O, me patrie!

I love its fragrance of romanticism. It was a favorite the second I heard it, and I will never forget its fragrance. Chopin liked it a lot, too. Something cool happens to your right hand when playing this... it does harmony and melody at the same time. His voice was in his fingers. I always wonder what he would have done if he lived longer, in terms of composing for orchestras. I look at stuff like synth keyboards and am intrigued at how many different voices can be used with a single button. But that's the thing- it's a button. Yes, it's an instrument, but it doesn't have the same effect of a real piano. That's why I like it so much- because you literally have to grasp the sound. And it makes my heart melt.

This guy was birthed to this song. It's a memory I'll always have to myself.

Harder = a terrible safeword

you're depressed because you compare yourself to john coltrane
but when did you stop thinking you could be like john coltrane?

here's a little lesson in hard bop:
they didn't call it hard bop because it was harder than be-bop
they called it hard bop because everyone shot a bunch of dope
it was the 1950's
all them cats
art blakey
paul chambers
miles and coltrane
lee morgan, dude who blew trumpet on this track
he played an angled horn on the record
given to him by dizzy
another heroin addict
i mean, what better way to put funk into jazz
other than being inside the jazz?
anyway, lee morgan died too young
his woman took a glock and shot him up on stage
i guess she lived in the music, too

i wonder what he could have possibly done
to have his woman kill him like that.
is it even possible
to separate the murder from the music?

have you ever tried to write a song and realized it has already been written?

Procrastination...

I recorded this exactly two years ago, on an upright Young Chang . It's titled "September 8," though its working title was "No Substance World." I don't know why I never finish songs unless prompted. Perhaps I'll finish this one... winter's coming. I miss having a piano. I swear my creativity soars when one's around.

Download:

Interrupted

Also, sidenote: notating music on Finale Notepad is excruciating. I swear to never use this notation software again... back to the pencil and paper.

Also, another sidenote: graphic scores are the shit. They're probably my favorite way to notate music. When people say they can "read music," it pretty much means they can look at a piece of paper and execute the intended results, usually with other people. But what if those intended results aren't really... intended? The New York Miniaturist Ensemble has some really interesting shit to say about that. And they have a fairly decent, part humorous collection of graphic scores on their site.. check them out.

Mistaken for strangers by your own friends

I guess I started this mix a really long time ago with the working title "Corrine's Mixtape." I got the idea from my friend Rob when he made a mixtape that "completely defined him" or something like that. I don't know if this mixtape completely defines me. But I could see myself writing every song on it, or at least contributing a chorus or something.

Download:

An Ode to Serotonin

(click to enlarge)

13 tracks, 47.2 minutes

I noticed that my mixes are getting progressively shorter and shorter. I think that I subconsciously envision the larger framework as a "Side A." Also, I like making mixes for a specific environment, event, activity, ala music for purpose. I guess I always envision theme music for everything I do. This one's the background to my everyday life. Just sitting down. Talking and thinking. Staring out the window. Folding clothes occasionally, maybe learning a song or two before getting ready for work. You know.

A few notes: the Untitled Brand New track comes from their untitled demo album that was leaked in 2006 before The Devil and God are Raging Inside of Me was released in November. Some hardcore fans would argue that those demos are infinitely better than the mastered recordings. What people don't really know is that most of those songs were SUPPOSED to be on The Devil and God... but Jesse was so pissed/embarrassed that the songs had leaked, so he purposefully didn't put them on the album.

Now, in retrospect, I want those songs to be on the album and many of them aren't, and I'm probably more to blame for that than anyone. This record already feels incomplete to me without those tracks and probably will forever. -Jesse Lacey

It must suck to hate the product of your art with only your own neuroticism to blame. Oh well. That's what major labels are for, right?

Rufus Wainwright's version of "Instant Pleasure" can only be found on his Best of album... and the Big Daddy soundtrack. Why do people shame others for enjoying sex for pleasure with multiple partners? I say be a slut and own it and fuck what they say.

Anyway. Enough of that. "Reparations" by Saul Williams is my battle cry. I impulse bought tickets to see The National in Kansas City last month.. super excited to see them again, hopefully from the rail, again, and this song is amazing live. I love the chorus to the Vampire Weekend song "Run." Apparently, according to my room mates, it sounds like Paul Simon. It's funny listening to old records, by the way, and realizing that most of my favorite artists now are mere reincarnations of 70's and 80's bands. I'm always weary to put Antlers songs on mixes... I just think that each song fits so perfectly in the new-age song cyle, Hospice, that taking them out of context makes them lose their essense. Whatever, I really like the second part of this song. Can't get that Kid Cudi song out of my life... Sam showed me an acoustic live version by this chick Lissie and I can't get the melody out of my head. The only reason I like the original better is that it's produced by Ratatat, and they're incredible.

