39 entries for September 2021

The Pat Metheny Interview

[More-so than my guitar player thing, I do music, and closely after, I'm a band leader. I try to create spaces for other people to do interesting things.]

[You can go to college for four years to study harmony, or rhythm, but not melody.]

[Improvise using the structure of Happy Birthday.]

[Melody is the way things go together. As you flow easily in conversation, flow from one musical idea to another.]

[Melody can be a way to share a cool thing you found, introducing and describing and showing examples.]

[I want to understand how the music I love works.]

[Every night I would take ten pages of notes about the songs we played.]

[Most of the people who are going to check your stuff out are not born yet.]

[I never play any two notes at the same volume.]

Free Schools Are the Future of Education

What if the modern world had a church in schools for lifelong learning?

Male Rivalry: Sex, Testosterone and Antlers

[Women do problem-solving while cooking together but it isn't considered as such.]

The Transformative Power Of A Single Invitation

[What was a time in the last year where you felt most alive? What's a big life lesson you learned and how did you learn it? How are you similar or different from who you were as a sixteen year old?]

[To only express hopes, dreams, or values in the form of invitations.]

Maede Shafiie: گروه نوازی تنبک

Maede Shafiie leads this group of five Iranian women playing tombak with hypnotic hand coordination.

Nate Wood: It’s Enough (2021 single)

From the fOUR project. One person playing drums, bass, and synth in 5 meter, while singing, plus “recorded live in 1 pass with no overdubs, click track or pre-recorded backing tracks”. What else??

Sam Gendel When I Am Laid In Earf

From Fresh Bread (2021) pairs baroque harmony and voice-leading with a computer-generated voice on autotune. Hella eerie.

Chancha Via Circuito: Bienaventuranza (2018)

Old favourite reverberating inside me the over last few days. I have never forgotten my first impression from hearing this years ago: the feeling of a wide-open space gradually expanding, physical heaviness (as if this were a solid object) created from sparse texture. This digital cumbia from Argentina has a certain rawness from traditional instruments and especially the voice, combined with natural ambience, and electronic sounds.

A Story of Stories

[Viable story viruses need to be teachable and understandable for simplicity, hard to disprove and specific as absolute truth for conviction, and applicable to a wide range of people for spreadability.]

[To drive behaviour of its host, story viruses needs promises of pleasure or pain to create incentives, claims that your behaviour will be known to facilitate accountability, coverage of the spectrum that humans believe for comprehensiveness.]

[Story evolution favours the hosts who survive.]

[Dehumanization adds superglue to the story to make it not only okay but one's 'duty' to kill the other.]

[Having a supreme leader and identifying yourself with the story ('I am a [story]ist') creates the tribal mindset that enables larger groups of humans to act in concert.]

[A tribe's military fights external threats. The police fight cancer.]

Money through the eyes of Mowgli

[The Tarzan suite analyses from the fully-formed individual onwards: the nodes make up the network. The Mowgli suite starts from interdependance and a child that needs to be cared for: the network makes the node.]

[The idea of passing a random stranger on the street did not exist in the past, as survival implied being a part of tightly-knit groups.]

[Nation states are only about 5000 years old and have dissolved the boundaries between smaller collectives to create 'the public', which we are vaguely connected to but do not know.]

[The image of 'prehistoric wilderness man' we consider today is a caricature. Primitive life was not 'solo men creating shelter and hunting' but intensely group-oriented collaboration, as can be seen in photos of indigenous tribes.]

[The myth of self-sufficiency assumes that interacting with others and trading is optional, as opposed to a mandatory means of survival.]

[The natural mechanism of 'life' is a sort of credit, where people give you things to help you survive without any immediate or precise expectation of return. You might pay it back informally or pay it forward.]

Let's talk about my morning routine and plot holes....

[Does it make sense? Is it feasable? Is it logistically plausible? Does the motive match the ends? Are there plot holes? If all that checks out, look at their 'evidence'.]

[How would I do it if I was the mastermind?]

Can I Get Some Feedback on That, Please?

[Be on your own side.]

[A can see you're trying to do x, y, z. Here's what seems to be helping with that. Recognize that they're doing their best.]

[Sometimes asking for feedback might be asking for permission.]

[Might be easier to receive exact feedback directed at someone else because you know they received it.]

The Age of Community: Building, Growing and Changing the World

[Each person nominates the next person to introduce themselves, distribute the responsibility of delegating.]

[Sometimes things happen through second and third-order effects and you need to simply turn your back on the main thing.]

[An interest community can also be a place to make friends.]

[A community never dies because the principles that led to its coming together are still in play.]

[Empower and showcase.]

[Some domains like pottery still take time and do not change as technical paradigms accelerate. Email was slow but now is fast whereas making a pot takes days.]

[This is your community, take charge of it.]

[Suggest one project that inspires you.]

[Low hanging fruit can be industries that don't engage with people that are like you.]

[Tell more stories.]

[De no solamente tener amigos pero de sentir ellos,]

Hania Rani: Live from Studio S2

Live recording which makes me want to play the piano again. At various points she plays while touching the strings to create percussive sounds. The set merges electronic and acoustic, and she also sings on some tracks. It’s always special to see people pushing the boundaries of live music-making.

The Best of Mildred Bailey | Jazz Music (1930s)

This compilation of music features some lovely stride jazz piano. My first time hearing this singer.