Lucky Dog Audio Post

I was super excited this week to be informed by Darren Solomon that my qchord/omnichord youtube video had been added to In Bb 2.0. (That's me in the corner, third row, far right.) As I said before, this is one cool project - a collaborative spoken word/music piece that culls it's contributions from youtube uploads. And what an awesome assortment of instruments - three guitars, bass, glass marimba, Kaoss pad, rhodes, toy sax, trumpet, clarinet, vocals, banjo, Korg DS 10, EMX-1, piano, qchord, and omnichord. I look forward to watching this list grow. There's definitley a slot open in the bottom right, but who knows, maybe Darren will add more columns and rows in the future.

Being an ambient piece, the overall impact of the music here is somber. And I feel like this tone is also heightened by the videos themselves. Viewed individually, these youtube vids emote a feeling of isolation, each being of a musician working alone. But isolation is overcome by the way in which all of these pieces come together. The sum is greater than the individual parts. And the intention here seems to be just that. If you visit the site, make sure you play the spoken word piece (third row, far right). It's a poem written by Australian author Daniel Donahoo. The last line could almost be read as a mission statement, "This is not about what I produce. This is about what others receive." I feel that that says a lot about the spirit of this collaboration. That said, hats off to Darren Solomon for putting this together.

Here's the full text in case you feel like reading along.

Information
By Daniel Donahoo (2009)
she unplugs the device
no bigger than her thumb
from the computer and it smells electric.

“My life’s work,” she says. But, it isn’t her life’s work.

You see, we store information like an Escher painting.
It shouldn’t all fit in there. But, it does.
And every day we manage to fit more and more into smaller and smaller spaces until one day
she says,
we will be able to fit all the information the world has
everything that everyone knows and believes and dreams
into nothing.

All the words and pictures, the voices and videos,
the ideas and the daydreams,
the games
the past and the future.
It will all be there. Stored and filed.
Tagged with relevant keywords.

Our hard drives will be thin air.

They will make nanobots look like elephants.
And elephants will be in there too. Tagged. Accessible with search terms
like ivory and mammoth,
like largest land dwelling mammal

We will process away at nothing and understand everything.
We will think of the word and the information will slip in, not through our ears or eyes –
but straight thorough our skin. Information will breathe in and out of us.

Our knowing will permeate as deep as it does wide.
Our work here is to learn

so much,

to be so full of knowing,
that all there is left to do is unlearn.

Humanity must get to a point where we let go.
Leave the useless ideas and the spent ideologies in the recycle bin.
like an adolescent brain shedding neurons.
like a snake slithering from its old skin.
like an old man who has come to understand so well the point where reality meets the intangible that he is able to decide which breath will be his last. And, he will enjoy that breath more than any other he has taken his entire life.

And, her life’s work is more than four meg flash drive.

My life’s work, she says, is the impact that this has.

This is not about what I produce. This is about what others receive.