Saturday, March 25, 2006

MySpace

As much as I hate to jump on various pop-culture phenomena, over the last year I've found MySpace to be a much better method of communicating with listeners, exchanging ideas, and reporting on artistic developments.

Therefore, I don't really have time to maintain a billion pages, so for the latest Emptyself info, either check Emptyself.com or MySpace.com/Emptyself.

- ej

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Emptyself debut.

The Emptyself (self-titled) debut CD is being officially released tonight. This marks almost a year exactly from the beginning of production. Not too bad, considering all the new avenues I explored during the process. If you are interested in hearing/buying it, go to GenomeRecords.com. (Please?)

Almost hours after sending off the Emptyself master for production at the end of April, I began working on new Cire material. Now that Chris O'Guinn, an incredible drummer, has become invested in the project, we are anxious to work on new material influenced by our improvisations in the rehearsal room each week. This is a totally new experience for me. I'm used to improvising with people, but Chris and I seem to spontaneously generate coherent song-like parts out of nowhere. Fifteen minute explorations that sound more like "compositions" than "jams". We've been recording it all to DV cam, which is the only way we are able to retain these fertile experiments.

We're also still looking for the right bassist. We have been polishing and enhancing many of the Adrenological songs over the past few months as well, but there's only so much we can do without the bassist's presence. New material, on the other hand, can be in some ways easier to explore without the bassist. Since I'm the only one hitting any notes, I can switch in a new direction on the fly without having to tell anyone. The chemistry between Chris and I is incredible. It's making me have the crack-shakes in anticipation of our next show (who knows when that will be.. goddamn non-existent bassists.)

So just to be abundantly clear: for those of you wondering if Emptyself marked the death of Cire, or my desire to do heavier music with live drums, nothing could be further from the truth. The concentration of my ambient/acoustic/electronic inspirations into Emptyself has given me the ability to pursue those things to the fullest without worrying about consistency. Correspondingly, Cire is becoming a tighter, heavier, more cerebrally igniting entity (also owing a lot to Chris' drum science).

I was actually sitting here working on a Cire song just a minute ago.. But felt I might be venturing into an area I'm not sure I want to go. There is something to be said for expressing your hopelessness, but I try to make music now that helps me find my way back to a clear perspective when I get lost. As you listen/perform these things over and over, I have started to realize that I'd rather reinforce my wise moments over my weak ones. There have been so many times in the last couple of years that I began to fall into traps I attempted to work through in Adrenological. Reading or listening back to those insights helps me regain focus.

In any case.. I just thought I'd post this little bit of info to all my blogs, some of which have been left for half of a year untouched. To all of you with whom I've been out of communication, I love you all.

Thursday, December 30, 2004

where am i

I have left this blog sitting untouched for a while. My picture of the world I am living in has been so drastically damaged, that I sort of view every day now as a bonus. I've been spending most of my time either working on projects for money, or working on my music with the help of some very inspiring new tools.

So, I'm not depressed in the clinical sense. I actually feel more confident in who I am, as seeing so many brainwashed lynch mob members makes me appreciate my analytical/skeptical nature. I do feel very alone though. Not alone in the sense of being without others in my life, but alone in feeling that the individuals are scarce who share my respect for facts and my weariness of the pitfalls of superstition. This time I'm not just talking about the right-wing fools.

Around the election time, I felt like half of us were in the same boat, valuing facts over appeals to fear. Valuing real causal explanations of terrorism and poverty, over emotional appeals and blaming. We were people who did not see ourselves as the grand design of God/the universe, but as one of the Earth's many creatures. We valued evidence, and clear reasoning. Wrong.

The fact is some people are "left" aligned for the same reason others are "right" aligned. They identify with the people around them who happen to think a certain way, and import their beliefs for social currency. Many of them are just as superstitious and unprincipled as their right wing counterparts, their conclusions just so happen to fall on the left. I will say that their emotional concern for others seems greater at times, but these things are impotent without any constructive thinking patterns. What I'm talking about here are the people who believe in UFO's, karma, "mother nature" as essentially an intelligent god - and spend more time focusing on these completely impotent ideas than on the real inner workings of repression/destruction.

I'm not part of some cult that believes in eating only raw foods while playing a kazoo during certain moon cycles - and then wondering why there aren't many others like me. I don't have some radical theories of the way that things work, other than the ones you might find in Discover or Scientific American. When I have a theory about the way things work, I treat it as a hypothesis, and I respect the methodology of science to reveal whether the "hunch" is correct or not. I don't go around making all sorts of random associations, treating them as absolute truth, blaming who I see fit, and exploding with anger when I am questioned about these personal revelations. That's it. That's all I want to find in people. A real concern for life, along with an understanding that magical thinking has never stopped anyone's suffering. In fact, it has been the cause, or the means of much human suffering.