I totally had this idea for a video before I saw this by the Morning Benders. Now I don't want want to do it because I feel like I'd be jocking their style. Still cute.

Yeehaw!!

And in the crush of the dark...

I could not, for the life of me, get this song out of my head at work today. Minor flashbacks of pole dancing on Halsted. Ow. I also blame Nikalas and Samantha for having the same exact music tastes. It came to my attention that I don't really listen to chick singers. I don't think it's on purpose. I guess I just relate to male front men more in the same way that Nik relates to Alanis Morisette. Haha. This one's for you, buddy.

Instruments: Ukulele / trumpet / my mouth / pill bottle filled with rice

Download:

Psychobabble all upon your lips

Currently listening to: Sufjan Stevens - All Delighted People EP (2010) (just came out omg) (so good)

In conjunction with: The National - Boxer (2007)

You should maybe listen to: La Roux - s/t (2009)

A triumphant return

Me 12:45 am

i say fuck it, you only live once

12:45amChelsea

lol until you die

12:46amMe

hmm.. i guess i never really thought about that part of it

It's been a year since the initial conception of this project. Life has come full circle, but everything is still the same. That being said, music is and can no longer be just a form of escape- it must be the propeller of creative energy, a substantial reason to keep going, surviving, or else all this "figuring out" turns to a pile of bullshit.

After the JTIC meeting last night, Dietzler (who is a more badass version of me in 4 years... or the other way around) helped me to realize what I already knew. That time happens, that life happens, and we are responsible for our own complications. Is Conor Oberst right? Should we just take it easy, love nothing? Or is everything really everything, as Lauryn Hill says?

I made this mixtape thinking about solipsism, but it eventually transformed into something more hopeful. I guess some human beings can't help who they are or who they've become, but if life changes like the colors of the leaves, then I guess we have to believe we can, too.

Click to enlarge:

Night Diving

I've been on some creative block for some time now. I don't know, I guess part of it is finding a reason to do.. anything. The motivation. It's kind of like the formation of a wave. I mean all these natural forces in the world create the actual wave. Without the external, it would just be existing there as water. Does it give less meaning to the physical and tangible liquid that it is? No boundaries in a world where waves exist, almost in spite of the meaning we give or don't give. Little things happen and exist for that specific moment. When the waves come barreling down the rocks by the museum campus on the southern side of downtown Chicago, the ictus between them being and them not being is: the crash. Once it crashes, it no longer is. Parts of it splash onto the sidewalk- if lucky, onto the same people that determine their meaning. Most of it falls back into the water. Is there pleasure in the height of a wave? Or do people just think too much and make metaphors about dumb shit that nobody else gives a fuck about? I'm back to "I don't know." But. I guess it's better than "I don't care." So, I had a record button, 5 notes, and these instruments at my immediate disposal. AKA in reach of my chair, so I wouldn't have to get up. None of these instruments are mine, by the way. Andrea's ukulele and Jamie's trumpet with Phil's harmon mute An ocarina shaped like a little bird A canister of loose change Just ride the waves, like moving incidences, crashing into one another. I guess it's what makes life have momentum. Listen with earphones, I recommend it most: 

Run on sentences are fun

When things happen, do they happen by chance, or does fate exist to some extent? How random is random, really?
I don't know what I really believe, but I know what I feel. And when your heart reacts so strongly to a piece of art, I believe the two of you were meant to meet, when you do, in your life, at that moment, to understand a little bit more of the world as it pertains to you, as it did for him/her, and to feel connected through time, as to never really being alone.

I guess. This guy's still alive though.

The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind is a kind of epic, a history of Judaism. It has Abraham, exile, and redemption. The movements sound like they are in three of the languages spoken in almost 6,000 years of Jewish history: the first in Aramaic; the second in Yiddish; and the third in Hebrew. I never wrote it with this idea in mind, and only understood it when the work was finished. But while I was composing the second movement, for example, my father would sit out on the deck with the newspaper, the sports pages, and every once in a while he would shout, "There you go! Another Yiddish chord!"

Listen to: Osvaldo Golijov: The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind

Opus 10

Oh man. What was he thinking when he wrote this one?