Dobrow, We Knew Thee Well

Tomorrow I'm in NYC for a couple of nights. There's no one in town who needs me to call and where I go from there I'm done packing for - leaving me time to get to Anon, who posted that I should blog more about the cassette music.

It all started with one inopportune Savomaniac. And then another, and another. Not so much victims of bad timing as stagnant space. But the main thing to remember is that karma had to be generated in order for there to be something to do, say, and feel ... things, that is, to accompany the open secret of  hyper-consensual multidimensional experience. So there I was one deciduous morning, toying with notions to write jokes about my phlegm, and the words welled up: "If all our hearts were with the heart of God, power would sort it and care ... "

Now that it's all over, the entire collection represents a larger tour of my life's work thus far. I've been listening more recently to the sound I got with one particular piano, tapes from a studio rented over a number of winters. Few of these songs are considered finished: the 2011-13 tour confirms that. The writing sure, but not the performances. "what more can i do" and "face the void" from the indie CD - absolutely, solo work over and done with, no need for further embellishment. A couple of the band demos too are not to be repeated, posited in the heyday of their day, "Pure as the Driven Snow" and "Better Tomorrow". The first is a three-way about cocaine versus good lovin'. The latter remains as my latest production piece. Of those four, "Better Tomorrow" received the most treatments on the Yamaha-driven exile-on-pain-street. "face the void" got but one version, reworked to a samba beat-box.

Yeah, I miss playing. For now, it's life in limbo land. The keyboard was showing signs of wear & tear anyway; didn't take too much ersatz Mitch Mitchell on the strip of drum pads to kill a couple cymbals halfway through. I was running out of one-off round the house percussion novelties too. Heaven knows what instrument I'm going to play from here (and i think i mean that literally). Singing aloud is a more private, infrequent affair. The truth is, playing and singing for myself had come to bore me enough to make listening to myself back worth doing songs at all. Like I've been saying for the last 8 years now, I'm into some other kind of sub-cellular music. That music IS flush in the tapes though, which does add comfort to having spent the last three years devoting to a medium in which all commercial product in that form ends around 1999: this music is new.