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Tuesday, November 18th, 2025
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Well, the end. This will be the last entry in this journal. It has had an immeasurable impact on my life, both with what I've written, who I've kept in touch with, and who I've met in the past two and a half years. I will always be available to keep in touch, paulnm a-circle gmail, and I want you to know that you are all my friends with whom I have shared and grown up alongside in a way I never thought I could with so many wonderful people. I'll miss making you laugh the most. I had this great Onion spoof in mind about a guy who complained a succubus just sorta laid there and really wasn't worth it, but I guess you can only spoof satire so much until you really start to question... Well, you know. Of course, I had to end this all with one last rambling sentence.
Anyway. Thank you so much for reading.
From the Archives of Nightplayer: ( )
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I have a house with a recording studio and a garden, and I make music with many talented people.
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Since you asked, what inspires me is the usual: hardship, dreams, girls... Mostly girls, though.
I don't think it's possible for the female persuasion to understand just how much I owe them as a musician. They do it just by being awesome and by talking to me and helping me to understand how their brains work, which is way more interesting than how mine does.
In nature, there is always a starting point at the very smallest magnitude. There is no edge of the universe, but there is an exact center. You can move in positive or negative numbers approaching infinity, but you start at zero. The only true roof we've got is the speed of light, which is really fast and leaves us with quite a bit of leg room, honestly.
Now, light is made up of photons, which are poetic. They are probably the fundamental building blocks of the universe, but get this: They're both a particle and a wave. At the same time. Imagine you are a two dimensional figure on a sheet of paper on a coffee table, and someone is holding a coffee cup above you. When it is right above you, it looks like a circle. When they are pouring it off to the side, it looks like a rectangle. "My God!" you cry in 2D, "That shape is both a circle and a rectangle!" That is how we see the photon. (We may discuss 2D God in a later article.)
Also in nature, the basic motivation that drives all life, "Survive!" (thank you L. Ron "Coconuts" Hubbard), which means you gotta procreate. To be human is to be aware, so we have to find a reason to do so, which is love.
Now, there are many differences between men and women and people in general, but when you get down to it the starting point for human existence is love and sex at the same time. I have run this by several female friends of mine and they generally agree: While each gender understands both if they think about it, men see the rectangle and women see the circle, if you know what I mean. One sees the particle photon, one sees the wave, but both are searching for a what makes light happen.
I love sex, and I sex love, and I owe it to the women in my life who have helped me understand what love is throughout the years. At that tiny quantum of struggle between the wave and the particle, that's where my music happens, and I just wanted to thank the women in my life for being beautiful like that.
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And not a moment too soon, let me tell you. Jay-Z to the rescue! Up up and away! Finally this bunch of no-talent, can't sing, can't rap hacks have been condemned by a voice with enough pull to make a difference. Because, seriously, the music scene right now is even more embarassing than usual.
Incidentally, I am updating this from my new G1 from my little studio and it is sort of the most wonderful thing since the smoke signal. Which, btw, was my chosen method of outside world interaction pre-G1. Support open source.
My old phone died horribly along the lines of a protestor in Iran or an ant at a young detectives convention, so i am noticeably without many phone digits. Feel free to remedy this if so inclined.
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Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
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If any of you are going to Bonnaroo this year, may I humbly suggest you see Raphael Saadiq, a really wonderful singer of classic soul. That way you can make me jealous and slightly want to be you, and have a good time while doing it.
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Lysandra's Aunt
Very nice lady. Her job: she gives this test at high schools in LA county for everyone's favorite, No Child Left Behind. They systematically issue passes to kids excusing them from class so they can walk across school and take a proficiency exam.
What they found was (surprise!) students used the passes to skip school or hand out somewhere else on campus instead of take the proficiency test. She was so shocked! A direct quote from her to me: "When you're told to do something, you do it."
What she meant was, "When an authority tells you to do something, you do it." If a homeless person came up to Lysandra's Aunt and told her to take a test, she would cross the street to avoid it. If her boss asked her of it, test taken, no hesitation.
