Some Musical Discussion

I had a new idea for making music. I really like making both mellow acoustic songs and energetic electronic songs. What if I recorded the same song in both styles? I think it would be fun and would work well. I always like hearing covers and remixes when both songs are good. It would save me the trouble of writing new songs but the arrangements and instrumentation could be radically different. Maybe that's lazy, but I think it could be effective. I know I'm always coming up with ideas for music and never follow through with them so there's no guarantee that this will ever happen, but for now it will be my goal.

I know I said it before and I will say it again, Blonde Redhead's newest album '23' is so good. If you take one thing from reading this blog let it be that album. I find the songs so powerful and the sounds are so rich. I love it. I haven't listened to it too much, which is good because I usually listen to my favorite albums over and over and then lose interest. I'll try to savour this one.

Speaking on that topic, we listened to Bach's Mass in B Minor the other day on Easter. We're not religious but my Dad wanted to play it anyways. He's said it on several occasions now that it is on a lot of desert island lists. What I mean by desert island lists is that if you were stranded on a desert island, the list would say what you would want to have with you. Apparently Bach's mass is so deep and complicated that you could probably listen to it over and over again without ever getting bored of it. While that might be true and the typical pop album might not hold up too well on a desert island I don't think I would want to listen to a mass, (I believe that's a funeral piece), everyday if I was stranded on a desert island. I was trying to think of something better to listen to, that would still not get boring and I realized I would just write an algorithm on a computer that could compose new songs that would always be changing and always be awesome. They'd probably have to be minimalist electronic music because I imagine it wouldn't work to use real instruments if it was all on computer. I think I could definitely get by on a desert island with a soundtrack like that.

I'm thinking I'm going to try to learn some PD, (pure data). It's a visual-based computer language that lets you do awesome things with music. It might take a while but the possibilities are endless. It would be cool to use a computer as an instrument. They are difficult to learn but their capabilities are stunning, and they can also maintain full performativity which is sweet. For example, I could use a camera capturing my motion on the computer to control the sounds it creates. The best part is that PD is free to download and use and is open source and runs on basically every operating system.

The dreams I'm going to describe from last night both contain similar shocking and graphic violence. You have been warned.

My cat hates it when other cats walk around just outside the back door. They walk by fairly often. We always have to chase them away. In my dream there was one cat outside that I was trying to scare away. My cat was sleeping on the rug by the door and I didn't want her to get upset. I knocked on the door to scare the cat but it did nothing. I then opened the door and barked at it and it ran a short distance away. Then it looked at me with curiosity and walked back to the door. I closed the door but somehow this weird cat ghosts half way through the door so that its front paws and head are inside the house. I'm kind of freaked out but I'm mostly concerned about my cat sleeping right there. I think the other cat might try to attack her. I try to stop the cat somehow and my mom tells me to scratch its eyes. I am completely revolved by the idea of scratching the cats eyes out and do a gross out dance in disgust. Meanwhile my mom gets a small dust brush and starts smacking it across the face to try to get its eyes. I'm still doing the gross out dance.

The second dream was even stranger. I think I was at some amusement park and some huge family comes up to me with their camera and asks me to take a photo of them. They are standing in a group but I can't seem to frame them properly. I feel like I need to move farther back. Somehow I end up shooting them from around a wall and all I get is a picture of the father and his son, which is an awesome picture, just not a full family shot. The details get blurry here for a second but I think that the entire family was killed or something by being shot with guns. I think it was some gangsters. I run into the gangsters nearby and they decide they need to kill me. I have a gun from somewhere, maybe it was theirs, and I try to shoot them. There are only two of them. I think I kill one right away but the other one is difficult. It's because the gun sucks. It shoots large cork bullets which aren't very strong, and the gun isn't very accurate. I'm running from the gangster the whole time and right when he catches up with me I manage to get a good shot right up in his neck. The cork bullet goes in and he is temporarily stunned by the shot. By this point I am standing right next to a waterfall observation deck and I throw the gangster over the railing. He rolls down a chainlink fence roof for a short distance and then disappears over the edge of the cliff. I'm relieved that I took care of the gangsters. Very shortly after that I am suddenly grabbed from behind and it is the gangster. He climbed back up from the bottom and he is wet. I am freaked out because now he is really pissed and he is definitely going to kill me. He is super tough and he has huge muscles. I try attacking him and he basically lets me because he knows I can't hurt him. I punch him in the face several times with what I would consider good hits but he just ignores them. I'm wondering why he's dragging it out. I'm also kind of mad about it. I get him on the ground somehow and start going for his eye. I don't know if he was still letting me do this but I don't think he wanted me too. All I know is I have to kill him before he gets bored of me trying and just kills me. I push my fingers into his upper and lower eyelids on one eye and his eyeball starts bulging out. I can basically rip it out at this point but I don't know if I want to because it is seriously disgusting. I think the dream stopped there.

I know that I've always said I would do anything to defend myself if someone was trying to kill me but now I don't think I could. I have never been so close to taking out someone's eye and it felt very wrong. That kind of hands-on gruesome violence is tough to handle, even in a dream. I hope I never get into a real life or death situation where I have to rip someone's eyeball out.