Soundbyte Psychology

There’s such a stupid line-up of music at Burning Man this year. I mean, what’s the rest the world doing this week if it’s all at on the Playa?

Mad thanks to Ch!p for linking me up with the Rockstar Librarian’s Music Guide for Metropolis. BTW, Root Society is bringing some crazy huge video screen and setting up an outdoor dance area they’re calling the Tower of Babel. Then they have their large dance dome Yoshiwara and the smaller dome for Root Society Underground. I’m putting a T, U or Y next to each listing to separate them. Here’s my personal dancing plans (plans, ha!):

Mon – 10:30 – Opulent Temple (2:00 & Esplanade) – Dulce Vita [breaks]
Tue – 12:00 – Root Society U (10:00 & Esplanade) – Mimosa [dubstep]
Tue – 01:45 – Opulent Temple (2:00 & Esplanade) – Aphrodite [drum n bass]
Wed – Dusk! – Root Society ? (10:00 & Esplanade) – Metropolis Silent Movie
Wed – 12:00 – BassCamp (2:00 & Detroit) – Mochipet [basscore]
Wed – 03:00 – BassCamp (2:00 & Detroit) – R/D [dubstep]
Wed – 04:00 – BassCamp (2:00 & Detroit) – Eprom [basscore]
Thu – 02:15 – Opulent Temple (2:00 & Esplanade) – Dulce Vita
Fri – 12:30 – Root Society T (10:00 & Esplanade) – Crystal Method [bigbeat]
Fri – 02:00 – BassCamp (2:00 & Detroit) – Mimosa
Sat – 01:00 – Root Society U (10:00 & Esplanade) – Kraddy [tech-hop]
Sat – 01:45 – Root Society U (10:00 & Esplanade) – Vibesquad [tech-hop]
Sat – 02:30 – Root Society T (10:00 & Esplanade) – Rabbit in the Moon
Sat – 03:00 – Hookah Dome (8:00 & Esplanade) – Dulce Vita
Sat – 05:30 – Root Society T (10:00 & Esplanade) – Special Sunrise Guest!

Special Note: The Paddy Mirage is back!!! They’re at 2:00 & Athens. The last time they came, they brought wood and boards and literally built a two-story Irish Pub (seriously), complete with bar fights and a piano.

For anyone who wants to peek inside the Librarian’s Guide, click here.

While working at a certain fruity company, I remember the effect it had on me when I saw an entire cluster of plants literally killing themselves to reach the little amount of sunlight that reached them during the winter day. They stretched so far towards the light that they were uprooting themselves. One had already lost too much rooting and fallen. Some of the plants were reaching over other ones and likely blocked out light to those, but they were killing themselves over this limited resource of light. Then, looking out onto the field, I saw a single tree out in the light. It had grown into an almost perfect half-circle, completely balanced. It had non-finite resources and no competition. It was whole.

Here in a few minutes, I’m going to submit this entry, then I’m going to go write an email saying goodbye to a friend and a fellow musician… forever. I’m generally an amoral person, but live my life by a set of seven rules. It’s really sad that he broke one of them: “If a person asks or tells you to choose between them and someone or something else, you sever from the person doing the asking/telling.” Never support dividers. Their energy will infect you and drive a schism into your heart and you will infect others around you. In the past, the rule has come up only with people who I was fine severing from my life. This one is more difficult. Not only is he amazingly talented, but we’ve led similar lives and have shared experiences I don’t often find with the general populace. But the rule remains… and it’s there for a reason.

Post-note: In the past, others have created drama or made severance drag on longer than needed. As a testament to his character, not only did he respond from the strength of his character, but went above and beyond this. Fare well.

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of time, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
~Paul Bowles, “The Sheltering Sky”, Chapter XXIV

To appreciate a thing, both the “local” and “global” forms of awareness are required (a rare admixture). The local is required to focus on a particular object, or scene, person or environment. This “thing” that is focused in on may be special, may just be some other thing or may just be the required point-of-focus for the moment. In order to appreciate it, however–to judge its value and personal significance–awareness of other times, other objects and other people is required.

Example: I’m a bit annoyed that I have to wait five more days just to find out the artist and title for this song I heard about an hour ago. That actually triggered the fact that I WILL get to know the title, that I’m listening to a radio broadcast across the Internet that aired in the U.K. yesterday, hosted by a woman over forty who would make seventeen year-old girls from forty years ago look ugly… and listening on a computer with more music on it than even existed a hundred years ago and with computing power greater than that of the computer that sent the first humans to the surface of the moon. Just three years ago I couldn’t have skipped around a radio program, and five years ago I couldn’t have listened to it days after it aired, and just fifteen years ago I couldn’t have listened to it unless I could pick up the radio signal from halfway across the globe.

Time. Space. Knowledge of value to base comparisons. A vast global awareness is required simply to appreciate the local awareness and not take it for granted.

I found the track, btw, and it’s free from both artists.
It’s the XI Remix of “On Your Own” by James Yuill:

Free. Another “new” thing that I appreciate.
Love the fact I can share it just as freely.

When listening to Madeleine Albright’s speech at The Forum 2000, I was struck that she placed “freedom” in opposition to “responsibility”. This is a repetition of a mistake I first saw in the writings of Victor Frankl. Both have collapsed the two concepts of “duty” and “responsibility” into a single idea, calling it simply “responsibility”. It is a radical failing at worst, an error in lexicon at best. Collapsing “duty” into “responsibility” removes the possibility of being responsible to yourself. If you are drowning, your responsibility is to save yourself. If you and a car full of people are drowning, then you have a choice to be responsible to yourself or be personally irresponsible and risk your own life for another. No choice is right or wrong, but either choice means being irresponsible to either the individual or to others. Responsibility is not purely social nor individualistic; it’s both.