But! She didn't even make the distinction. It's against her wiring. It never so much as occured to her that students might question the validity of an authority telling them to take a test that does not contribute to graduation credits. This test truancy problem occured at every level at every public institution at which the test was administered. Without fail, which is proof that her world outlook is provably incorrect.
The truant students themselves based their actions on one of two things: habit or evidence. Habitually absent students rarely think through the consequences. They merely snag any possible opportunity to skip. The latter group, the evidence seekers, saw the signs and made a decision. They can't be punished by a third party institution. All that happens is they get another summons to take the test (this time, hopefully, escorted) and maybe grumblings from faculty. Will this affect grade? References? Almost certainly not.
Even Lysandra's Aunt complains about the ineffectiveness of No Child Left Behind, so the personal benefit to the truant students is highly questionable. Still, she is highly contemptuous of the students who skipped out on her testing. Why? After further questioning, I discovered the answer: It makes her look bad.
That's right. They keep a tight watch on each program director's numbers. That's why she's so vile towards the skippers in conversation. Personal gain. Admitting that her program is a joke. And it never even occured to her to think this through, because questioning that means questioning her basis for income and ultimately survival and justification for existence.
Lysandra's Aunt is on a lot of meds. All evidence points to her basic tenets of existence as being trivial and meaningless. That, and the underlying fear of being viewed by an imaginary crowd as a failure.
Authority: a classic example of Richard Dawkins' bad reasons for believing. Lysandra's Aunt is old and pretty much stuck, so all I can say is, don't become her. Don't be afraid to question yourself on the most basic levels. That's all, thanks.
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Instead of going to another awesome desert party like I should, I holed up in my studio this weekend to learn Max/MSP, which is depressing twice because I only have it for 29 more days, after which it will cost $700 which I quite obviously cannot afford.
The program itself is quite elegant, though, and opens up possibilities way, way way over my head, which is awesome. I'm in a library right now downloading looping patches which may or may not work.
It did have a nice, simplistic explanation of binaural rhythms hidden in the tutorials:
Philosophical tangent: It can be shown mathematically and empirically that when two sinusoidal tones are added, their interference pattern recurs at a rate equal to the difference in their frequencies. This apparently explains why we hear beats; the amplitude demonstrably varies at the difference rate. However, if you listen to this patch through headphones—so that the two tones never have an opportunity to interfere mathematically, electrically, or in the air—you still hear the beats! This phenomenon, known as binaural beats is caused by ‘interference’ occurring in the nervous system. Although such interference is of a very different physical nature than the interference of sound waves in the air, we experience it as similar. An experiment like this demonstrates that our auditory system actively shapes the world we hear.
Plain English: When you put two sine waves together whose frequencies are slightly off, like at 1000 Hz and 1002 Hz, it makes a rhythmic wave pattern because the waves regularly reinforce and diminish each other. We hear this as a steady beat. When you separate those two frequencies and play one in each ear, we still hear the beat through our nervous system even though the waves never had a chance to interact out in the real world.
Neat, huh? It also is very comforting to learn an utterly new way to think about computer music at this stage. This program has been around for years, but it's gotten accessible enough now (price tag notwithstanding) for the likes of I to grok.
I blasted through the Max programming language tutorial yesterday, which took something like 10 hours, and today got up to the MSP basics review, which is about halfway. It's getting into sound building, which I think is beyond my scope right now. So I came to download a looping patch called lloopp and buy some blank DVDs with which to burn Reason, because Max now supports Rewire. Which is also weird and awesome. Next week, I hope to know this software well enough to perform with, because that's when I plan to build my new MIDI controller, after which I'll have about 20 more days to make $700 appear out of my ass. Wee!
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There is this wonderful, wonderful thing happening. Ever since Prop 8 passed, the worldwide outrage has fueled a "Legalize Gay" brush fire across the board. Six states legalized since the election, with all eyes turning to California in a definite, "So there!"
