March 30ths

3/30/1998
 
The whole idea of generative art forms brings to mind Eric Drexler’s book about molecular engineering in nanotechnology where you can “grow” matter and assign them to be specific objects. You define the parameters and then cultivate the soil and water the seeds. 

[3/30/2026: This is essentially what the Songday series is about: Find a rhythmic riff and that becomes the seed]. 

3/30/1999

 

3/30/2006

Old Cal's, Wells and Van Buren

There is a small window to the right of the entrance, which had a "blues shrine" in it with a broken guitar and a Sinatra record. There was a story behind this, I'm sure, and we'll never know it. 

3/30/2021

Music For Photographs--a Robert Frank  

Route 285 is a north-south state road in New Mexico that's mostly a barren landscape and is in the vicinity of Area 51, and I wanted to incorporate that "vibe". At the end, I shift from Eb Major to Eb Minor which I think works well with the vibe of the photo, and the dark cloud at the end of the road and some rain falling from it. I thought it was perfect for the end--moving from a light pentatonic melody as a foreground element shifting abruptly to the minor mode with found audio elements. 

Red Room Mississippi was actually a re-working of an older song and video called Vintage Smoking, a Phrygian blues in G minor transcribed into notation which I then used as the form. The original was really kind of organic which had started with a simple blues bass line following the same rhythm of the kick. The new version has tremolo guitar and some organ which was a binaural composite of the original organ part and another one that was basically a drone.

3/30/2025

I’ve always approached art as an exploration of some kind of an idea, as David Lynch did. When you sit down to write a song, it’s based on an idea, which could be something you might be playing on a guitar, or it might be an idea for a lyric. Music is mostly a conceptual art. Any time you’re creating art from ideas, it’s conceptual. It’s not representational, because you’re not writing a song about a tree in the same way as you would be painting a tree. For art to be more like music, that painting of a tree would need to be an abstraction of a tree. 

3/30/2026

Article about Oliver Sacks’ marginalia. Fascinating. This bit from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil has a music in it and can be used as a lyric: