!), we the three stooges- mr. bearcub, senior audio monkey and piano monkey (who has just been moved out of her spot by.. well, sheer will and physical displacement. well, it's only 30cm to the left from the optimal listening spot. i suppose i will live) are having a rare moment of... listening for the sake of listening.

it is a funny process, listening. what's even funnier is the process of recording. to capture a moment. a time. a progress. a process. trying to see the essential points of the present and... click, boom and a ticking clock, it's all there. in the record. the only catch would be that the record can only be as honest as the ability and the capability of the capturer, and then by the listener. it's almost like going hunting isnt it? to capture. guess what time it is... it's 'on' time! hooray. go. play. catch. fetch. back. and see.. if it has survived the cage and the transportation.

as a musician, one plays much of this game. trying to capture. in classical music, it's the bizarre process of trying to recapture of the past, something that we have not experienced directly, or probably known directly, through the medium that is at least a second degree removed from its real existence (as music is a sonic event in real time and score, obviously, is a plastic medium that is not time-sensitive idiom, nevermind the fact that is it VISUAL and INTELLECTUAL. it is kind of funny to think about that. we learn music, which is supposed to be AURAL and EMOTIONAL from VISUAL and INTELLECTUAL medium. hmm. something tells me that is a highly inefficient process of a kind. oh well. too bad for now).

then comes all kinds of questions, problems, arguments, anger, frustrations, often points of martyrdom, bloodbath, fistfights. to do historical performance? authentic performance? wait, what is authentic? who knows what? modern instrument? what modernism? arent we the children of post-modernism? wait, did we leave existentialism behind? save that child as well! what about personal interpretation? what is interpretation? if it is personal, is it good enough to exist? well, if it isnt good enough, how do we get rid of it? but what if we also need bad bits? wait wait wait why do we listen to music at all? why does one still need to play with all these performances being available?

i have no clue.

the biggest thing would be.. well- why not? every human life is a form of some sort of cognitive repetition from the group (we ARE herd animals therefore). the absolute value of arts as an idea is well- a load of bullcrap and it does not work. by recognizing its existence, we already are interacting with it, therefore it is no longer.. absolute! ooh watch out, now the almighty ARTS has fallen.. flat. oops. sorry.

therefore, this innate need to express and to transfer, and wait for the cognitive reception and feed back is the essential form of human life. then it becomes such a simple thing to understand do this thing called practice. and to do music. as of to break breads with others. to talk. to have human touch. to be more than just breathing organisms, the spender of the carbon an oxygen. so as trivial as it may seem to talk of the 'finer' 'professional' interest in recording 'techniques' and 'interpretations,' it isnt trivial at all! it's just natural discourse of life, as much as- well, need of shared water source.

so here we are, sitting in the complicated listening room, armed with BMW 802-Ds and some of the best performances of the existing music (or we like to think at least), talking the small differences of the low and high resonances, being the proper humans we could be, dicing and splitting meniscus differences in the wee hours of the evening in -30'c and i cannot think of more natural however civilized way to exist.

hooray. go technology. go arts. go team. go linked thoughts and enthusiasm. circles. overlapping. the days of venn diagram.
i love my buddies. we havent killed one another discussing aesthetics either. victory.