Fucking Christmas.  Fucking over.  Tipica '73 be spilling out my speakers and I must say that the clave rules.  I defy you to not want to move while this music is on.  Nothing to do with anything.  Focus.  Cascara making my head knock.  Tata Guines solo.  Taste, maturity, control, class.  Listen to his resolve.  Can't fake that shit.  Short stabs of verbosity.  Bongo bell incessant.  Focus.  Focus.  Focus.

Ritmo.  Ritmo Universal.

Yesterday I talked to my brother about the Harmony of the Spheres.  He told me that he was at church recently and that the pastor--or whatever the fuck you call him--started rapping about how everything is music; everything is resonating.  I could hear that my brother had a lucid moment about a very simple and irrefutable truth:  everything is vibrating.  From imperceptible sounds--by our limited vessel's means--to all colors and on to white light the electo-magnetic spectrum be holding it down.  It is a service of continuum meant to remind us that there is nothing random or out of place/order in this now.

 When I started my serious experiments in sound one of my early partners was Garry Scott Davis- or GSD as he is known in the skateboard world.  Garry was one of the first "professional" skaters.  He had the first street specific deck.  He invented the Boneless One.  He is an important and seminal American Cultural Pioneer.  If you have the time, look up his work.  It is honest, deep and uncontrollably unique.  One of my favorite human beings for sure.

We used to have all day sessions where we played trees, grass, shoes, toys; we'd amplify garden tools, glass, air conditioners--nothing was safe from the contact microphones.  There were times where our commitment to the sounds we were creating manifested themselves in colors that our ears could see.  You read that right, ears could see.  Quite the opposite of contemporary music lovers that are taught to hear with their eyes--more on that later...Without the use of drugs--GSD never did any--we'd trip on whatever the universe was delivering.  A favorite memory is playing the local supermarket.  Chip bags, cabbage, glass containers, the multi-timbral and harmonic drones of the coolers, freezers and air conditioners all can be utilized physically and passively to create an orchestra that you couldn't create only experience.

Everything is Music.

When I lived in Los Angeles it was difficult to find venues that were open to experimental musics.  There were two places in the early nineties that catered to adventurous musics; The Alligator Lounge and later, The Smell.  As one of the faithful ten or eleven people that went to the Alligator Lounge every Monday night to hear sonic relevance, I remember being enveloped in a gift that introduced me to many amazing artists, the most important to my UNDERSTANDING OF MUSIC was Billy Mintz.  The Alligator Lounge scene lasted for two years or so.  Those who were there already know this, but I must say that the run there--curated by Nels Cline-was one of the most consistently revelatory musical offerings maybe ever.  I'm not hyperbolizing either.

The players were mostly older and the scene seemed a little insular.  Being a young dude--twenty-three years old--seemed to place me on the outside.  This was before Vinny Golia started using Cal Arts students in his bands and never was there a younger person on the stage.  During this time some dudes started up a club in North Hollywood called The Smell.  The Smell was about eight feet wide and thirty feet deep; like a giant shoe box.  It was shitty and didn't seem serious or that it would last.  In fact one of the dudes didn't know who Captain Beefheart was.  Surprising and maybe telling somehow that this dude ended up moving to downtown L.A. and having the hippest alternative venue in the city.

Garry and I had been plying our wares anywhere we could.  There wasn't much of a scene so sometimes we played open mic nights.  There would be a dude doing stand up, several singer-songwriter performers--boy does that shit never change--and then Garry and I.  Garry would be playing one of the guitars he built with wire or rods for strings and I'd be in another part of the room playing trash, tin cans, pots or whatever.  Sometimes I'd bring a drum set to play for five minutes.  Most of the time we'd get heckled, or ridiculed.  Occasionally people would step to us and say they dug it.  No matter.  We had to do it.  Movement is always good.

After getting nowhere with Nels--I even did a record with him--on the booking front we got booked a few times at The Smell.  My dad came and saw us perform once.  I don't remember exactly, but we probably started our set playing toys, trash and found objects.  I would go around the room and outside finding any objects that had a sound I might want to use.  After that Garry would start playing guitar and I'd get on the kit and we'd play INTENSE.  Many drummers make me snicker when they tell me of their "thunderous" or "powerful" attack.  Not to be diminutive, but adjectives need only apply when they're true.  Garry and I played with push that can't be trumped, only matched.  So dad got hit with some shit that he most likely had no background with which to understand what what the fuck we were doing.  We finish our set.  Our sets were mostly challenging, loud, dissonant and dense.  But they were also unequivocally honest and their intent was positively to uplift.  Make a joyful noise, dig?

The gig is over and we're packing up and my dad walks over to me, says he liked it and has this look of  a new understanding on his face.  I can't recall if he said this that night, but soon after the gig he says, "So, Matthew, you think that everything is music?"  I told him I do in fact think that; know that, even.  He nodded as if to say, "Wow.  I get it."  What he got was the reminder that everything is music.  He also got a fundamental understanding of his first born son's beliefs and values.  Not long after that my dad gave me an advertisement that was in the paper.  It was a picture of this chef standing behind a skillet with two hamburgers on it.  His hand was over one of the burgers like it was a record he was about to scratch on.  His other hand was holding the spatula to his ear like he had DJ headphones on.  The caption at the bottom reads: "There's music everywhere, if you know where to look."

Besides my life, it is the best gift he ever gave me.

"MUSIC IS THE HEALING FORCE OF THE UNIVERSE"

                                                       --Albert Ayler