I’ve been becoming a little bit of a photography enthusiast of late, pouring over technical articles, putting together wish lists of gear, and checking out lots of photography be it for art or commercial purposes, and this last weekend, I had the pleasure of being able to do a little event photography for a Yoga Art themed event put on by Yoga Tampa Bay featuring local artists including my personal favorite (for some reason) alignbetween whose art was displayed on easels around a Christmas tree in an up and coming development setting known as “The Heights”. It was a lot of fun and even hula hooping ensued. Check out the flickr stream.

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“Open” is how I feel when I am “in the zone” which is a phrase used a lot by jazz artists who improvise. Both terms are used by practitioners of meditation and free diving as well and it turns out they are talking about the same thing. When free diving the experience is closer to removing inhibition as you lose your fear of being submerged underwater when you are an air breathing mammal doing an activity that is directly defying death, and blatantly going against your innate nature of self preservation. As soon as the fear is gone, you can free dive to your max potential. I remember taking college classes in jazz improvisation (4 semesters worth) and in class, people did some of their worst improvising since they were under pressure, being graded, being watched by their fellow students and their professor during a morning class to make it that much worse. The very same people on the band stand at a live gig at 3AM after some drinks and dancing on their breaks could improvise like Coltrane. This is because they were blocked by their fear, stress and racing thoughts rather than letting go. What do all these disparate things have in common you ask? All of them and several more activities have been measured by EEG to create alpha waves in the brain. This neurological state is what artists of all stripes would call “in the zone” and it requires that you are “open” and that your racing rational thoughts are turned off. Another name for this state of mind is a “flow state” of consciousness.

For me, the quickest way to get open is through expulsion, play, and channeling the more primal aspects of human nature. Yogic breathing or pranayama is another way to get in the zone. Essentially what is going on when you do these exercises is you are stilling, and quieting the rational mind. In Eastern cultures this stilling of the mind is considered essential to being whole in your humanity, so it can serve you in more ways than simply allowing you to be more creative musically. Westerners tend to think of this process simply as relaxation or stress relief, but that is a reductionist way of looking at something so important.  Without connecting to the emotional, irrational, truth in the body, you are unbalanced flailing around in only half of your potential and you’re going to create music that sounds like its coming from your head which isn’t going to move anyone. For us in the West, getting started down this path can be difficult at first. My rational senses are so strong that I have to go through what amounts to fits of unacceptable behavior in order to prime the primal pump within. Some people have suggested that our modern lives are so cluttered with noise and movement that still meditations are not effective anymore which is why they suggest active meditations where you do a repetitive task with focus to allow the storm in your head to silence. Also don’t think of “meditation” as this big scary serious and foreign thing. It can be almost anything as long as it distracts you from your thoughts. I like to play with toys in a childlike fashion, get silly, crack stupid jokes and laugh a lot. In the Scorcese short film Life Lessons the Nick Nolte character plays basketball inside his art studio loft before ever putting brush to canvas. Walking or dancing may also qualify as an active meditation as long as you can do it in a way that makes the busy mind cease. I also jam a lot, which is an improvisation method, I do pure jazz improvisation as a warm up to writing other forms of music, I like to play scratch DJ on some vinyl, or fiddle with knobs on my synths to make the most extreme noises possible in that childlike play approach as well. For me extemporaneous musings such as this equate to being an active meditation.  Disconnecting from utilitarian function allows you to get lost in what you’re doing, and that’s where you want to be. Once you’re there, all your formal musical projects with deadlines all seem to fall into place. All of these things I did intuitively at first and much much later came to rational discoveries that showed me how and why this might be a good thing to do.  When Johnny Depp met Hunter S. Thompson to study for the Fear and Loathing role, Hunter instead of shaking his hand, zapped him with a cattle prod, then took him home, started drinking whiskey, and they went out back and started blasting holes in all kinds of stuff with a shotgun. On the surface it sounds insane, but when you think it through in the context we’re talking about here, it makes a lot of sense, just not rational sense. What is rational about a festival like Burning Man? Nothing, but it is very human and spurs a lot of creativity. Maybe the writing analog for this would be rap freestyling, free writing, quick and sloppy poetry or prose, writing one word on many different pages and rearranging them or cutting them up with scissors or setting them on fire. William S Burroughs cut up methods worked like this. He was an intensely creative writer and seemed to understand what the creative processes effect on the brain well when he coined the phrase:

“exterminate all rational thought”

Now, you’re in the zone.

