So, this is my first post here, and I figured I would lay down some thoughts about what a blog is, what this blog is, and what kind of place it (and I) have on the internet.
1. Blogging.
I often ask myself, why the hell would anyone care about what some no-body has to say about their daily life, or the mundane asinine things that they are able to derive some type of pleasure from? Have we really devolved into a state of perpetual boredom that is so thick that we just sit and write to imaginary audiences all day and hope and pray that the mindless dribble that we type onto the screen makes any kind of measurable difference in this vastly growing (and simultaneously shrinking) world?
In my cynicism, I realized that the very reasons I initially dismissed blogging are the very reasons that make blogging something important. While the blogosphere may be just an over-sized popularity contest of poorly composed ideas, it also allows us, as autonomous humans in a world that is always trying to take that away from us, to shout whatever we have to say to the stars. And while we, and what we write, is largely unimportant (mind you, I use "we" very purposefully here, because I am in no way exempt from anything I've written so far) it may be important to SOMEONE. And for that very reason, we should write. Even if that person who derives importance and meaning from our words is ourself, or a random student/child/adult/elder/lost-soul in NYC, Dubai, Paris, or Ulaanbaatar, we need to write in the off chance that we help that lost-soul find meaning, hope, importance, or at the very least amusement.
2. My Blog
This blog is, first and foremost, about music. I have always wanted to be an "expert" on something, and since I live, breathe, eat, and shit music, I figured this would be a good enough place to start. I've gone through a variety of musical phases in my life (drifting from metal to grunge to folk to jazz and back, always picking and choosing what I take forward with me) I have realized the one thing that connects all music in this day and age: electronics. Electronic music is such a narrow term that is used to specify and separate very specific types of music. However, almost all music in this day and age is electronic music. Even the folk band that shuns the even thought of an electric keyboard, and would not even think of using electric guitars is making electronic music as soon as the studio engineer opens Pro Tools to record their newest folk-concept album about the evils of technology. Even if that band realizes the paradox of their very nature in this day and age, and decide to only use analogue methods of recording, the chances are that their creations will be spread on the internet.
So while (nearly) all music is electronic music, I would like to focus on what I'm calling electro-muzik (which I admit is a shallow attempt to create a term that is encompassing of a very specific idea in an innovative way, which is itself an antiquated and passe idea). While I will at times talk about the different types of electro-muzik I find along my journeys, the idea of this specific blog is documenting the ways in which I, as a human living in the 21st century, create and relate to electronic music. Entering this digital coil as Spectre Sound (or 5pectre//5ound if I want to be 1337), creating music with my comrade and partner in crime Mars Blastoff, combined to form Nexus 6, I wanted to document the ways in which the ways I look at the world change as I delve ever deeper into the digital rabbit hole.
3. The Digital Coil
The Digital Coil, is what I like to call the personas and lives that we create on the vast frontiers of the internet. I was watching one of my favorite episodes of Cowboy Bebop this past summer, the one involving a cult that attempts to transcend the Mortal Coil by uploading their consciousnesses onto the internet. I realized that once we reach that point, transcending the Mortal Coil by moving our lives (at an alarmingly increasing rate these days) onto virtual mediums. If half of our lives are spent in virtual worlds, what point does the Mortal Coil have? When we die our Facebooks, MySpaces, Twitters, iTunes accounts, and every mailing list we have joined since the 90's live on.
If Marx and Locke both recognized that in production we put a small fraction of ourselves into our product, what does this mean in an age where we aren't actually producing things that are tangible? This blog, which will live on (presumably) after I am gone, is just a string of words that are translated into various coding languages that are, in turn, translated by computers into ones and zeroes, stored in virtual space, and back to coding and then words. But I've put time and energy into this blog entry. Marx and Locke would probably agree that I could have spent this time doing homework, or working for the industrial complex, or building birdhouses. An actual portion of my time on this earth was spent on writing these letters that are in reality an endless string of binary. Does this mean that a part of my soul is now stored on the internet?
These are the only reasons for this blog.
Document
Write
Listen
Think
-Spectre Sound
No comments:
Post a Comment