so, after some months of denial, i've come to the sober realization that most of my classical guitar monstrosities are now forever lost in the consequences of a snow-flooded backyard shed. i would shed a tear, if it weren't for the reality that they've been lost to my mind and my fingers for far too many years to recover them, anyways.
i would have laughed at you if you would have told me i'd be sitting here, thirteen years later, lamenting the fact that i never recorded these pieces. yet, here i am.
there's not really a good reason why i never recorded these. i just didn't. it's true that i was distracted by other projects, and that i wanted to make sure they were perfectly imperfect before i let them out. that doesn't explain why i never bothered demoing them, or even just recording them half-assed for historical purposes. alas...now they are gone...
i took classical guitar lessons for about a year from spring '00 to spring '01. by that time, i'd been playing guitar for almost ten years and had been through many years of blues and jazz training, albeit not for several years before then. i didn't want to go back to rock-era instruction, but i felt i could benefit from approaching the guitar with a different perspective. i also wanted to learn a little about counterpoint. so, we went with renaissance pieces to start off with (and which comprise this short offering) and more avant pieces by the likes of leo brouwer near the end.
a punk with a classical guitar is still a punk, just a punk with a classical guitar. throughout the experience, my cobain instincts and hendrix flairs overpowered any demands to play nicely. the truth is the guy i was paying absolutely despised me, but he also had a muted level of respect for somebody with the panache to actually think about even trying to pull this shit off. i caught him open-jawed a few times, as impressed as he was shocked.
there were almost twenty of these things written out. he'd present me with a score and i'd just go to town with it, scrawling notes all over it, changing chords, making up notation symbols, just whatever i thought sounded better. the results were a legitimate fusion of noise rock and classical guitar music in a way that stressed technical playing over atmospheres. what is present here is the very tip of this iceberg.
yet, i didn't want to just record them. i wanted to recreate them. the version of little suite that is here is a good example of where i wanted to take these things. the problem i ran into was that i didn't know how to. which isn't to say that i didn't how to do what i wanted but that i couldn't conceive of what i wanted to do. so, i kept putting it off until that stroke of inspiration would finally come...
it never came, and is now lost.
there will be a second version of this; how far in the future that will be, i cannot say. i think a part of me wants to wait until i'm older and is happy i now have the excuse to do that. for now, though, i'm closing down this project, restricting it to this short ep and an album of unrealized dreams.
recorded in the first part of 2001. initially released as a bandcamp upload in august, 2010. re-released on january 18, 2014. as always, please use headphones.
credits:
j - classical and electric guitars, ebow, effects, organ, synthesizers, sound design, sampling, sequencing, drum programming, vocals, digital wave editing
original authors forgotten. please contact if you recognize these pieces.
released may 10, 2001
Saturday, January 18, 2014
RE: windsor
From: stepmother's email address
To: death.to.koalas@gmail.com
Well I am glad you are settled and able to do the things you enjoy!
To: death.to.koalas@gmail.com
Well I am glad you are settled and able to do the things you enjoy!
at
20:49
Location:
Ottawa, ON, Canada
Re: Hey.
From: "Jessica Murray" <dfhldgdhdlhfdla@gmail.com>
To: the surviving uncle
now? the first few months here were up and down, but i'm currently actually probably more content than i've ever been. i'm not using this address much, though. i'm more responsive at death.to.koalas@gmail.com.
j
To: the surviving uncle
now? the first few months here were up and down, but i'm currently actually probably more content than i've ever been. i'm not using this address much, though. i'm more responsive at death.to.koalas@gmail.com.
j
at
19:32
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
Re: windsor
From: Jessica Murray [mailto:dfhldgdhdlhfdla@gmail.com]
To: stepmother's email address
hi.
i wasn't checking this address at all after i moved in. i think i needed some space. so, i was sort of ignoring the channel of communication, but not anybody specifically. i'm using my other address (death.to.koalas@gmail.com) more frequently.
it's been sort of mixed over the last few months. the first little bit was difficult, but i had a lot of things to keep my mind focused on. i had to get the shower replaced, for example. the landlord did that.
he's pretty good, considering it's a divey place in windsor. he inherited a big chunk of money from his family's concrete business as well as responsibility over his slightly autistic brother and more autistic niece. they live upstairs. he's got three other units in the place rented out to cover costs, which basically means property taxes. so, i lucked out in finding a landlord that's not really interested in maximizing profit on the unit. one of the things we agreed upon is no rent increases, for example. that makes the living arrangement very stable, so long as i can continue to find a reasonable source of income. this is a huge two-bedroom basement apartment that is roughly similar in size and layout to the entire basement on arnot (knock the wall behind the tv down, put a kitchen in the back room and separate out the two bedrooms and it's virtually identical) for $650.