It's strange how awful things can fuel awesome ones. It makes me happy.
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I promised myself that by my birthday I would have a new, self-produced demo to show people. We're working on the drums, but here are the 3 new songs so far:
Electric Strawberry
Welcome To the Jawshack
Intentions
The big booming bass on Jawshack makes me very happy. Happy like... A BIRTHDAY!
Oh, snap.
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It was February 1, 2009 when the ocean flipped upside-down and covered the sky from one pole to the other.
Arturo Sandoval was one of the lucky few not quite dozing on the beach at 3:45 a.m. on the money, PST. He said later, "Better than the movies."
Of course, farmers at first thought it a cloudy, thunderous morning. Soon, all planes were immediately grounded (at least those not already grounded accidentally) with more than a few nods to the newly meaningful term "airship."
Cell phones, European TVs, and communications with satellites both commercial and secret went out. Luckily, many television signals in America survived, causing Time Warner to dole out a slew of congratulatory layoffs. In fact, so utterly was proof of the far out sky gone many wondered if, rather than the ocean become the sky, the earth had not flipped inside-out instead.
With Valentine's Day not two weeks away, many the romantic's plans seemed put on hold indefinitely without the twinkling stars under which to whisper sweet nothings. The more adaptable soon realized, however, that a sunset seen glowing through the diamond shaped crisscrossings one sees at the bottom of the pool would be more than sweet-nothings-worthy.
This same bottom-of-the-pool sensation gave more than one careful mother pause regarding what times their beloved children were now allowed to eat, simply out of reflex.
After several days, the sense of wonderment at the new sea sky passed. People got on with their daily lives as best the could. The sailors went back to school. The Coast Guard reintegrated. The satellites connections were fixed and everyone decided the moon wasn't all that great anyway. Oh, it rained more, which was good for some and bad for others. Most of Africa rejoiced, most of New Orleans just gave up and left. The Netherlands, somehow, persisted.
The legal troubles soon set in. The former oceans had been international, so when J. Arthur Murray made the first claim to purchase a significant portion of the Marianas Trench and half the former Indian, well, the proverbial shit hit the proverbial fan.
With two-thirds of the planet now suddenly viable real estate, a land war ensued to rival even the Falkland War of the late 1900s. While some stragglers had taken the plunge to their deaths (mostly seagulls and goldfish) the marine biosphere had done a pretty bang up job of picking up and skedaddling up to the sky with the rest of the water. The cleanup was minimal. Add to that the legends of buried treasure or the secrets of the Bermuda Triangle and prices skyrocketed.
The whole affair got so messy a large auction was finally held by several major world powers at the base of the Tonga Trench known as Horizon Deep. A larger conglomeration of the affluent, wealthy, and just plain filthy rich had never before been seen. Sultans showed up in caravans. A makeshift landing strip was double parked with private jets, some of which had not officially been invented yet. The smell of cigar smoke hung heavy in the humid, miles-below-former-sea-level air.
Most of the normal world was watching on their fiber optically connected television sets when, on Friday, February 13 at 3:45 p.m. on the money PST, the ocean fell back to the earth and crushed every last one of them at the bottom of the sea. Most of the world had forgotten how nice the moon looked at its fullest, and the following night the lovers sighed beneath the twinkling stars and made love.
Arturo Sandoval, his biggest worries now gone forever, sat on the beach and took the hand of his girlfriend, Isabel. Into her ear he whispered, "Best Valentine's Day ever."
The End
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Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
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I sold Ewan McGregor a pair of hiking boots today. This means that, basically, if you sleep with me you are basically sleeping with Renton, minus the hepatitis. Also if you call now I'll throw in a free light saber in any of these three exciting colors. Operators with Scottish accents are standing by.
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With the first chord strummed pickless on an old jangly guitar, the crowd surges toward the front of the stage and stays there for hours. Gogol Bordello frontman Eugene Hütz has hair almost to his shoulders and not an ounce of fat on his body. His handlebar mustache blusters about as he sings about work, drinking, loving, and giving the finger to the establishment. Also about wearing purple.
