8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Category: Part 5 – Embracing Nowhere

The inspired self and creativity as a path to connection and purpose in a complex universe. The soul of creativity.

Chapter List

  • Summer Showing

    I was back at it in the park recently, sitting cross-legged on a blanket under a tree, far from the path and people, with my synth propped up on a portable camp table, still trying to find a summery sound.

    Thanks to a new addition to my gear collection I was no longer playing with headphones, but rather I had propped up my small speaker amp nearby, set it to a reasonable volume, and was filling the local air with a bit of my chaotic noodling.

    It was not intended to be a performance.

    The reality of being outdoors in a park making art, taking photos, or playing music is that it is public. Eyes will connect. Heads will turn.

    We travelled to Europe a few years ago and did a lot of plein air sketching in very public places and it’s a whole other thing, let me tell you, to sit near a few thousands of wandering tourists and do your craft.

    Back in my little park a man on bike with his dog stopped to look, eyes connected, head turned. He stood in the grass a respectful distance away as if he expected me to crack out a banger and was getting ready for the show. I tapped out the first few bars of a Bach Prelude I had been practicing earlier that week and which was still stuck in my fingertips.

    He lingered for another couple minutes then cycled away.

  • Summer Synth

    What does summer sound like?

    Oh sure, it seems obvious—ice cream trucks, and birds chirping in the trees, Vivaldi symphonies and sunshine bouncing off the asphalt—but I was sitting in the park recently and I had brought along my synth.

    Remember my synth? About a year and a half ago I bought an Arturia Microfreak digital synthesizer (not a sponsored mention, by the way) which at about the size of a laptop computer has twenty-five solid state keys and about thirty knobs & buttons for tweaking and tuning the sound envelope. It is not a keyboard or a piano, but rather a proper (albeit budget) synthesizer with powerful shaping tools, a matrix-based sound design engine, an LFO, arpeggiator, sequencer and—oh, the list goes on. It’s also pretty portable, so I can pop it in a backpack with a battery pack and some headphones and—yeah—go sit in the park and play music.

    I have about four hundred patches loaded into the memory banks, presets for interesting sound patterns and pads and leads and bass effects and even all variety of cosmic sound effects.

    I thought it would be easy to find a summery sound.

    Because I was, as mentioned, sitting there in the park with my synth and my headphones and making music for no one but myself and I wanted a summery vibe.

    Synths, and perhaps this was merely a factor of my synth and how I had it configured, seem very wintery: echoey and airy wisps of noise, hulking bass tones, crackling shivers, and creaking sine waves. I tuned through my options, scrolling the knob and seeking something with mood that matched the sun and the grass and the mosquitos flitting about in the same and I struggled. 

    A tinkling piano sound, a ringing lead that evoked a steel drum, or the croaking higher octaves of a patch named after a frog—I was close.

    Summer was all around, but I couldn’t put my finger on something that fit. What does summer sound like, after all? 

  • Polka Truths

    If I was asked to cobble together a top ten list of my deepest and strangest creative influences, leaders of thought and individuality, curiosity and cleverness, people who have evoked the best from my introspective heart, near the very top of that list would surely be “Weird Al” Yankovic.

    My first interaction with the parody artist was when I bought “Dare to be Stupid”[1] on cassette tape while in grade school, the first album I ever bought with my own money, and I wore that darn thing out listening to it and memorizing every song.

    My latest interaction with the musician was just last week when I bought tickets to his touring show, one for me and one for my daughter, which is coming to my city later this year. It’ll be the first time in my forty years as a fan that I’ll see him perform live.

    And that’s the thing, isn’t it. Forty-plus years (nearly fifty, to be more precise) of making music and entertaining a loyal fanbase is nothing to shirk at, but it also represents a span of time lacking scandal or public outrage, all while being something completely unorthodox in time, space, music, and commercially-bankable content.

    And it all really occurred to me as I was walking this morning, having loaded a few classics onto the playlist of my phone: If there was ever a model upon which to look with awe and reverence for what it means to be a truly creative soul, how can we not count Mr. Yankovic as a paragon?

    Dare to be stupid, indeed.

    That’s the real truth some of us are looking for.

  • Explain Yourself

    Anyone who is not a sociopath is probably, eventually going to discover the need to explain themselves to someone.  This isn’t a weakness. It’s a social legacy reality.

    We all make stuff. 

    Maybe you’re not an artist or a writer or a musician, as I write about those things here, but you might prepare food, manage money, build roads, fight for justice, heal the sick—or any of countless other jobs—and each of those things the pursuit against the entropy of the universe. It is making order out of the slide into chaos.

    And if you are doing any of this making, eventually, probably, likely someone will ask you why you have made the things you have made.

    Why? Why did you spend your time on this planet, in this life, doing this thing and making what you made? Why this?

    It would be easy to mistake this for a requisite justification of our lives, rather than for what I think it is: the realization by all of us on the side asking the question: that what makes us humans is looking into the heart of someone else’s passions and seeking to understand.

    So. If someone asks you don’t flinch and feel interrogated. Explain yourself. Share your soul. Spread your love of that thing you do.

  • Monochrome Me

    A month into a photo project that is forcing me to post more black and white photography left me pondering an important question about the niche: what is so great about monochromatic images?

    I tried to wing this to the camera. I turned the camera on my own face (to practice some of that voice work on camera thing I’ve been doing) and attempted to talk about light and shadow and tonality and contrasting subjects, all of it in a meaningful way that didn’t make me sound like a tourist explaining that this thousand year old monument was neat-o, huh?

    It occurred to me half way through filming that while, yeah, I love the vibe of black and white photography, what has been captivating me about it as a photographer lately is that it is a kind of simple constraint.

    As I wander through my fourth decade of photographic hobbyism I find myself wrestling with a paradox: I could go buy more expensive equipment, travel to interesting places, and photograph amazing sights with pixel perfect clarity—like everyone else.

    Or I can find a voice of my own.

    I can try to stand out for my own style.

    Try to tell my own story.

    Try to to turn the camera into something more than a photocopier for the instagram top ten list of popular photo subjects and instead shape it into a mirror for me.

    And it isn’t (just) about the black and white.

    No.

    Rather, it’s about shaping the experience with the camera, locking in the effort to a set theme, or sticking with a single lens for a span of time, or putting the camera into monochrome mode and… and… AND… finding constraints that challenge me to break out of the perfectionism trap.