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This is a piece of music written by family friend David Lamb in memorial of the death of my mother’s father. It is played by my grandmother (violin) and her brother Greg (piano), who is now also passed away.

Hearing it again reminds me that life is short. I have not been making the best use of my time. I moved to the Bay Area nearly 7 months ago. Since I’ve been living here, I have done a little timid exploring, very little extremely timid socializing, and a whole lot of keeping my cognitive tendrils embedded in the extended reality of my computer, with its vast, tempting, and marginalizing wealth of information and connectivity. While enabling great feats of externalized memory storage and access, and augmenting capabilities of information processing, storage, and organization, it seems at times that living life so absorbed in this abstracted processing tool results in an overwhelming reduction of critical thinking ability and other aspects of intelligent behavior.
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To the detriment of my poor elderly car, and the benefit of my endorphin levels, I took a trip back to Olympia. This visit was a respite from my previous months of working hard at living alone in California and having no friends and working all of the time on my reel and my procrastination. Then I came back, and continued doing the very same thing.

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Unfortunately I didn’t have a tripod on my return journey, so the previous consists of snapshots taken every 5 miles or so. The music is Traces by Cheju.

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Efterklang is an inspiring and amazing band who I first started listening to in 2005. They are from Denmark, and play a fascinating breed of music which blends folk, indie rock, electronic, and their own unique musical sauce into a compelling style of brilliantly dynamic, emotive, and beautiful compositions. I was fortunate enough to see them perform in San Francisco on March 10th.

I had the interesting experience of going to a club and seeing Tipper perform two nights before. For quite a while now, I have been excited by electronic music, and the potentialities for interesting new sonic and musical territories to be explored. All too often (as in many disciplines), I find the majority of electronic music to be uninteresting or even repulsive, because it strongly adheres to established patterns of style and form, is often rhythmically unsophisticated, does not experiment nor innovate, but instead self-congratulates and regurgitates itself endlessly.

As a relatively Anti-Sphexish human, I am predisposed to be repulsed by things that self-regurgitate endlessly. I tend to be interested and excited by things that push accepted boundaries and experiment, and that offer compelling, internally consistent, emotionally powerful, tantalizingly complex, and genuine (in the sense of sincere, profound, and non-cynical) “art”.
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