I was cultivating a false sense of respect for the people of other countries as well. I definitely think most Americans don't respect other countries' opinions nearly enough - don't get me wrong. However, I had started to idealize the people in other industrialized countries, and to think that they were all so much more intellectually advanced. There governments might be more progressive, but that doesn't mean that they think about the big-picture any more than your average American. The fact is, most people are concerned largely with their own practical existence. That's totally understandable, but it doesn't make the apathetic in Europe morally superior to the apathetic in America. Furthermore, people the world over create their world views in as equally a sloppy manner as the religious fanatics over here. It just so happens that the people around them, and the cultural tide where they live is less violent. If it were to shift, I think we'd see that most people worldwide do not have the necessary respect for facts to ward off power hungry leaders' appeals to groupthink. It's easy to seem progressive when all you have to do is nod your head with everyone else. I'm starting to think that, although I'd rather live in a lovely country with progressive government, the best social thinkers often come out of repressive countries. (I've read some incredibly morally advanced ideas from thinkers coming out of India & Saudi Arabia, as turning against their repression required a lot of conscious examination of the principles underlying it.)

In order to protect freedom/limit suffering, we need to not only agree on what the problems are, but be capable of discerning between constructive actions, and simply flailing our arms in the air, shouting "The end is near!!" Now I'm not saying anything against ranting, I'm just saying that some people don't seem to understand when they are ranting and when they are saying something constructive. Many don't seem to understand when they are making the same superstitious associations as religious zealots. For instance, an acquaintance recently made the assertion that the tsunami's wiping out 114,000 people (& counting) were Mother Nature kicking our asses for overpopulation. I merely asked what this was based on, what research, which prompted an almost wholesale rejection of the very scientific methodology that allowed the person to know about environmental devastation in the first place. This is no different from Pat Robertson or some other fundamentalist saying that "Aids cures gays." Some disaster strikes, and people pop out of the woodwork and say "I told you so!", which is not only heartless, but illegitimate and useless. And then they go on to insult those who actually spend 18 hour days working on the problem as "number-crunchers" who don't "get it." Meanwhile, the fact that science is the only reason life has gotten better for mankind is completely lost, as is the fact that the only effective humanitarians are those who seek to find the real causes of problems, rather than just pointing a finger based on a gut-feeling.

So we've mostly got people on both sides of the spectrum, using the same irrational thinking patterns, and disregarding the need for evidence to back up one's claims. We have people that talk about GWB's lack of evidence for going to war, and then start talking about the evils of genetically modified foods, when the evidence related to them only shows that they save millions of lives, are better for us & the environment than pesticides, and are no more harmful than the "genetic modification" we started 12,000 years ago by breeding the best crops. When they are shown this evidence, some environmentalists change their minds, but others just say the data is meaningless because they know "evil" when they see it. Well, so does W. If you are going to be in the camp that says "evidence & scientific objectivity don't matter, we're going to base our thoughts/actions upon our personal intuitions," you should know whose company you share, and that you are opposed to the revolutionary thinkers who have found a way to better this existence.

People are always bringing up Nazism when one starts talking about the biological roots of behavior, or the importance of trusting science. If we start finding out about our genetic makeup, surely tomorrow we will be cloning nazi's and sterilizing those who are "inferior," right? Let us reflect, that had the German public been more fact-based, they might have said "Wait a second, there's absolutely no evidence that the Jews are responsible for any of our problems. To hell with you and your crackpot ideas, Hitler!" But alas, they were just like the vast majority of Americans, and the vast majority of people in general. Someone gave them something to blame, and they joined the mob, rather than examining the truth of their fantastic claims.

So many great social thinkers & philosophers have made these observations much more eloquently than me. Try Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the list goes on.

Many people simply haven't been exposed to any real information about who we are, where we come from, and how we work. If you are interested in starting to understand these things from a factual perspective, rather than a faith-based one, here are just a few books I highly recommend. They are very enjoyable and enriching reads, and moreover, they do not contain the armchair hunches of the authors, but the vast amounts of knowledge from the tons of research being done day and night, with the very same methodology that cures disease and makes the world a better place:

Religion Explained - Pascal Boyer
The Red Queen - Matt Ridley
Genome - Matt Ridley
The Blank Slate - Stephen Pinker
Descartes' Error - Antonio Damasio
The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins

These are at the top of my list, but check out anything by Ridley, Pinker, Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, E.O. Wilson, and of course Darwin. If you have any books to suggest to me, please do, but know that I don't have time to read any more evolution vs. design, theism vs. atheism books. These things are child's play, and for first-year philosophy students, and life is too short to keep talking about whether or not Santa Claus exists.

