Noise

Maybe you've been wondering what I've been up to for the past two weeks. It seems as though I just dropped off the face of the planet. I haven't blogged, haven't been on facebook much, and haven't tweeted quite as often as I usually do.

The past two weeks have included: graduating, getting a job, looking for a place to live, and moving. Actually, that's all been within the past week, but senior week prior to that was jam-packed with friends and whatnot. Sometime soon there will be a post dedicated to all of these events.

In the meantime, I have a more normal post.

Today, as I completed the setup of my new room, I decided to play guitar and bust out the good 'ole pedal board. Right now, that's a Boss GT-10, Boss RC-20XL, and a PreSonus TubePRE preamp.

This was just a for-fun time for me. A chance to play around with some new sounds and experiment. It wasn't about practicing and it wasn't about writing. It was about sound and music.

I list sound and music separately for a reason. Music is notes, rhythm, meter, and structure. Sound, in this case, is how music interacts with its environment. There is a lot of overlap between the two, but it is important, in this look at things, that they be viewed separately.

As far as the music side goes, I began with some riffs that I have been working on. This includes some real neat math jams as well as some live looping. Once I got into the live looping, as it often times does, it got out of hand.

One of the beauties of live looping is that it allows structure alongside chaos and meshes them seamlessly. When you have effects out the wazoo, you can incorporate this into your jamming. And it's beautiful. The structure/chaos coupling is the basis of a lot of experimental music, including more experimental post-rock.

This is stuff that I live to play. And I use "play" rather loosely. By the end of the jamming, "play" included things like heavily processed feedback loops, rubbing the neck of the guitar on the amp, etc.

This is where music and sound begin to diverge and is why a lot of people don't get or can't handle this type of music.

The music began as the notes and continued as the looped material. The whole jam was music, but only loosely through that structure.

As the jam progressed, parts of it diverged from music to only be sound. The way a guitar feeds-back with delay, reverb, vibrato, and distortion is often times noise; sound free from music. As the sounds build on themselves and take shape, though there are musical undertones in the looped material, the vast soundscapes in the foreground are what you feel.

You feel the music in the sound, but, more prevalently, you feel the sound. It's almost a form of sensory deprivation in that it is all that you sense. You hear sound and connect so deeply that you forget to smell or taste - you only hear.

And then you remove the droning; you turn off the amp suddenly or stop the loop. And there is silence. You go from being entrenched in the sound to being overwhelmed by silence. The noise ends so abruptly that it disorients you and the silence becomes a part of noise.