People seem to like drums. Take the most abstract, way-out-there, weirdo sound but add a cool drum-kit to it and you’ll still have a potential hit on your hand. Why do people connect so much with the sounds of things getting hit by other things?
I guess that people can relate to it easily since it’s one of the most basic forms of musical expression…every culture out there has it at least in some form no matter where you go. (I remember even as a kid, my first musical experiences were with me making a drum set out of things I’ve found around the house.) It’s also sort of fun having the freedom to choose whatever you want — you can hit almost anything with pretty much anything, so the possibilities of sound combinations are pretty much endless.
Today’s set-up was especially messy (as seen in the picture) since I wanted to take the “junk in the piano” idea a little further. This is my way of altering, hacking, or “disrupting” the system of the piano that’s normally supposed to sound like a smooth, homogenous, ironed-out sound palette from bottom on up. The goal here is to make an instrument do something new that wasn’t originally intended by adding extra color and unexpected modifications.
I added a theme to the track for this one — “Tides of Change”, based on a few things I’ve been reading and hearing about through the grapevine. A lot has changed since the new millennium, but after hearing about what’s been in the works it seems like it’ll be nothing compared to what’s about to happen. American society is going through a major shift in its cultural identity right now, and the music world and music industries will be changed along with it. There’s going to be a permanent shift towards a more unpredictable social and economic environment with a whole new set of problems, solutions, pitfalls, and opportunities — and these changes seem fairly inevitable at this point.
So the music should come to represent these things — a flow of ideas and actions in flux, where the beats and rhythms are constantly changing and evolving into something different at every moment. I liked the “entrepreneur as a surfer” metaphor used at the last LeanLA meeting — seemed pretty apt for what people have to learn to do in order to ride the waves uncertainty that’s about to come in the near future.
Maybe they’ll be a point in time where things start settling into something more stable — the emergence of a new narrative or cultural model, maybe. But we’re not at that point yet, so it would seem disingenuous to try to create the impression that that’s how things are.
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