Monday, November 22, 2004

thanksgiving week

I'd love to start a message board sometime to connect some of the wonderful people who have found my music, as they are a disproportionately intelligent and musically-involved group from about 8 different countries.. but who needs another message board? Maybe in the future..

Notice that there is a new link to a music downloading page, where you can still download 2 full tracks from the Emptyself EP, as well as the full web-exclusive single "Occupation". In addition, you can now download 1.5 minute samples of the other songs on the EP, if you don't already have a copy.

As far as the rest of the material, about 5 songs are in the mixing stages, and several more in pre-production. Already the question of live performances is coming up, but I made a decision early on that this was to be art uninhibited by a particular band format, so those arrangements will have to be made after the fact.

Lingus, the funk band I play with, went into the studio today to begin tracking. I am going to mix and produce the CD, but it looks like I won't be there for the rhythm tracking, as I am stuck here in NOLA doing the voices, sfx, and music to a cartoon for Cleco. I am the voice of a man, 2 boys, a girl, and a dog. It's actually enjoyable work, but I regret missing the Lingus sessions.

I hope everyone has a happy thanksgiving... I guess, even though it's not really possible for the people in Iraq.. I guess we can be thankful we are the invaders and not the invaded, just as the pilgrims might have been... So I guess this is the time of year that people of European descent get to be thankful they aren't of some other race.. yeah that must be it.

Sunday, October 24, 2004

web-exclusive release: "occupation"

Today i uploaded a little song that, although non-central to the material i'm working on, needed to be released this week or never.

"Occupation" is available on Emptyself.com, but go to nolabands.com/emptyself to download if you want to move it up the charts.

These days, our administration often chops up the world into good and evil. The label of "evil" covers not only those who do us harm, but those that live anywhere we stand to profit from invading. We make no distinctions between the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11, and anyone with their skin color. The CIA and the 9/11 commission have refuted with certainty all links between Iraq and 9/11. They have refuted any claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, or that they had any programs to acquire them. Yet many Americans, and most republicans, believe otherwise. We just can't seem to tell them apart.

And yet we expect the Iraqi people, and the rest of the middle east, to tell us apart from our leadership. We expect them to watch tens of thousands of civilians die at the hands of foreigners whom they did not attack, and welcome us as liberators.

This is not a "war", my friends. To call it so would be like saying child abuse is a "fight". We are fighting the people of a nation. People that are watching bodies burning in the streets. People that see children's bodies so mutilated you can't recognize that you're looking at.

45,000 people and counting held prisoner and less than 1,000 charged with any crimes. We expect them to endure all this, and think of us as liberators?

The truth is, we look a whole lot more like the "evil" ones every day. And it's not just some "partisan rhetoric". Its the whole world, except for the people in this country who are responsible, and the people they have fooled.

The answer to terrorism is not to terrorize 10 times stronger. It's to stop it at it's source. Please vote to remove the biggest war criminals in the world. Stay informed.

OldAmericanCentury.org
AlterNet.org
ProjectCensored.org
MoveOn.org


Monday, October 04, 2004

not enough time

why can't days be 144 hours long... i am doing a blues gig this friday since lingus is on break and none of my projects are bookable right now. it always strikes me as ironic that i work so hard to make original music, but that ends up being hard for other people to learn & expensive technically to put on, so i end up jamming unrehearsed blues favorites instead.

emptyself will perform live, as will cire once again. however i am just one person, and i can only do so much at a time to make ends meet, write & record new music, learn new production techniques, keep up with world affairs, handle label business, practice playing and singing (which i dont do as much as i should-- slacker!!), and organize live performances.

lately i've been working with NI Kontakt running on my laptop for constructing drum tracks out of samples of the kit in my studio, and it's really inspiring. i love working out my studio setup to make it more streamlined and inspiring. i also love learning how to do completely new things with pieces of gear that i've had for 4 years, like the triton. that board is just an ocean of possibilities that one could never exhaust. i have a modest studio, but i'm thankful for it everyday.

Thursday, September 30, 2004

hello to nobody

emptyself is a conceptual music project. psychedelic in the sense of communicating a metacognitive awareness, but not in the sense of being random or postmodern in any way.

since i am determined to take over the name "emptyself" everywhere i can, why not have a blog?

check out emptyself.com if you want to.