at the moment, i think i'm fairly content. i've been focusing a lot on music and reading - the things i really care about. i don't know anybody here, but i'm introverted enough that i'm not all that concerned about it.
regarding the city itself, it's sort of weird. i'm used to having everything located downtown and didn't think that there might be a city that's arranged the other way around. in windsor, everything is in the suburbs. so, if i want to get to a store to get anything that's not groceries, i need to take a bus ride. what used to be the main street through the italian district (i'm just north of little italy and just south of a mostly arabic district) is now mostly boarded up. you can really see the effects of the urban decay. the downtown core is mostly dilapidated buildings that are decades beyond the point of repair and would be torn down if the property they're on was worth anything and instead are a mix of dying businesses and low-rent apartments. there are little pockets of upkept buildings, but the reality is that the city would actually benefit massively from a huge fire.
i'm kind of more interested in the music scene in detroit than i am in windsor in any way. i haven't bothered getting a phone yet, which has made it impossible for me to get across the border. first i have to get a phone number (and i'll probably finally get a pay-as-you-go internet phone in the next few weeks), then i have to get a nexus card. i can't get a passport because i'd need a ridiculous 6 references. the nexus card is for "low risk travelers". but they won't just let you across for the day with a birth certificate like they used to, and like i sort of assumed they would. so i can't really say how much i like the city yet because i don't feel i've really experienced it. i made it out to a punk show in october, but windsor isn't the destination that most of the bands coming through here that i'm interested in are going to pick (although the casino here will sometimes outbid detroit for moderately large acts that don't want to enter downtown detroit).
regarding the safety of detroit? i don't know yet. i've read some things that suggest that there are areas to avoid but, overall, it's not any worse than any other major city - so long as you avoid those areas. i can't think i look like much of a target. and most of the destinations i have circled require going through the core on a bus. so i get the impression it'll probably be fine. i guess i'll find out, though.
i think i'm legitimately happy, here, though. the whole arrangement plays into my introversion and is maximizing my ability to be creative.
j
To: stepmother's email address
hi.
i wasn't checking this address at all after i moved in. i think i needed some space. so, i was sort of ignoring the channel of communication, but not anybody specifically. i'm using my other address (death.to.koalas@gmail.com) more frequently.
it's been sort of mixed over the last few months. the first little bit was difficult, but i had a lot of things to keep my mind focused on. i had to get the shower replaced, for example. the landlord did that.
he's pretty good, considering it's a divey place in windsor. he inherited a big chunk of money from his family's concrete business as well as responsibility over his slightly autistic brother and more autistic niece. they live upstairs. he's got three other units in the place rented out to cover costs, which basically means property taxes. so, i lucked out in finding a landlord that's not really interested in maximizing profit on the unit. one of the things we agreed upon is no rent increases, for example. that makes the living arrangement very stable, so long as i can continue to find a reasonable source of income. this is a huge two-bedroom basement apartment that is roughly similar in size and layout to the entire basement on arnot (knock the wall behind the tv down, put a kitchen in the back room and separate out the two bedrooms and it's virtually identical) for $650.
at the moment, i think i'm fairly content. i've been focusing a lot on music and reading - the things i really care about. i don't know anybody here, but i'm introverted enough that i'm not all that concerned about it.
regarding the city itself, it's sort of weird. i'm used to having everything located downtown and didn't think that there might be a city that's arranged the other way around. in windsor, everything is in the suburbs. so, if i want to get to a store to get anything that's not groceries, i need to take a bus ride. what used to be the main street through the italian district (i'm just north of little italy and just south of a mostly arabic district) is now mostly boarded up. you can really see the effects of the urban decay. the downtown core is mostly dilapidated buildings that are decades beyond the point of repair and would be torn down if the property they're on was worth anything and instead are a mix of dying businesses and low-rent apartments. there are little pockets of upkept buildings, but the reality is that the city would actually benefit massively from a huge fire.
i'm kind of more interested in the music scene in detroit than i am in windsor in any way. i haven't bothered getting a phone yet, which has made it impossible for me to get across the border. first i have to get a phone number (and i'll probably finally get a pay-as-you-go internet phone in the next few weeks), then i have to get a nexus card. i can't get a passport because i'd need a ridiculous 6 references. the nexus card is for "low risk travelers". but they won't just let you across for the day with a birth certificate like they used to, and like i sort of assumed they would. so i can't really say how much i like the city yet because i don't feel i've really experienced it. i made it out to a punk show in october, but windsor isn't the destination that most of the bands coming through here that i'm interested in are going to pick (although the casino here will sometimes outbid detroit for moderately large acts that don't want to enter downtown detroit).
