Just a few informal notes contextualizing the various music audio files linked elsewhere in the Music section of my website…

So — yeah — in my spare time (heh) I’m known to torture the kids, pets and neighbors by playing strange musical compositions on my synthesizer.    I have a few different musical styles, none of them fitting extraordinarily well into any particular genre.

I’ve composed hundreds of songs and recorded dozens of hours of playing, but I never seem to find time to edit or mix down my stuff … too much else going on in my life… and of course, although I deeply enjoy my compositions and improvisations, I don’t feel to be quiiiiite as talented in the music-verse as in say, AI, philosophy or writing…

Anyway, at this point, almost the only stuff I’ve gotten in a condition remotely approaching presentable are a few simple instrumental songs w/out rhythmic accompaniment. A lot of my music is very different than this stuff I’ve put online here — I love loud bass, electric guitar and drum samples … over which I occasionally make the questionable choice to growl out some lyrics ;-D … but recording and mixing that stuff is more complex and time-consuming, so all I’ve got online for now is pretty simple stuff….

I do have a rather particular philosophy of music: I don’t like to imitate anyone but myself. I like to approach the keyboard as if it were a found object that no one had ever seen before, and just fiddle with it and see what happens. Of course, I don’t take this philosophy too seriously and plenty of stuff I play is influenced in various ways by other things I’ve heard…. The Dubuffet “naive art” philosophy from painting and sculpture is fairly close to my philosophy of music, I suppose. I started playing keyboard in 1982 (when at 18, I bought myself a crappy Casio keyboard as a college graduation present) and not until about 2002 did I decide to start seriously learning some songs composed by people other than me (OK, not counting some Ministry and other industrial stuff I used to play in the early 90’s, or some blues I used to jam with some guys in Australia in the 90s, etc. but…). Close your eyes, put your fingers on the keyboard and feel … quiet the conscious mind and let yourself be an antenna for the mushroom god from the 99’th AI Y-verse dimension … that’s the idea … or something like that 😉 … then after doing that for a while you can start to consciously shape the stuff your brain has channeled into structured, thought-out compositions … yadda yadda yadda … OMMMMMMmmmm…..