Ari Zucker (guitar), Kevin “KJ” Sawka (drums), and Joe Doria (B-3 organ), are each individually accomplished artists steeped in the culture of Seattle’s progressive music. Combined, they are Arisawkadoria, a rising force in the worlds of jazz, funk, and instrumental music. Their debut album, “Chapter One”, is an intricate exploration of sonic possibility exhibiting masterful instrumentation and ground-breaking improvisation.

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Ari Joshua Zucker creates dynamic, surging sound-scapes with the electric guitar and laptop. He is a classically trained jazz guitarist and a teacher at the Seattle Drum School. Ari has played with many groups and in jazz festivals around the world. I have personally seen Ari play solo at house parties in the Seattle area, and have watched him captivate audiences with warping surround sound using only a guitar and small effects controller. Joe Doria is a Hammond organist that has played with Skerik’s Syncopated Taint Septet, the band of the one-named Seattle saxophone legend, Skerik. Kevin Sawka, or KJ Sawka as he is more commonly known, makes a practice of upstaging DJs (perhaps unintentionally?) at electronic parties around the world with his live Jungle/Drum & Bass acts. He can outmatch the most sophisticated drum machine with his careening super-sonic funk grooves on an acoustic drum set.

“Chapter One” draws the audience in with an ambient electronic introduction that pops and sizzles with anticipation. The second song bursts off in a jarring funk groove with the organ running a driving bass line. It lays a solid foundation that the guitar gently floats over into a descending jazz melody. We are carefully introduced to our players, as though they were the costumed performers of a circus act, each one jumping out from behind the curtain and demonstrating only the smallest sample of their talent. They bounce off each other, pushing and pulling the transfixing audio like taffy.

“Chapter One” takes a turn at ‘Ninja’, and we see the true theatrics begin. The somewhat eastern mood, dubby bass, and jungle drum pattern draw comparison to past experimenters like Bill Laswell, Tabla Beat Science, and Seattle’s own Critters Buggin’. The song fizzles out like a holiday sparkler, the tempo slowing and the cymbals sizzling. The album takes a big breath in during ‘After Death Part One’, having exhaled a tremendous amount of creativity in ‘Ninja’. It twists the listeners’ anticipation like winding the rubber band on a balsa wood plane and setting it on the launch pad. ‘After Death Part Two’ rockets forward into probably the most memorable tune of the CD. While the audience teeters on a frantic drum pattern they are washed in a rain of vibrato harmony. The listener is set adrift on the blissful sea of awareness as they inundated with radiating sonic detail.

Arisawkadoria embark on a three song continuous jam starting with ‘Turtle Beats the Hare’. One can easily imagine the grin on the players’ faces as they attack each other with bursts of jazz in ‘Turtle’. In ‘Speedy’ the insanity continues as the guitar becomes distorted and the keys become shrill with heavy oscillation. We see rock and roll from the other side, not a simplistic subordinate to more complex forms of music, but as a strong culmination of the energy from a sophisticated combination of styles. The album drives on without pause into ‘Extensions’. As we bounce along into a new groove the Hammond B-3 expands into our aural backdrop and foreground. It sets a rolling, grooving bass line that pulls the intensity of the drums into perspective. The atmosphere is set with a spacey arpeggio that sounds like it could be straight out of the movie of 2001, A Space Odyssey.

As a fan of each of these performers individually, it is bliss to hear this collaboration take place. Arisawkadoria’s “Chapter One” is an album that shouldn’t be missed by any living human being.

This far but no further
I’m hanging off a branch
I’m teetering on the brink
Oh honey sweet
So full of sleep
I’m backsliding

This week I am not using my car at all. The goal is to make the transit between home and school more difficult, so I’ll spend more time at school and (hopefully) accomplish more while I am there. The benefits of riding my bike are already apparent. This is a habit I would like to keep.