regarding the safety of detroit? i don't know yet. i've read some things that suggest that there are areas to avoid but, overall, it's not any worse than any other major city - so long as you avoid those areas. i can't think i look like much of a target. and most of the destinations i have circled require going through the core on a bus. so i get the impression it'll probably be fine. i guess i'll find out, though.
i think i'm legitimately happy, here, though. the whole arrangement plays into my introversion and is maximizing my ability to be creative.
j
at
19:26
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
grappling with my own writing
"bear patrol"
my laptop died on the 5th. i resurrected it! but the push out of schedule has got me focusing on cleaning up my discography as a sole priority. i'm almost at the point where i've caught up to unfinished work that i always intended to complete. a few more days. when i get there, i will pause and spend possibly as much as a week cleaning up this page, as well as a few days dedicated to my proper web page.
i knew that if i started focusing on genealogical links then i'd lose focus. years ago, that meant falling into obsession. nowadays, considering that i have a stronger grasp of the genetics of the situation (we're all relatively closely related) and a better understanding of the social science of sexual promiscuity [some studies estimate that as much as a third of people are born into families that include males that are not aware they are not the biological father *and* women that are aware of this - this kind of "trickery" is a normal and natural aspect of human sexual behaviour that attempts to combine female intuitions about genetic superiority (dna daddy) and financial security (non-biological daddy, but in every functional sense actual daddy). while this recognition doesn't really have an effect on my underlying arguments regarding class, it does make the research meaningless. even if you get through the childish myths and legends of aristocratic control, there's no way to actually know who daddy ever actually was in any specific situation. in many cases, centuries-old gossip about the queen sneaking out late at night to meet her chosen genetic suitor has been preserved, and is probably true on a very real level. "he doesn't look much like his father" actually usually *does* have an obvious explanation!], it means losing interest. i wanted to ensure i was doing a certain amount of "formal reading" a day. i want to get back to it.
so, i'll be back!
....but it's quiet for a few more days on this front...
http://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/simpsons-co-creator-rescues-bears/19645/
some species of birds do this. we're not unique in it.
some people will counter that women were under strict control until relatively recently. well, i may question whether the examples provided are general or extreme cases. i may question how large a period that really applies to (does it apply to the "anarchy" of the early middle ages and periods before it?). but, excluding these academic questions, patriarchy is a system of control and comes out of reasons to control. that is, it gets the causality backwards - men exerted control over women's reproduction because it was the only way to ensure their dna would carry on, for the precise reason that women were constantly faced with this biological contradiction between ensuring that their own offspring had the best father and being coerced into this breeding system defined by land and wealth. women had to be forced into it to overpower their biological urges.
now, liberal-minded people of both sexes would, today, universally accept that treating women like child-bearing chattel vessels is morally wrong. there's no real debate there. but, how much of that follows from the social systems that have developed since the modification (i don't want to say collapse, because i reject that) of feudalism is a serious question. the old feudal logic no longer applies. yet, recognizing it's inherent injustice is not the same thing as understanding it or why it became a dominant system of controlled reproduction. as morally reprehensible as patriarchy is, it made sense relative to certain axioms - and as a reaction to natural, biological behaviour.
the flip side of this is that, throughout the history of patriarchy, we find examples of "enlightened land owners" that didn't really feel the need to enforce it. one could suggest it was only necessary to enforce it under the conditions that the male dna was coming from a less than ideal source. see, and now i'm starting to build a biological theory of patriarchy and class dominance, which was sort of what i was getting at in the first place, albeit very modified from my initial beginnings.
the point being that the argument isn't debunked by patriarchy. rather, it works as a mechanism to explain it along biological terms.
so, what i've shifted that aspect of the site to is away from mapping the lines out and towards examining their validity, even as i constructively build up these historical classes from their obscure roots in the collapse of roman control of northwestern europe.
marx & engels could not have fully understood the implications of modern evolutionary biology on their ideas. they're just too close together to each other. they were certainly aware of darwin's ideas, and engels particularly actually spent a lot of time with certain aspects of them, but they just hadn't developed enough at the time. while i may not agree with the social darwinists (a disagreement i share with scientific darwinists), the extreme political movements that followed social darwinism or their watered down equivalents in neo-liberalism, i have to at least give the right credit for actually adjusting to darwin. the left has not done that. well, kropotkin tried, but, he, too, was too close to the source. leftist theory has to be rewritten to take these ideas into account.
