Hello, everyone! This week I have a prior commitment that will prevent me from doing my usual Tuesday night show. So there will be no Meander tomorrow night… and instead, I’ll do a LIVE performance tonight at 8/7/6/5 PM E/C/M/PST (one hour earlier than my usual).
Tonight’s show will be one to two hours long and will feature a live musical improvisation exploring a concept that is highly unusual for me — uncomfortable, nerve-wracking, even scary.
I fully acknowledge that I am incredibly noisy individual. My late mother said that I “came out talking.” Anyone who’s ever tried to hold a conversation with me knows that as Nature abhors a vacuum, I abhor silence. I talk constantly, even to myself; I focus on sounds of all kinds in my environment, and often play music or noise textures when there aren’t enough; and as a 30-year veteran of terrestrial broadcast and Internet radio, I have an instinctive aversion to “dead air.”
Silence represents the unknowable to me. It’s a void that’s full of uncertainty and potential doom. Peter Gabriel once wrote of hidden silences that wait to come out and eat everything that moves, and I feel that in my gut… to the point where I hide a drone under every one of my live setups so that if everything else fails, I can unmute it and fill the terrifying silence before it consumes me.
Tuli Kupferberg wrote a poem about W-A-V-E-R, a “non-controversial radio” station that once broadcast an hour of silence, but I’m not going to inflict that on anyone (there’s dead air and then there’s DEAD AIR). Hopefully, though, in tonight’s piece (tentatively entitled “The Living Air“) I will allow myself some silence: pauses, spaces to breathe, very quiet sounds rather than a constant high-level onslaught, attempts at sparseness to counter the often-massive weight of many of my compositions – and no drone as a safety net. Let’s see how far I get before I crack!
See you then, and remember, no Meander tomorrow… a different kind of silence on my part, I suppose.
You must be logged in to post a comment.