It is hard to develop self-control exercises that directly pertain to school work. This was the best one I can think of, and I wanted to stop driving to school anyway. I really thought my motivation from working full-time would propel me through more than half of a quarter. I wanted to get good grades. I still don’t give a fuck.

I’m applying myself this week though. Perhaps I can set a homework goal and reward myself with new cymbals if I reach it. That could be good.

I’m sincerely tripping on this right now; the weather is eerily coordinated to my behavior and feeling lately. In fact, this is not a recent thing, this has happened for quite a while. Has anyone else noticed this? Perhaps it is just because I refuse to acknowledge concepts like “cause and effect” when dealing with natural correlations. One could argue my mood is dictated by that weather, which as a larger system supersedes my personal actions. I do notice how I am happy when it is sunny. However, take this following example:

This morning I woke up tired and upset that I was up late last night procrastinating on my English essay. The weather was overcast and drizzling. I skipped my first class and rode my bike to school in the rain. Now, sitting in the schools computer lab, having just finished my English essay, the sky is bright and sunny. I don’t propose that one thing caused the other, I just think that the correlation is of particular interest.

I don’t think I’m backsliding anymore.

I’ve just been alerted to a sub-genre of funk that I was unaware of, funk carioca. I’m reading through this article on wikipedia, and it is quite interesting. As I have been all about Brazilian music lately, this falls right into my current interests. Perhaps I can find some more influences for my Cobdorgian Gerstrupletriz album?

I just copied a couple albums by “The Books” that I’m pretty thrilled about.
Thought for Food (2002) (CD/LP)

The Lemon of Pink (2003) (CD/LP)

If you’ve heard “The Books” before, a lot of the production and styles are similar to Lost and Safe (2005) (CD/LP). They make good use of staccato notes and crisp, clicky drums. “The Books” wonderfully explore the textures of sustained cellos, chattering vocal samples, and twangy banjo and guitar lines over their dynamic off-beat rhythms.

I found ‘Contempt’ on Thought for Food to be unnervingly creepy, in a bad way. However, ‘Mikey Bass’ instantly became my favorite Books song, above Lost and Safe’s ‘Vogt dig for Kloppervok‘. It is fun to see their careful prose jump off the deep end and plunge into a bassy jam. At the end it tumbles into a hysterical myriad of laughing and joking.

The Lemon of Pink deserves another listen before I speak much about it, but it is exciting to hear some soulful female vocals on the title track. Both of these albums deserve attention by music aficionados and intellectuals alike.

Next week I will post a full review of ‘Chapter One’ by “Arisawkadoria”, as I am writing one for my English class. Don’t wait for the review to get this album, it is definitely one of the best of this decade, perhaps this century.

…and that high pitched whine in the signal is absolutely intentional.

Do you hear that teeth grinding, brain melting sound when you watch television? Do you ignore it? Have you in your old age lost your ability to perceive that  frequency range? If you haven’t yet become aware of it, try recording audio from a television signal and adjusting the pitch. You’ll notice it, it isn’t slightly subtle. Why, in our age of modern technology, would this be broadcast on our national video feeds? I can’t think when I hear it. I can’t pay attention to anything else. It is both mind-numbing and commanding of my attention. Is that your experience too?

[ this is a long one, the rest after the jump]

I don’t watch television anymore. I haven’t for a while. I live with someone who does, and it makes me sad. All of the content on basic cable is advertisement.  Most of the content on extended cable, digital cable, and satellite feeds is advertisement. Take, for instance, the typical sports feed. Aside from the constant interruptions for the videos labeled as advertisements, there whole of the broadcast is coated in a sticky residue of consumer filth. Watch as the batter takes the plate (I guess I’m going with baseball here) in front of the banner for antiperspirant or beer, and shifts their emblazoned Nike cap every so slightly to the left. The announcer takes this brief second to regurgitate the slogan of MLB’s umpteenth sponsor. The ball is hit, and the camera pans out across the sea of billboards and banners following the ball over the giant coke bottle replica. The scoreboard watermark in the corner flashes FOX as the announcer shouts the count of Microsoft K’s for kids or some similar bullshit.