In December 1998 I cut my hair short after years of sporting an undercut. I cut it the day after I saw Rage Against the Machine on The Battle of Los Angeles tour, because I couldn't imagine throwing it about at a concert the same ever again. Up until last night, I was right. But that's not why there's still hope for the future.
Immediately the diversity of Gogol Bordello's current lineup makes you grin. A bass player from Ethiopia, a guitarist from Israel, accordian and fiddler from Russia, congas and whistle from Ecuador, a drummer from America. The ultra sexy Gogol girls are both half-Asian and half-something else (Just ask Weezer what that means!), dressed up in togas or viking hats and leaping about banging on marching percussion. The band deliberately draws from the best the world culture has to offer. And let's not forget a gypsy punk at the forefront, inspiring a personality cult with a grin and a bottle of wine.
Eugene threw his famous red bucket over the microphone and banged it again and again in time. He leapt and stomped about. He drew a fan from the audience and danced with her, and she almost died of frenzy.
I brought earplugs. They broke. I had on a nice shirt. It's almost unrecognizable from a bathroom towel now, and smells much worse.
During the intermission, I left the front mob to try and find a friend. I thought to myself, sagging from exhaustion, "I'll just stay back here for the rest of the show." I lasted about a song and a half into the encore, and then the band rushed the crowd all at once, and I ran through the crowd to meet them. "How the hell did I get back up here?" I wondered, my exhaustion completely forgotten. But that's still not why there's hope.
I was surrounded by people of all ages, but the crowd was definitely predominated by high schoolers. That definitely contributes to the hope factor. This age old music from the guts of the soils strewn about the planet spoke to them and they heard it and came in droves enough to sell out a show in Pomona, of all places. That's very close to why there's hope.
When I saw RATM in '98, we got knocked about plenty. There was a lot of anger and confusion and lack of focus then. I've only really done that since at GWAR, which was flat out violent. But this time, while I was packed in like a sardine on a trampoline my shoe almost came off, and right about then the music went slow. I bent down to double knot, and the crowd made a little circle around me. I popped up in record time to a sea of smiles, and a shirtless kid behind me yelled over the music, "Good job!" And the crowd surged back in as the music swelled and were all the better for it.
That moment of cognizant positivity in the midst of such deliberate destruction is why seeing a band like Gogol Bordello in 2009 gives me hope for 2010.
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If I had a thousand dollars, I would buy these in a heart beat:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=productList&Q=334433&A=buyUsed
As a matter of fact, I don't have a thousand dollars and I'm still thinking about it.
For the price, they are the greatest speakers in the world. They match my ear perfectly, because they're a little bassy. They're crisp and clear and from Finland. What more could a guy ask for? Right now the best speakers I own are in my car. That is sad. Owning these puppies would save me an incalculable amount of time and heartache. Sigh.
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I have decided NPR is okay. Just okay. They are still, when all is said and done, a pandering watered down pansy flamby pop news station.
Exhibit A: Swine Flu.
They were practically disappointed when there wasn't a massive global pandemic. My dog just yesterday looked at me and said, "Obviously, this is no big deal." Yes, everyone and their dog knew it was stupid, but since panic sells, for a week they found more and more obscure people to interview. One guy even said stock up on water and canned goods. SHUT UP.
Exhibit B: Piracy.
It was an extremely exciting sequence of events that led to the rescue of the American captain taken hostage by Somalian pirates. But over and over all I heard was talk of, "Should we arm the sailors? What weapons do they have? Can we nuke them?" Only in passing was the sorry plight of the broken country mentioned and as soon as all that blew over and the buzzword "pirate" could no longer be used, no one has mentioned Somalia since. FAIL.
Exhibit C: The Science of Spirituality.