to carry on from my earlier point, the person closest to actually doing this (that i'm aware of) is actually that old liberal-in-a-hurry richard dawkins.
unfortunately, the left has tended to lean more towards freud than darwin. that's not going to get anybody closer to utopia, it's just going to trick workers into accepting conditions of dystopia.
this is what modern scientific socialism is actually about:
my laptop died on the 5th. i resurrected it! but the push out of schedule has got me focusing on cleaning up my discography as a sole priority. i'm almost at the point where i've caught up to unfinished work that i always intended to complete. a few more days. when i get there, i will pause and spend possibly as much as a week cleaning up this page, as well as a few days dedicated to my proper web page.
i knew that if i started focusing on genealogical links then i'd lose focus. years ago, that meant falling into obsession. nowadays, considering that i have a stronger grasp of the genetics of the situation (we're all relatively closely related) and a better understanding of the social science of sexual promiscuity [some studies estimate that as much as a third of people are born into families that include males that are not aware they are not the biological father *and* women that are aware of this - this kind of "trickery" is a normal and natural aspect of human sexual behaviour that attempts to combine female intuitions about genetic superiority (dna daddy) and financial security (non-biological daddy, but in every functional sense actual daddy). while this recognition doesn't really have an effect on my underlying arguments regarding class, it does make the research meaningless. even if you get through the childish myths and legends of aristocratic control, there's no way to actually know who daddy ever actually was in any specific situation. in many cases, centuries-old gossip about the queen sneaking out late at night to meet her chosen genetic suitor has been preserved, and is probably true on a very real level. "he doesn't look much like his father" actually usually *does* have an obvious explanation!], it means losing interest. i wanted to ensure i was doing a certain amount of "formal reading" a day. i want to get back to it.
so, i'll be back!
....but it's quiet for a few more days on this front...
http://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/simpsons-co-creator-rescues-bears/19645/
some species of birds do this. we're not unique in it.
some people will counter that women were under strict control until relatively recently. well, i may question whether the examples provided are general or extreme cases. i may question how large a period that really applies to (does it apply to the "anarchy" of the early middle ages and periods before it?). but, excluding these academic questions, patriarchy is a system of control and comes out of reasons to control. that is, it gets the causality backwards - men exerted control over women's reproduction because it was the only way to ensure their dna would carry on, for the precise reason that women were constantly faced with this biological contradiction between ensuring that their own offspring had the best father and being coerced into this breeding system defined by land and wealth. women had to be forced into it to overpower their biological urges.
now, liberal-minded people of both sexes would, today, universally accept that treating women like child-bearing chattel vessels is morally wrong. there's no real debate there. but, how much of that follows from the social systems that have developed since the modification (i don't want to say collapse, because i reject that) of feudalism is a serious question. the old feudal logic no longer applies. yet, recognizing it's inherent injustice is not the same thing as understanding it or why it became a dominant system of controlled reproduction. as morally reprehensible as patriarchy is, it made sense relative to certain axioms - and as a reaction to natural, biological behaviour.
the flip side of this is that, throughout the history of patriarchy, we find examples of "enlightened land owners" that didn't really feel the need to enforce it. one could suggest it was only necessary to enforce it under the conditions that the male dna was coming from a less than ideal source. see, and now i'm starting to build a biological theory of patriarchy and class dominance, which was sort of what i was getting at in the first place, albeit very modified from my initial beginnings.
the point being that the argument isn't debunked by patriarchy. rather, it works as a mechanism to explain it along biological terms.
so, what i've shifted that aspect of the site to is away from mapping the lines out and towards examining their validity, even as i constructively build up these historical classes from their obscure roots in the collapse of roman control of northwestern europe.
marx & engels could not have fully understood the implications of modern evolutionary biology on their ideas. they're just too close together to each other. they were certainly aware of darwin's ideas, and engels particularly actually spent a lot of time with certain aspects of them, but they just hadn't developed enough at the time. while i may not agree with the social darwinists (a disagreement i share with scientific darwinists), the extreme political movements that followed social darwinism or their watered down equivalents in neo-liberalism, i have to at least give the right credit for actually adjusting to darwin. the left has not done that. well, kropotkin tried, but, he, too, was too close to the source. leftist theory has to be rewritten to take these ideas into account.
to carry on from my earlier point, the person closest to actually doing this (that i'm aware of) is actually that old liberal-in-a-hurry richard dawkins.
unfortunately, the left has tended to lean more towards freud than darwin. that's not going to get anybody closer to utopia, it's just going to trick workers into accepting conditions of dystopia.
this is what modern scientific socialism is actually about:
at
03:14
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)