It isn’t limited to moronic expressions of male ego. Just watch anything at all with the knowledge that someone specifically motivated to sell you something has paid for, selected, and dipped their greasy paws into the creation of your “entertainment”. Now sit there and remember that somehow you paid for this crap. You PAID for it. That is absolutely unacceptable. Shows like American Dad and The Colbert Report aren’t even funny, they just present an abhorrent point of view to an excruciating extreme in the hopes that the contrast to what the viewer knows is decent will make them laugh. The Daily Show isn’t even funny anymore, as it has fallen into a stark formula.

I fully understand the popularity of serial and episodic video distributed on DVD. It is a wonderful alternative. It is much like listening to a CD over listening to the radio. I find this a little sad though, even though I am not a radio fan. It is like giving up on the public forum, the desire to have a medium where our collective conscious is imagining something together. I think that is the dream of what television should be, and we should all have that in our thoughts. Youtube was the first step at correcting that. (As an aside, this video is spectacular: Imagining the Tenth Dimension ) Now we have websites like Stage6 that take that to a new level of quality, beyond that of typical television broadcast. The next step is improved methods of creating associations among the content and accessibility for viewing. I really want to see more of these video websites design special CSS layouts for the Nintendo Wii to make browsing them on a television or from a couch more accessible.

The limitation of these systems is that they are still delivery structures for content generated by an individual or (relatively) small group to many more people.  They have the benefit of having much more interaction for the viewer, allowing them to associate the video with similar ones, rate it, and respond to it with more content. The next step in having a better collective consciousness forum is having something that makes all viewers participants. Think of a step or two away from a video game. Here are some of the things on my mind:

• A video “mad lib” of sorts. I haven’t much thought out how this would work.
• As an extension  of our internet video association databases (youtube, stage 6, etc) and the video search engines (google video, etc.), one could make a interface where each local viewer (every viewer in the room) can enter a list of subjects as videos are playing. Imagine that each user has a little PDA sort of device (or perhaps a wireless game device), a laptop (with wireless internet). On the main screen the videos play, on the small screen each user has a list. The users/viewers could pass the list making device around, they don’t each need a separate one.
  As the users formulate their subject lists, a video play-list forms for the big screen. The play-list could be formed in this manner:
  1. Similar subjects are grouped together to have a more full comprehension of the type of content the users want to see. The similar subjects that have been selected by the most users will have higher priority over the subjects selected by individual users.
  2. Videos that have associations with higher numbers of picked subjects gain a higher priority on the play list.
  3. The videos are filtered by rating (good/bad, thumbs up/down, 1 to 5 stars, etc.) and other parameters set by the user/viewer.

  As the videos play the play-list will constantly update according to changes in the user-lists. The videos will play back to back without interruption. The users will have the option skip a video. Also, the users can individually rate each video for preference or quality. The ratings could be handled in a similar manner to subject picking; videos similar to watched videos with multiple negative ratings will be less likely to play.

• I’d love to hear your ideas.

PLEASE, please, please, if you pay for television, stop. You are paying for something that you don’t want. If you say that you want advertising, then you are reptilian, pure and simple. If you don’t want advertising, then you don’t want television.

I have been struggling with the quandary of  how to help my sports watching friends break their television habit. There isn’t a good answer for this. I would love to say “stop watching that crap” but that isn’t going to help any. One can watch stream baseball online (with a steep membership fee at MLB.com), but for American Football and many other sports the internet broadcast is crippled by licensing deals with television networks. I hope this will change so we (as a species) can stop pouring resources into a bad system. Sports fan-dom is stupid, but not inherently bad. Television sports broadcast is bad though.