Three stories in the past two days on this. Neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, quacks, shamans, all of a sudden they're doing all these interviews with guys studying religion and the brain, and they keep spinning it like there are all these implications. "Seeking God in the Brain." OMG STFU. The work is only interesting in that it arouses minor questions of brain function, and you don't need to interview eight thousand people to figure that out.
So you still have to siphon through mountains of pandering to the average listener stuck in traffic searching for something juicy/sexy to get anything actually newsworthy out of NPR. I am so disillusioned.
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That being said, pertaining to Exhibit C, it's cool to see scientific research on chemically inducing a religious experience. Maybe even induce it in lab mammals. Neat!
There must have been some period of time when spiritual experience and revelation first started occuring in the prehistoric human brain, roughly in the 50-150,000 BCE period. That probably had interesting effects on our development as a species. What was the first revelation? What do you wish it was?
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Here's what Gene [Roddenberry] said in an interview just before he died in August 1991; somebody had asked him, 'What's going to become of Star Trek in the future?' And he said that he hoped that some day some bright young thing would come along and do it again, bigger and better than he had ever done it. And he wished them well.
— Richard Arnold, Roddenberry's assistant
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There's a new 3-track demo out there now, with three poorly produced but good songs that sound relatively similar. The instrumentation is drum machine, organ, clavinet, guitar, synth bass and pad. And me singing obviously. Last night I handed it off to Al Jackson of the Soul Children, and we had a talk and it was good. I'll see him in a month if he doesn't get back to me and I can talk to him then. He was eager to hear it and we talked about music and that made me feel very positive about the whole thing regardless. He also gave me a copy of his new mix. Yay.
I am more or less trying to start a band.
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Saturday, April 25th, 2009
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I don't know, I heard Superstition again by Stevie Wonder and my music started coming out all soul-like. Also, my bigger MIDI keyboard doesn't have velocity control. Which means organs and clavinet sound way better on it. And harpsichords. There it is.
Also, new Piece of String archive at my revamped site. How's that for nostalgia, huh?
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Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
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We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
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Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
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It's half past midnight in Hollywood and the smell of greasy hot dogs follows me to my car. A cool mist fogs my glasses, and I nod to the little lady behind a cart covered with aluminum foil, relish, and fried onions. She's the same old Latina woman behind every hot dog cart in LA, and she nods back grimly. The wet weather is bad for business.
I first saw Jimmy Edgar in 2006 opening for Jamie Lidell at Troubdour. Jamie always puts on a great show and has really come out since the Multiply single got some play. I remember Jimmy Edgar as having the right idea but lacking in execution.
A few days ago a guitarist friend sends a text saying, "All live electronic music! This Thurs at Knitting Factory! I think u like..." Who could it be but Jimmy Edgar again? Great! He must have pulled a Jamie and gotten a band together, instead of the button mashing and Korg-talking of his last performance! Excitement!
But, no. Come Thursday, it was the same old schtick. A guy with floppy hair behind a lot of gear and wicked gangsta beats paying absolutely no attention to the audience. Occasionally he sang, modding his voice to sound the way he wished it did in high school. He didn't sing complete songs, so the neat and funky vocal riffs were overshadowed by all the pre-recorded nonsense.
Did he notice when people stopped dancing because he let a naked rhythm go on too long? Did he give any thought to structure, harmonic or lyric? Did he have any stage persona at all, other than a vaguely Prince-in-supsenders outfit? No wonder he hasn't learned anything in last three years! He never looks at his audience!
So! Here's a list of rules for aspiring live electronic musicians:
RULE 1 - EXCESSIVE LOOPING IS BORING
It takes forever to get to the good parts, and it messes up your structure. Looping is a supplemental tool to be used tastefully. It is no basis for an entire track by itself, because nobody wants to listen to the same four bars for five minutes without a break. Also: Beat repeaters and knob-twiddling filters only count as a break the first time. By the twenty-seventh use it gets a little old.