When I was a Fine Arts major at USF, my love of music became a love of all arts and creative endeavors. Fine Arts students were issued a “fine arts pass” that had a bunch of unpunched numbers on it, that could be used to get into a fixed list of fine art events that semester for free, each number corresponding with a specific event. The College of Fine Arts people who put this plan together knew we were college students with the interest but without the money to attend, and this was like their way of subsidizing our creative growth, which I really appreciated in retrospect. Even then I took that pass for everything it was worth. I originally went to art shows for the free food and wine, (again because I was the quintessential starving artist myself at this time) and quickly got hooked on the content. This was coincidentally how I got interested in wine, which I will discuss another time. I had a decent amount of raw drawing talent that had only been partially developed, so after attending some art shows, I wanted to try to go to the next level if only for my own personal reasons, so I took VC1. (Visual Concepts I the college of fine arts equivalent to ENC1101 Freshman English). I figured it would be a fun blow off course, where I would learn a thing or two, but instead found it to be immersive, challenging and really beneficial to my artistic eye. Developing my visual art side I realized much later only helped me in my musical creativity, because it allowed me to see the creative process from another angle, where some parts are easier to access and others more difficult, like how several different computer operating systems will have largely the same features and functions but one function will be much more apparent in one OS than in the others which helps you locate it easier in yours.

dinner is served "naked sushi" style at Nude Nite

The first culture shock for me was nude models. I was never particularly repressed or hung up on nudity, and I had no issues with it in an art museum, but I have to admit on day one in class with a live human nude model, I felt a little self conscious, and other students with less arts exposure than myself were clearly outright giggling immaturely. All of us eventually got over it though and we collectively realized that it was art, not erotica, that we were involved with which became more apparent the longer we did it. We did quick charcoal sketch exercises that only allowed us to capture the essence of the human form in 30 seconds, then 45, then one minute, and then later had more time to do 30 minutes, an hour, and an hour and a half. After going through this exercise it made sense to me why they didn’t do it the other way around, long sessions first, and short ones later, because you have to learn to see line, shadow, light and connectivity and be able to capture it with an economy of means, a concept I mentioned in my minimalism post. The long sessions would be a waste of time without developing that inner sense first. My art professor would place a human skeleton on the model platform when we didn’t have a model so we could feel and learn to draw that underlying connective power that belies movement and posture and she would place the skeleton in poses similar to our models so we could make the connection. I became so comfortable with drawing nude models objectively that over time I almost didn’t notice when the nude model of the day was a girl I had a crush on in school.

So, it was a nice surprise to get a call from DJ Teresa, who I produced a remix for the Synth DJs “Saviors of Electronica” on New Head Records UK, who was lining up all the musical talent for Nude Nite Tampa, and she asked me to spin a DJ set this Thursday night, February 26th at 1920 E. 2nd Ave in Ybor City Tampa, FL. I knew about Nude Nite from their events in Orlando where I spend a lot of time, and this was to be their debut of Nude Nite Tampa where I live, so things couldn’t have played together any more nicely. Nude Nite according the description on their official website is:

Nude Nite is a dazzling art event celebrating the beauty of the nude.Nude Nite brings together hundreds of artists for three evenings of visual art, performance and a cast of characters both in costume and out…

They also have info on the artists, a FAQ, and a blog for more background information about the show, and its intent. There has been a trend in the last few years of combining art, music and fashion under one roof, to bring more creative types together under one roof, and provide more value to people who are picking and choosing which events to attend fully, and which ones to avoid with their time and money, so this trend is a good thing for everyone involved. If this sounds interestng to you, and you want to do something different for a change and possibly expand your own personal horizons, come out to Nude Nite and if you’re there Thursday night, drop by and say hi to me.

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The term minimalism is commonly misunderstood, and often maligned. In its truest sense, minimalism was an art movement, a form of architecture, and then finally a form of music, specifically Classical or art music. Recently this label has also been applied to electronica as well, and many questions seem to arise from the use of this term, which probably needs some clarification.

