_ESCAPE

i need one. at least, i feel like i do. just a break from all the monotony that is the cacophony that is my life.

make sense?

there’s a lot going on around here, music and otherwise. it can get to be too much. OFTEN. between being sick recently and dealing with job stress, financial fuckery and interpersonal complications, the drowning feeling has been all too familiar.

so, i’m hoping sxsw provides some respite. word to my donation box, i won’t be ponying up the cash for a full music pass since i can’t afford one (i completely and utterly appreciate those who did find it in themselves to contribbit, though ) i’ll be more observing than expecting networking miracles this year. i’ll be missing all of the seminars and whatever else goes on for the pass-holders, but i will be catching performances and mulling around the events getting it in that way. SXSW deserves a bit more preparation than what i provided this year; i know that now and will be ready, should there be a next time.

but a secondary benefit of this week plus of being away from home is just a little escape. i’m completely unfocused at work. its to the point where every day i feel like i should be apologizing to my supervisor for my mediocre performance before i leave. over the past month, beats have felt like a job. my workflow isn’t optimized so it’s been a trial to get at the machine and start making shit i’m proud of. there’s been some dope one offs, but for the most part it’s been a time to make the donuts thing. what makes that worse is when i gotta hunt the paper down. i’ll be glad to escape the grind, i’m going to force myself to not think about anything but enjoying myself in a completely new environment for a few days. i’ll be seeing my aunt for a few days too, as she lives in Austin. i’ll be escaping this temperamental weather here in Philly, too. it’s looking like mild summer days in Austin. i’ll be bringing mad shorts.

it’s weird, but i haven’t had an official vacation where i traveled out of the city for an extended period of time since like…2005! i have to look at that entire stretch of time as a long stretch of continually compounding unrest!

so, needless to say, i’m excited. i’m trying to be careful not to put too much pressure on the time away, especially since it’s really only a week. i’ve done that before- “this is gonna be a full reset, i’m gonna do this,  i’m gonna do that, i’m gonna return %100″. but i do want to try to shed some stress while i’m away.

i’m also gonna try to do a little video blogging while  i’m there. i’m sure things would have been a little more interesting if i had been able to get my pass, but it’s all good. i’m creative, i can make a can of pork n beans interesting!

________

BABIES!

my baby sister is pregnant with her 1st child, actually she’s the first of my siblings to have children, so we’re all very excited for her due date, which is actually the day i leave for Austin. wack juice, right? here’s hoping she blows early or mad late!

i attended her baby shower on saturday. she’s huge!

that looks like it hurts. lolz

can’t wait!

aight. i’m goin to bed!

_NI MASCHINE//PETE ON JIMI.

so i got the heads up via the homie Rob Viktum about one of Native Instrument’s newest additions to their already ridiculous line up of music production products: MASCHINE.

this could quite possibly be the culmination of my best-of-both-worlds wetdreams manifested real time yo.

(pic & screenshot via CDM)

simply put, this could be the answer to many a producer’s prayers. the attempt at seamless integreation of hardware and software, a step sequencer and sampling. it looks amazing. $$$ willing, i will be FIRST in line to cop one this spring. 

it sorta bothers me because i’ve had loose blueprints for something like this in my head for about 2 years now, but had no idea who to approach to get the ball rolling. it doesn’t matter though, i’d rather be making beats. i love Native Instruments, they bring it every time, man.

i can’t wait for some hands on reviews. 

//

i just wanted to post this, because it’s often the most revealing when greatness can speak honestly and candidly on greatness. most of us never had the chance to see Jimi Hendrix live and rocking, so we’re stuck with the documentaries, the dusty concert footage and the youtubes. they do their part to echo the moments captured, but nothing like being there. 

i felt a little of what it was like reading this Pete Townshend piece Rolling Stone ran a while ago, talking about the 100 greatest guitarists of all time. 

 

 

1   Jimi Hendrix

by Pete Townshend

 

I feel sad for people who have to judge Jimi Hendrix on the basis of recordings and film alone, because in the flesh he was so extraordinary. He had a kind of alchemist’s ability; when he was on the stage, he changed. He physically changed. He became incredibly graceful and beautiful. It wasn’t just people taking LSD, though that was going on, there’s no question. But he had a power that almost sobered you up if you were on an acid trip. He was bigger than LSD.