RULE 2 - PRE-RECORDED MUSIC IS DISAPPOINTING
A good live experience is based on establishing a dynamic between the listeners dancing and the artists creating. Music is simple like that. The mind is simple like that. Adding a step where the mind has to interact with music created somewhere else is distracting, and the mind is never fooled. It knows this pre-recorded schlock could have been created for anyone and the only point of coming to the show was to hear it louder. The mind does not feel special after this and leaves to get a beer.
RULE 3 - A COMPUTER SCREEN IS NOT YOUR AUDIENCE
The day recording went to 96K was a dark day for tape, because, frankly, 96K sounds great. That happened quite a while ago. Which means everybody and their friggin' dog listens to music at least recorded and augmented electronically. Hip hop and club pop is nothing but electronic music. In 1998, yes, Americans listening to electro and IDM got a warm, fuzzy future window to carry around in their hearts. Now Muse and Infected Mushroom and Kid A exist, and the glitch vibe is a thing of the past. Listening to electronic music no longer makes you special. Bands now possess the ability to supplement their live act with quality sounding electronic instruments, which means the old one-person-behind-hardware-mountains doesn't work anymore. We used to watch that because we didn't have a choice if we wanted to hear the stuff live. Not anymore.
RULE 4 - IF YOU CAN'T SING, DON'T
This goes out to every new artist out there: You are not Pete Townsend. You are not Daft Punk. You aren't even Cher, probably. Autotune is not a talkbox. It just makes you sound really stupid.
New album rule! You are only allowed one vocoder-like track per album. The rest you have to sing completely un-pitchcorrected or get a real singer to do it for you. Royksopp is getting better at this. It's only a matter of time until this production fad backfires anyway, and you want to be the first out the box on that one, don't you? Rimshot.
RULE 5 - MEMORABILITY IS A GOOD THING
"Music is Rotted One Note" is a prime example. As an avid Squarepusher fan I am happy to report I love this album. That doesn't mean I ever listen to it.
There's a lot of debate on memorability in music, which in my mind makes it the most important. When I recorded the Sex Pistols, John Lydon told me, "Debate! Always debate. Let the Nazi talk!" He also told me, "All good music is folky, mate!" He would point out the melody in any folk song (Not surprisingly, they all have one. Take note, Jimmy.) and then during an instrumental break he would say, "Can you hear it? It's still there! They aren't playing it, but it's still there, and you can't wait for it to come back in, can you?"
That's called a hook, which sounds like marketing, which sounds like sell-out, which is bad. So don't call it a hook. Call it folky. That's called integrity. All music we owe to folk, because it was memorable. Don't ignore thousands of years of songwriting because you're afraid of being called a sell-out. Be at peace with the way the human brain works or stop complaining about your lousy concert turnouts. It isn't just about you.
On a final note, let me talk about my friend Lee Noble. He used to play bass and pitchbent toys in a Nashville band called A Poet Named Revolver, and they were awesome. They made one great album and broke up, ignoring the interest from labels it sparked. He has a film degree and now lives in Burbank.
He sometimes performs under the name Conger Eel. His set up, which is usually in dim dive bars that serve more Mexican beer than domestic, involves several tape players, a guitar, illegible vocals and noise, noise, noise. His show is always different and the only genre label that might possibly apply is avant garde. His performances are fearless and without expectation and are to be taken seriously and very flippantly simultaneously.
Knowing that Lee exists gives me great comfort. His Conger Eel project won't make him any money, but he follows all the rules I've just laid out. His loops are created on the spot and never last long un-chopped. There's no computer screen, because he does this all with hacked tape cassettes. Anything pre-recorded is ironic, like an old M.C. Hammer sample found at a thrift store. And he is a good singer.
My friend Alen is a visual artist from Detroit, and he remembers the experience when I took him to see Lee at the Airliner with a vague sense of awe. That counts. Memorable means genuine, and Lee is most definitely that.
It's half past midnight and the smell of greasy hot dogs follows me to my car. A cooling mist hangs in the air and fogs my glasses. Maybe the crummy weather explains the sparse crowd at Jimmy Edgar's show.
I wouldn't bet on it.
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