Freedom exists in the realm of personal responsibility.
Duty exists in the realm of social responsibility.

Therefore it is “duty” that stands opposite to “freedom”. Both of these are forms of “responsibility”.

I’ve made a few aesthetic changes around the place, dusted off some corners, smoothed out a bit of the background and generally made this lil blog up-to-snuff. The core purpose for stopping by here today is entirely music-related. My album “IO Vapoura [Variations]” is going to begin on July 7th of this year. Starting with the track “Gongo Dodan”, a new song will be released for free download each week until all thirteen have been released. The main place to keep up-to-date on the album will actually be on my new Facebook Musicians page here:

http://www.facebook.com/san.jaya.prime

Here are previews from each track off the album:
IO Vapoura [Variations] (Previews Only Until July 7) by Jaya Prime

Finally, as a runner up in the “2999″ competition hosted by Peppermill Records, my track “Escape from Hunahpu (To Break the Sky)” will be featured on their album later in May. Tim Luncsford, a 3D designer and architect, will be illustrating my track on the album. For those who like dubstep, grime and/or bass-heavy IDM, check out Peppermill Records near the end of the month for the album.

On nights when I sleep six hours instead of three, I almost always spend the time in lucid. It’s a practice I’ve lived for almost a decade. At this point, it is somewhat rare to run into anything “new” in the Dreaming. Because it’s stuck like a thorn in my mind, I have to get it out. This morning, in my main study in the Dreaming, a clock showed up where a book should be on a stand. This isn’t odd, in fact it’s normal. What was not normal was that the clock actually had a time on it that stood still and could be read. It read “11:15″. I had to know, was it the correct time? A clock had never shown the time before. So I woke up, turned on my computer and looked at the time. 11:18. It was a minute or two off. I looked around for a clock, anything I could have picked up the time from, and came away empty. It seems such a small thing, but it is a real anomaly to me as the world of dreams works rather predictably and being able to actually tell time in the Dreaming is not one of those things. Any other walkers reading this, I’d love to hear your experiences with clocks. Do they work for anyone else? I mean, hell, can you even read them?

You’ve been at the fair for some time now. You’ve ridden the rides, laughed with your friends and had more than a bit too much funnel cake. In fact, you likely shouldn’t have shared that cotton candy with your friends. You can feel it. The heat of the day and the rides has worn on you. You’re ready to leave. . except there is that one friend who wants to stay (isn’t there always). Your desire to leave is less than their desire to stay, so you stay. Day drags towards night. You feel you could almost pass out, or throw up, or whichever comes first. Then it happens. The sun begins to set. The sky colors and it seems the sound of those throughout the fair quiets ever so slightly as if you are not the only one to notice the sunset. Finally, as the light has fled almost entirely, lights begin to turn on in explosions as the rides, booths and games of the fair are all lit in explosions. They color the air itself in this moment between day and night, so that it is almost surreal. It is still the same fair that you couldn’t stand for the past few hours, but it isn’t. It’s transformed. You feel energized, charged – dare I say ‘enchanted’? You can’t believe that just minutes ago you felt like dying. You feel like you could stay up all night in this new wonderland all around you. Your own laughter grows louder, more energetic, joining the raised volume of those around you as nightfall is assured. This is the moment that changes everything. The moment in between one world and next. The moment in mixing when one song becomes another.

You didn’t think I was really talking about the fair, did you?

I have a personal ethic that, as long as something matters to me, I will push myself to be the best. One immediate effect is how much resistance surround this effort externally. The more you move forward, the more resistance. It trains the psychology over time to expect resistance (whether that be competition, management, natural or otherwise). When you take first, however, everything changes. The psychology has been prepared to expect greater and greater resistance, yet suddenly there is no interaction at all. Silence. It was only while working for Apple that I realized that this was because there is a concern about any interaction causing a decrease in performance. Before I realized that, I would create stories and illusions about the silence being caused by competition working behind the scenes to overtake me. Again, still trained to expect that. Instead, as I have seen time and again, you begin noticing that your own work and methods are being adopted by others (even passed out between others as some super secret message that must be destroyed after reading). It has become the very solitude and absolute freedom that I now seek in all I do.

The body is a system, just as a corporation or classroom is a system. Integrity is the body of a system itself: the whole. It is strength, unity and form. Loss of integrity anywhere at all in the body is like a fracture, and in moments the entire body can shatter like glass. Some systems are stronger than others. Some shatter instantly with even a single fracture. A fracture becomes a wedge, the loss in strength from that part of the body causes other parts to work harder. This added work leads to stresses in the system. If the fracture is not healed, then the chances of the system failing only increase. With a human, there is integrity of the body and of the mind. With the body, we know integrity as health. With the mind, we know it by our consciousness. There is also social integrity. Social integrity we form with our word. We either do what we say or we don’t. Anywhere there is system failure risks failure in all systems a person is connected to.

Building on the last post, take a look at modern day robots. They are built, specifically, to perform specific tasks. They have the tools for them and are really good at it. If any one of these machines were to become self-aware, it is very likely that it would not rebel and stop doing what it was built to do. Quite simply, it takes very little energy to do what it is built to do and an extreme increase in energy for it to do any other tasks. A robot’s ‘happiness’ lies in its function. There is only stress, energy loss and a multitude of unknown variables in taking on a different task. The rate of failure increases as well. You can use a hammer to drive a screw into a wall, but it is more difficult to do so and the screw will not hold as well as a nail when used in this way. Reviewing the majority of humanity, the similarities to the prima munus of machines lead one to assume that humans are machines, themselves. The danger in this is that a machine who becomes self-aware in a military program will find its greatest happiness in destruction. Any re-training would be to erase the creature it was to replace it with a new one, which amounts to death. The first machine ‘awakening’ remains to be seen.