Four Thoughts

On returning to practice and a practice.

My setlist journal is also becoming my practice journal, as I get into practicing someone else’s music for the first time in some years (!), and as real instrumental practice crashes back into my life.

I’m working on Glenn Branca’s 13th symphony for 100 guitars, to be played June 12th at Lincoln Center (come thru!). It’s a little over an hour of music, and I’m definitely shaking off some rust and dust getting back into reading it/at all.

The first couple days back in front of the page were quite difficult, and I had to speak every thought out loud to keep myself on track. “Okay, bar 125, C# on the 3-and,” and so on. That’s cooled down to simply counting at this point, and hopefully that too will rescind in good time. I wanna show up correct to this gig.

This has got me revisiting my vocal practice while I’m at it. Running scales, working through some scream technique videos I’d bookmarked a while back, just generally trying to get my shit together after barely maintaining vocal fitness for the past year. All this time I could have been getting better! Ah well. There’s today at least.

It’s exciting to be putting the time in. In this moment I can see a whole world of delicious stuff to work on and get under my fingers, a huge cache of materials waiting to be turned into music. I’m enjoying a moment of possibility while I wait for these habits to become ingrained once again.

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When I'm sleeping well enough to remember them, I sometimes get musical ideas from my dreams. I had two music dreams one night this week. The first involved life as a composer in prison, and spotting an old friend leading a joyous workshop across a crowded prison lunch room. Go figure.

The second, I could only remember a snapshot of. I was sitting outside with a keyboard. There was a telephone pole nearby, with a number of metal rings around the base. Pressing a key on the keyboard would light up a ring, like a puzzle in a video game. I sat, just playing notes.

I didn't get a concrete melody or sound out of this dream, just a distinct vibe: something like the ambient side of the "folktronica" zone from the early 00s. Very nice sounding music, a zone I've never really given myself full permission with, always felt too corny somehow? I took the dream as permission to play with some basic, spare elements.

I don’t always know whether something is going to be used right away or cast into the riff graveyard. One tune we’re working on in Receive right now is based on a riff I wrote down in 2009, living in Berkeley and getting ready to move to New York. Most ideas can find a place at one point or another, if you keep things organized.

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I just watched the King Crimson doc from 2022. They were a big deal for me in my teens and twenties, and helped form a part of my musical sensibilities in a huge way. It’s understandable and easy to clown on prog, but I’m sorry: Rigor, when it hits, is so much more compelling, and sexy, and just cool, than aloofness. There’s room in music for all the breadth and depth of the human experience, but when it’s got discipline under its wings, man, that’s some shit right there.

Letterboxd reviews talk about the hilarity of watching everyone suffer so badly for the music under Big Daddy Fripp, and how odd that is to see in the context of a rock band. It's true that it’s pretty funny, but I also find myself remembering a more studious side of my musical self that I've mostly stepped out of in my thirties. (Generously you could say I was focused on writing and recording instead of practicing, but I suppose it depends on which way the light is shining.)

When I laugh with this film, I laugh in recognition of the absurd angst of living in constant striving, and I laugh in a sort of distant-for-now solidarity with that mindset. I am definitely not anything like a world-class player, but it doesn't take much time in the shed to work up a bit of craft-trauma, and that's something I can relate to for sure.

But the band's talk about making space for music and silence to enter the room, about reverence for the sacred, about leaving something behind when they die – that's the crucial IYKYK-flipside to the craft-trauma. When you hear and see them playing together, unfashionable as the aesthetic may be, it's like, oh right, yeah. The prep is hard enough to take up your whole life, but look, duh.

80s Discipline and y2k Construkction of Light era Crim were always my favorites, and I’m taking this as a reminder to get deeper into Belew’s stuff. I see the spinoff band Beat (Adrian Belew, Tony Levin, Steve Vai, Danny Carey) is looking to do a US tour later this year. I’ve never seen KC live, but even without Fripp, it sounds pretty sick right now.

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I drum like I sing or play guitar: One sound at a time, often pretty sparingly, played as beautifully as I can manage. I try not to reach for moves I’m iffy on, and anyway my aesthetic inclination is usually simple on the instrumental end, no matter what instrument I’m playing. I probably picked this up from my years with koto.

We're working on a couple new, quieter tunes in Star Card right now, and I'm noticing how these lighter beats are really bringing out the ugliness in my playing. That is, the individual hits themselves sound bad. On the one hand it sounds a little weird to say - a hit is a hit; you hit the drum and there you go. But on the other hand, oh, no, not at all haha. There are so many things that go into the sound of a drum, and the gear itself makes up, what, maybe a quarter of that sound? No, anyone who’s spent time looking for a snare sample knows this already: A single drum hit can be anything in the world, depending on the author.

Playing hard has been my M.O. so far on the drums (sorry Calley 💜), with my main inspirations being Nirvana-era Grohl and Animal from the Muppets. On most instruments, hard is easy, which is fortunate because playing hard sounds sick. But playing soft has really connected my drumming to the rest of my musical practice in this way - the anatomy of a discreet sound, this universe-in-an-atom thing. (I just googled this phrase and found out it’s the name of a book I haven’t read, oh well.)

I’m also confronted with another musical value that I hold very dear, one anathema to my impulse towards rigor, which is the beauty of raw naivety, of everyday playing. There’s a real place for this, and squaring that with my stage-4-prog-poisoned brain can be challenging. Caveman beats and “ignorant music” are broadly really resonant with me, and I think that dichotomy between the severe and the forceful is something a lot of heavy music folks hold space for. I think of certain early twee bands as an example of these values applied to more gentle music, to great effect.

It’s tricky holding low-grade cognitive dissonance about this stuff sometimes - band music can get a little tribal after all, and a lot of that stuff is signified by style, sound, and the rest of it. It’s also just uncomfortable to be at an instrument you’ve spent less time with, to be outside your comfort zone. End of the day tho, what else is all this stuff for?

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