sonacast.com - podcasting without rules

12 Minute Travelogues

The tape deck was a Christmas present, a long time ago. It was huge and heavy and mostly metal, with big aluminum levers to switch the noise reduction on and off, or to select what kind of tape you'd be recording. The knobs were large, sitting under big analog meters with hair-thin needles that would twitch and jump to the tune of whatever was playing.

I could say it saved my life, or maybe just made it what it is now.

In the late hours, I would lie in bed, maybe with a book, maybe just with my last daydreams fading in the night, with a pair of clunky headphones clamped around my ears. I'd reach up to the shelf over my bed, touch the play button, and a little solenoid would engage the capstans and play head with a satisfying kip-thunk.

Sometimes it was Eno, sometimes it was Czukay, sometimes Satie or Stravinsky or Monk or Sanders. Some nights I'd leave the tape deck switched off and use my old shortwave radio to tune in the distant voices out there, the gentle sound of news in Norway or the regular, hypnotic chanting from the Vatican. Sometimes, it'd just be static, formed by the rising and falling of the ionosphere, bringing in little bits of random noise, stations appearing and disappearing in waves.

I would lie there, bathing in those rich pools of sound, and I would rise, out of myself and all the day-to-day frustration that being myself requires, and let that intrusive state of being just slip away.

There are landscapes under landscapes in the world, layers under layers over layers, endless worlds of meaning, of observation, and of ways to travel.

I wrote once about a tree and a streetlight, just around the corner from here.

It is a new world, the world of tiny machines that fit in pockets with room to spare, and I was out walking with my own little machine singing in my ears. The haze was thick, the night was cool and quiet, and I saw a tree casting the most wondrous light. It was just a tree, and just a streetlight, but the branches made shadows that radiated out from the source of the light like fingers, made clear in the mist. As I walked, listening to the music, I watched the way the shape of those fingers of light changed, merged, and created patterns for every step, for every note ringing in my ears, for every breath, except—

—except the light does not change, and while the tree moves, it mostly stays firm, and all those patterns and all those microscopic, individual changes in how I could see the tree and that light came from me, and from my path, and from the attention I paid to something that would otherwise go unnoticed. Every possible way of seeing the tree, and ways that would never be seen, all exist simultaneously, in a sphere of possibilities waiting to be explored. With a song singing in our ears, it becomes harder to just write everything off as we so often do, and whole worlds appear from what we mistake for nothing.

It is all out there, nested inside itself, and requires only a reminder.

So that old tape deck is now stored away, lovingly, even though it has not worked in a decade, and new machines have come and gone in its wake.

I am still listening. I still rise up, out from myself, and travel.

Why it works for me is meaningless.

When there is the time, I travel.

This is the first of a series of twelve 12 Minute Travelogues, music for meditation, daydreaming, idle thoughts, and other higher (or lower) states of being. It was recorded this morning in one pass, in real time, with no overdubs or edits other than to trim for time and to add fade-in/fade-out volume adjustments.

The instrumentation for this first piece was: Ensoniq Esq-1 synthesizer, Clavia Nord Micro Modular (for signal processing), Lexicon Vortex and Reflex effects processors, and an Electro Harmonix Stereo Memory Man (with Hazarai) for loop recording and delay effects. I also used a pair of Doepfer Pocket Control MIDI controllers to adjust parameters in the Nord Micro Modular.

The recording was produced with a Zoom H2 digital recorder, edited on a Mac Mini (Intel Core2 1.83ghz) using (freeware) Audacity software, and converted to an MP3 file using iTunes.

This recording is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States license, which means that you may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, and make derivative works (remixes) or use it in your own work as long as attribution is given, it is not used commercially, and you share the resulting work with the same license and conditions. If you would like to use this work in a commercial setting, please contact me.

There will be a new piece issued weekly (work schedule permitting) for the next eleven weeks. If you like this music, please share it with your friends, use it in your own work, or write, compose, paint, draw, sculpt, drift, or whatever you do.

12 minutes is longer than you think. Listen slowly.

the feed: http://www.sonacast.com/12mt/12mt.xml

Copy and paste this URL into your podcasting application to add this feed to your subscriptions. For more information about podcasting and podcasting clients, see ipodder.org, Apple's iTunes/podcasting page, wikipedia's entry on podcasting, or search Google. There's a lot of info out there, and a lot of hype and advertising and other stupidity, as well, but there's wheat amongst the chaff, and gold, too. You don't need an iPod and any other mp3 player to listen to podcasts, either—just a computer with speakers (either built-in or external).

If you're using iTunes, either on your Mac or PC, it's even easier. Just click the icon above and it'll open iTunes (your browser may ask you if it's okay, or where iTunes is located on your system) and you can click the subscribe button to get started.

the usual

good places

cool tools

role models

love

the feed: http://www.sonacast.com/12mt/12mt.xml

download individual pieces:

Stay tuned, there's more to come!