A Listener’s Epiphany
At 2:37 p.m. November 16th, I realized I was a musician.
Having played music for seven years one would think this blow would have been dealt sooner, but one must also understand how to what extent I have always identified as a being a listener during these years. In 1997 for a variety of reasons I decided to say yes to everything. Should friends call late at night beckoning me to join in whatever debauch they had planned, knowing better and ready for sleep I had to say yes. Many things came of this, one being that one such friend offered me two guitars, a violin, mixing board and two FX units. Did I want them? Yes. Shall we start a band? Yes.
However, such a situation did not equal being a musician. You see, I have been an avid listener of music for my whole life, with a penchant for researching my passions. In my mind three things prevented me from becoming such a construction. Foremost was an intense distrust of Identity, that to see oneself as just such is to wear a prison of society’s making; division of labor, race, sexuality, gender… Secondly is that having read John Cage I had learned a contempt for the idea of genius. Lastly Was the Throbbing Gristle slogan, “The Future of Music is with Non-Musicians”. It was that maxim that ironically provided me with the license needed to do whatever I deemed necessary with my newly acquired home studio.
I lay no claim to the rigor and intelligence I detect in players I hold in esteem. In fact, seven years later I do not know the difference between an “A” or “G”, nor can I tell the difference between an archipeggio or glissando. Before gigs I often sit quietly while others tune.
At an Oakland dive of a café, I sat today at a sidewalk table. The November sun had become diffuse, as if the day was nothing but evaporation. I had on my crappy walkman, listening to a mix of recent material (I do final mixes based on this walkman having discovered that basing decisions using only high end equipment often ignores the fact that most of the world has people using shitty walkmans). Though consistently amateurish, and not having much belief in originality, it was still a shock when I understood to what extent the sounds I choose to make are echoes of sentences and conversations from people who are identified as being musicians. My drone was ringing on from the Velvets to Tony Conrad, the violin pulsing and radical panning from Henry Flynt and Acid Mother’s Temple, the recording levels shoved full tilt from my encounters with the Stooges and High Rise, the choice to bow metal an experiment taken from listening to Z’ev, while wanting to sound like Coltrane, and lastly the fagginess of my Art as a nod to Jack Smith and a whole generation of cultural warriors wiped out by HIV. My sense of what it means to be a musician became slightly more clear this hazy afternoon as I sat before going to my current gig—bartender. Looking back at the year; debut of a composition at Mills College (no, I do not attend there), an invitation and subsequent two months in Berlin to do music for Theater, I came to realize that November kicks off with the Day of the Dead and conversations with the dead happen among the living. This listener suddenly sees himself connected to a History and lineage, and can only hope to attempt speaking back in a language he has up to now only parroted.