 

What he played was fucking loud but also incredibly lyrical and expert. He managed to build this bridge between true blues guitar — the kind that Eric Clapton had been battling with for years and years — and modern sounds, the kind of Syd Barrett-meets-Townshend sound, the wall of screaming guitar sound that U2 popularized. He brought the two together brilliantly. And it was supported by a visual magic that obviously you won’t get if you just listen to the music. He did this thing where he would play a chord, and then he would sweep his left hand through the air in a curve, and it would almost take you away from the idea that there was a guitar player here and that the music was actually coming out of the end of his fingers. And then people say, “Well, you were obviously on drugs.” But I wasn’t, and I wasn’t drunk, either. I can just remember being taken over by this, and the images he was producing or evoking were naturally psychedelic in tone because we were surrounded by psychedelic graphics. All of the images that were around us at the time had this kind of echoey, acidy quality to them. The lighting in all the clubs was psychedelic and drippy.

 

He was dusty — he had cobwebs and dust all over him. He was a very unremarkable-looking guy with an old military jacket on that was pretty dirty. It looked like he’d maybe slept in it a few nights running. When he would walk toward the stage, nobody would really take much notice of him. But when he walked off, I saw him walk up to some of the most covetable women in the world. Hendrix would snap his fingers, and they followed him. Onstage, he was very erotic as well. To a man watching, he was erotic like Mick Jagger is erotic. It wasn’t “You know, I’d like to take that guy in the bathroom and fuck him.” It was a high form of eroticism, almost spiritual in quality. There was a sense of wanting to possess him and wanting to be a part of him, to know how he did what he did because he was so powerfully affecting. Johnny Rotten did it, Kurt Cobain did it. As a man, you wanted to be a part of Johnny Rotten’s gang, you wanted to be a part of Kurt Cobain’s gang.

 

He was shy and kind and sweet, and he was fucked up and insecure. If you were as lucky as I was, you’d spend a few hours with him after a gig and watch him descend out of this incredibly colorful, energized face. There was also something quite sad about watching him. There was a hedonism about him. Toward the end of his life, he seemed to be having fun, but maybe a little bit too much. It was happening to a lot of people, but it was sad to see it happen to him.

 

With Jimi, I didn’t have any envy. I never had any sense that I could ever come close. I remember feeling quite sorry for Eric, who thought that he might actually be able to emulate Jimi. I also felt sorry that he should think that he needed to. Because I thought Eric was wonderful anyway. Perhaps I make assumptions here that I shouldn’t, but it’s true. Once — I think it was at a gig Jimi played at the Scotch of St. James [in London] — Eric and I found ourselves holding each other’s hands. You know, what we were watching was so profoundly powerful.

 

The third or fourth time that I saw him, he was supporting the Who at the Saville Theatre. That was the first time I saw him set his guitar on fire. It didn’t do very much. He poured lighter fluid over the guitar and set fire to it, and then the next day he would be playing with a guitar that was a little bit charred. In fact, I remember teasing him, saying, “That’s not good enough — you need a proper flamethrower, it needs to be completely destroyed.” We started getting into an argument about destroying your guitar — if you’re going to do it, you have to do it properly. You have to break every little piece of the guitar, and then you have to give it away so it can’t be rebuilt. Only that is proper breaking your guitar. He was looking at me like I was fucking mad.

 

Trying to work out how he affected me at my ground zero, the fact is that I felt like I was robbed. I felt the Who were in some ways quite a silly little group, that they were indeed my art-school installation. They were constructed ideas and images and some cool little pop songs. Some of the music was good, but a lot of what the Who did was very tongue-in-cheek, or we reserved the right to pretend it was tongue-in-cheek if the audience laughed at it. The Who would always look like we didn’t really mean it, like it didn’t really matter. You know, you smash a guitar, you walk off and go, “Fuck it all. It’s all a load of tripe anyway.” That really was the beginning of that punk consciousness. And Jimi arrived with proper music.

 

He made the electric guitar beautiful. It had always been dangerous, it had always been able to evoke anger. If you go right back to the beginning of it, John Lee Hooker shoving a microphone into his guitar back in the 1940s, it made his guitar sound angry, impetuous, and dangerous. The guitar players who worked through the Fifties and with the early rock artists — James Burton, who worked with Ricky Nelson and the Everly Brothers, Steve Cropper with Booker T. — these Nashville-influenced players had a steely, flick-knife sound, really kind of spiky compared to the beautiful sound of the six-string acoustic being played in the background. In those great early Elvis songs, you hear Elvis himself playing guitar on songs like “Hound Dog,” and then you hear an electric guitar come in, and it’s not a pleasant sound. Early blues players, too — Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Albert King — they did it to hurt your ears. Jimi made it beautiful and made it OK to make it beautiful.