</rant>

I sit here in the quiet space between the end of my English essay and the beginning of my large assortment of horrendously mundane Java assignments. After finishing my essay (which I’ll post after the break) I was quite frustrated with school, so I flipped to a random page of the Tao Teh Ching. I thought this passage, the first one I flipped to, was quite apt:

20

Have done with learning,
And you will have no more vexation.
How great is the difference between
“eh” and “o”?
What is the distinction between “good”
and “evil”?
Must I fear what others fear?
What abysmal nonsense this is!
All men are joyous and beaming,
As though feasting upon a sacrificial ox,
As though mounting the Spring Terrace;
I alone am forlorn as one who has no
home to return to.
All men have enough and to spare:
I alone appear to posses nothing.
What a fool I am!

What a muddled mind I have!
All men are bright, bright:
I alone am dim, dim.
All men are sharp, sharp:
I alone am mum, mum!
Bland like the ocean,
Aimless like the wafting gale.
All men settle down in their grooves:
I alone am stubborn and remain outside.
But wherein I am most different from
others is
In knowing to take sustenance from my
Mother!

I don’t entirely know how to interpret that, it is rather depressing. There are a lot of parallels between that and this past weekend. I had another great time listening to a backup of voice mails about all the fun I am missing as I toil with teaching and learning. I hope you don’t think I am rude for not responding. I like hearing from all of you.

Cheesy “Remembering” Essay I wrote for English 101:

Remembering-New York with My Little Sister

01/30/2007

Naiah is my friend and a singer that I’ve collaborated with over the past few years. She is also my little sister, and she is 14 years younger than me. She is a wonderfully creative little tyke, and as her older brother it is fun to use my knowledge to facilitate her imagination. I’ll record her making up a story, singing in Japanese, or smashing on the keyboard, and then use the elements to produce a funky beat. We like to collaborate like that when we’re drawing, playing video games, or running through the park.

When Naiah was about 4 years old we went with my mother on a trip to New York. My mother was traveling for business, so during the day Naiah and I were left to explore the city. In our adventures we covered as much of Central Park as we could, but probably visited less than a third of it. One day, Naiah asked to go to the playground. Since we had no agenda other than our whim, we went playground hopping; exhausting all the potential fun from one playground and scooting through the park to the next one. We would scurry up the ladders, zip down the slides, and swing until Naiah would decide that “this park is boring.” It’s fun to be able to be her watchful protector and just see what a kid would do when given free reign in a big city. She would wander between each playground feature, her stuffed dog “Woofwoof” in hand, timidly trying out each one. It took ample coaxing to get her to make friends, even though she had a following of kids eager to meet the odd little girl wearing a camouflage coat and cradling a cute little dog. On another day, a hot one, Naiah lead us into jumping in a large fountain. Naturally, as the unruly hoodlums we are, we were stopped by a mustached horse cop that scolded us for not wearing shoes. “There could be glass in the pond,” he declared. We reclaimed our footwear and resumed our watery tromp.

Our most challenging quest was getting back from the American Museum of Natural History. While it had been a temperate cloudy day early on, we were starting to feel an ominous light drizzle. We did not have the stroller, rain coats, or an umbrella, and the apartment we were staying at was across town, separated by Central Park. A sense of urgency started to creep in. As we began to venture away from the museum, the sky exploded with water. *I scooped Naiah up onto my back like a gorilla and we galloped down the street to the nearest awning. *Naiah and I stood there in awe as people scattered and dashed under buildings to get out of the torrents of water. *We bided our time until the bullets of rain reduced to BBs. Then, I sprinted through the park with little Naiah-chan on my back. *It was almost like running through a war zone carrying an injured soldier, except that the injured soldier is just a young child that wants lunch and a nap. Okay, it wasn’t that intense, but it was a long and difficult run with a tiny, tired person on your back. We made it back to the apartment and took a nice long nap.