The best way to think of minimalism in the broadest sense, is as a series of concepts or ideas. Ideas drive many things, and in creative endeavors, ideas become design principles, guides or even sometimes arbitrary rule sets used to steer the process. The Mies Van Der Rohe quote “less is more” gets thrown around, and did stem from the Bauhaus architecture and design movement so it is legitimately part of the true definition of minimalism, but it is possibly not clear enough to those who do not intuitively understand it at face value. Another way to say this is “doing the more with less”, as in create the most function from the least amount of form. I like to use the term “Occam’s Razor” which fundamentally means “economy of means” or what we could all just call plain simple.

My personal interest in minimalism started in college, but probably really started long before I had a name for it. Even as a small child, I was always attracted to the straightest lines, the least adorned furniture, and the boxiest houses, so when I majored in music in college, I did a recital with some friends who put together a small chamber orchestra, and we performed Terry Riley’s minimalist classic “In C” at an in school recital that we did for own artistic gratification as it was not connected to any of our curriculum. I particularly liked how it seemed to unite artist and audience in the same trance like state. It was really Philip Glass who drew me in first, when I heard Einstein on the Beach, and that was the thread that led me back to Riley. I quickly realized once I had a name for my attraction, I found it everywhere in Bauhaus architecture, Rothko paintings, the poetry of  William Carlos Williams, in Apple products, and minimal computing initiatives that emphasize the most functionality with the least amount of code bloat, and Ableton Live is a great emboditment of this ideal, when most music DAW software requires gigs of storage to install the binaries, the full Ableton Live 7 installer (not the suite) was barely over 100MB, and runs very efficiently on most hardware.

In electronic music, long before the advent of the genres minimal or minimal techno, acid was the music that sounded minimal to me. In acid, the instrument selection was a very limited pallette of the now infamous xoxboxes (the vintage Roland gear with a zero in the middle hence the “x0x” ala the SH-101, MC-202, TB-303, TR-606, TR-808 & TR-909 as the most coveted x0xboxes) and the beats were spare, and musical arrangement very repetitious, and it seemed that most of the time the only change was the cutoff and resonance parameters on the Roland TB303. Repetition on this level, either drives people nuts, or immerses them. The reason for the latter response is related to a phenomenon known as photic and auditory driving. Repetition is the core principle behind meditation or hypnosis, and it is at the heart of many religious practices East and West, as indigenous tribal drumming, gregorian chant, plainsong or mantra meld into a singularity that in the end is simply part of our human nature, connecting back to the cycles of the cosmos. The movement of techtonic plates in the ground, the rotation fo the earth, the movement of the moon around the earth, the earth around the sun, our solar system in our galaxy revolving around a supermassive blackhole, our galaxy cluster around an even larger blackhole ad infinitum are forms of cosmic repetition that change very little over time. Precession of the equinoxes is a way to refer to the slight wobble of the earth’s axis over time that takes approximately 26,000 years to complete one revolution, while the earth rotates on that same axis every 24 hours all the while. In this sense repetition is changing because what appears to be completely static is actually always modified in a nearly imperceptible way. Minimalism is in fact very close to nature for this reason. Minimalism is not a car driving from point A to point B, but more like a fountain with a color cycling light that stays the same while the light subtly morphs over time. DJ Spooky wrote a book called Rhythm Science which I was lucky enough to have him autograph my copy at a lecture appearance at USF, which at its core refers to music in the broadest John Cage sense of being any sound, and sound is just vibration, and all vibration has a frequency, and with modern science just about any frequency of any thing can be measured, and if it can be measured than it can be used artistically, as a direct or indirect point of reference for a musical work.  When we allow ourselves to become immersed in minimalism, as in all the previous examples, we first learn the repetitious loop, then we listen for the subtle changes, be it automated reverb, or filter sweeps or whatever, and the repetition becomes like the hypnotists proverbial swinging pocket watch, and we tune into the slowly changing dimension, and we can disconnect from our surroundings and drift off into ourselves, allowing us to feel the upwelling of our unconscious as if we were meditating, so that the minimalist music becomes an active form of meditation. In design and architecture, the simplicity of the environment, allows us to focus on ourselves amidst the uncluttered serentiy, in poetry we become reflective of our true self, and so in the end, minimalism encourages us to be truly human.