Sitting with Naiah in any capacity has never been a chore. It is like revisiting a part of my early youth, except this time I have the privileges of an adult. Concurrently, I think it gives Naiah the ability to let her imagination run rampant as I take her places and watch out for her as she plays. It’s great fun to have such a wonderful friend for a sister.

This is the second day in a row that I have posted a blog. I’m not sure if this is more of an effort to procrastinate on school work or some sort of way to think outside the confines of my skull. It does seem to be therapeutic, and decent writing practice.

I made a pi estimation program for my Java class tonight. I should have been studying math for my test tomorrow, but I didn’t since this program is due. I would post the source but the formatting gets fucked every time I try. It was a load of crap, but I suppose it practices the things we’ve learned. Actually, I didn’t learn anything until I made the program. This class is painfully slow and I can’t pay attention. I wouldn’t go to it but the teacher sometimes surprises us with graded in-class activities. It’s fun to plug a number like 1,000,000 into the program and watch it scroll super fast through the approximations.

I’ve been using this Japanese Dictionary Denshi Jisho for some of the words on this page. It’s a really good one, and the sentences are helpful. It has been really fun to play with.

Listen to ‘Imaginary Cuba’ by Bill Laswell. This album is amazing! Parts of it give you that psychedelic tingly feeling in your spine like Shpongle or Tipper. The vocal parts are somewhat infectious, I hear them ringing and looping in my head. I’ve listened to it twice in a row tonight. The percussion is truly sublime. The rhythms flow like water in wonderful syncopation. Often they culminate into a bouncy break beat. One of the songs has a rhythm that really reminds me of Nightmares on Wax. I wonder if perhaps Nightmares on Wax sampled this CD, or if perhaps it is the other way around.

Recording should be like cutting out the pages from a magazine for a collage. It’s fun arranging those pictures into the final piece, but the real creativity is born from the snippets used. Recording should be blissful en devour, a joyous extrapolation of the sweetest waves one can obtain from their environment. Alas, it is not so…

Whilst the best of plans had been formulated, they did not follow the predefined structure. Four microphones were neatly arranged in an empty room with a bucket and an array of vessels, pots and pans in the center. We, being me and Mr. Neville, were gearing up to record some high quality water samples. We had the methods and tools to create wonderful droplet and percussive sounds, as well as strange tinny, pitch-shifting reverberations. We just couldn’t eradicate the signal noise from the setup.

<audio nerd>
We are constantly running into issues with amplification of the mic signal. Unfortunately the mic pre-amps in Mr. Neville’s Presonus Firebox interface are low powered in order to make the device more portable (it can be powered by a 6-pin Firewire port alone, without an AC adaptor). We are borrowing Judas’s Presonus 8x Pre-amp (can’t remember its name) to amplify the signal further, but at this distance from the relatively quiet source we still can’t seem to get a strong signal. We’re using SM57 mics primarily, and for what little I know about them I understand them to typically have a low volume signal. They sound great, but even doubling up on pre-amps is not getting us the levels we need to record this stuff well. We also were running a fair stretch of our cabling with unbalanced TS cables, which likely brought our noise floor up significantly.

Furthermore, our software is giving us grief. FL Studio is usually decent about accepting signals from an ASIO source, as the Firebox is, but this was our first time doing 4 channels of audio. That seem to work fine, but we had some severe performance issues and the program was doing this obnoxious unnecessary over-dubbing of our recordings. We would have used an application more suited for audio recording, but it seems Sound Forge does not support recording of more than 2 channels and Audacity won’t play nice with ASIO.
</audio nerd>

Why should you care? You shouldn’t! Stop reading! It feels good to complain. At the end of the night, we had little to show but a mangled recording of delirious maniacs making cat sounds and banging on walls, pots and the floor. It seemed to be a largely fruitless exercise, but perhaps we have learned some things from it. We need a better multi-channel recording application, and some balanced TRS cables. And perhaps coffee? Cheerleaders?

Hurrah!

- seed