Typecast: Pipe organs in Utah Valley

Typecast: a Sunday check-in

Zhneshtotmatlitszeth-n'

Today I'm feeling grateful for not taking a bad path in my life.

This has to do with the kind of music I listen to. Music is such an important part of life for so many of us that it's important to be mindful of what music we're listening to and why. I feel good about the music I listen to, which gives my life more richness than I can know. I know I take it for granted most of the time, especially now with the internet.

When I was young I was in danger of going down a wrong path with my music, allowing other people to shape my listening choices in regrettable ways.

I'm talking about rock and roll.

Specifically, I'm talking about how some people tried to stop me from listening to rock and roll, and for a while I was in danger of following their misguided warnings.

I was young and impressionable when I first heard scandalized reports of the evils of rock music: bands with names like Black Sabbath and The Grateful Dead – horrors! It wasn't quite like the movie Footloose – I didn't live in a small town and the church had no problem with dancing (of the right kind), but the knee-jerk fear of the strange and different was just as strong at home and at church. I remember telling my younger sister that rock and roll was devil worship and that I wasn't going to listen to it.

I didn't keep that resolution for very long, for two reasons: my older sister's discovery of MTV and my older brothers' record collection that they left behind when they went away to college. It was a treasure trove, full of Led Zeppelin, Rush, Yes and the like. And as my sister continued to sneak views of MTV at night, she started buying more records of the bands she was hearing: mid-80s stars like Ratt, Cinderella, Poison, Def Leppard, Guns n Roses . . . my parents were very worried. I could tell that there was illicit subject matter in some of the stuff, but I had no clue that “Pour some sugar on me” was supposed to be a sexual metaphor, and I thought that Van Halen must be heavenly messengers after I watched the video of the Blue Angels stunt flying to “Dreams.”

This went on for some years, and as adolescence eroded my innocence I did sometimes suffer pangs of conscience for listening to some of the music that I did. Every once in a while I had to confront some explicit warnings from the authorities. Some I could shrug off without too much guilt, like my youth leader who thought that Queensrÿche's nifty logo looked Satanic. Others were harder to ignore.

One Sunday when I was 17, the Priests' Quorum lesson consisted of a recorded talk by some minor general authority about the perils of inappropriate music. I don't remember the who or when or where the talk had been recorded, but I had heard plenty of this kind of thing over the years, and progressing through my youth I had developed quite a selective ear for the rock music I liked so much. I knew the Rolling Stones were right out, of course, because of the story of Gene R. Cook talking to Mick Jagger on an airplane and hearing out of Mick's own mouth that their music was calculated to drive teens to have sex. (You can read about this in several places, for example here and here.)

In truth, I've always found the Rolling Stones a bit boring, so that wasn't really a problem. I had put aside a lot of rock and especially pop music that I decided was not worth my time – in fact, my 18^th year of life was when I was most heavily into Rush and Queensrÿche, and had decided that a lot of other rock music just didn't measure up to those standards. Not to mention that I could see how many of my youth leaders, in being worried about heavy metal, completely missed the more blatant sexual messages in the more mild-sounding pop music they listened to.

So I was feeling pleased with myself as I listened to this talk, and allowed myself a bit of arch amusement at this old guy's immoderate hysteria about rock music, and then he dropped the bomb. He mentioned a song that everybody knew about which had the hidden lyric “Here's to my sweet Satan.” He mentioned this as an example of the really dangerous rock music out there that we just couldn't afford to dabble with.

But he didn't name the song or the group!

I was seized by doubt. Who was it? I didn't ask if anyone in the room knew; I wasn't that outspoken. Besides, I was truly afraid of finding out: what if it was a band I really liked? What if it was Rush? I could already tell that Neil Peart was skeptical about God, and there was that 2112 album cover with the pentagram. I had come to terms with Neil's expression of his beliefs in his lyrics, and I didn't listen to "Ghost of a Chance" or "Anthem."  I could forgive Neil for not believing in God, I could even forgive him from preaching selfishness in his youth, but what if . . .

No, it couldn't be Rush. Could it? Well then who? Maybe it was Black Sabbath? I didn't listen to them, only “Iron Man” when it came on the radio.

The question sat at the back of my mind for years. I wanted to know who had done it, but at the same time I didn't, just in case I might find out that I really had been dangling from the devil's hook unknowing for years. So over 20+ years of the World Wide Web I've never looked it up online – until just a few days ago.

Actually, I stumbled across it, as I was reading about something else, viz: the recent lawsuit brought against - and won by - Led Zeppelin for copyright infringement, for the opening riff of “Stairway to Heaven.”  (I won't discuss that in this post.)

I feel like I'm late to the party in discovering this weird little nugget in The Greatest Song in the World, but, it's sad to admit, I have a history of unease with “Stairway to Heaven” and Led Zeppelin generally. The first time I heard it (I was young and impressionable) was with a family member who was analyzing the lyrics and mentioned the possibility that instead of being a song with a Good Message, as seemed plain to me, it might actually be a song with a Bad Message. In other words, what if that “piper” were really the Devil? She never said anything about the supposed hidden message in the recording; I don't think she had heard about it.

And that album cover – well, it was certainly mysterious, wasn't it? Kind of spooky, with those arcane-looking sigils. My due respect for Led Zeppelin was retarded by that initial suspicion, so that the timeless wonder and quality of their music took a long time to erode my wary defenses. On the way, of course I heard a bit of schoolyard and lunchroom rumors (though never the one about the backmasked message): “dude, they wrote the song while they were high on some drug.” “Isn't that song about the devil or something?” “Didn't they sell their souls to the devil?” In the pre-internet information-scarce environment of public schools, any scandalous rumor seemed as likely to be true as the next. It didn't help that I saw a record-burning on the news with Led Zeppelin albums prominently displayed.

By the time I was 17, I had shed almost all of my unease or guilt at listening to Led Zeppelin – I had taped just about all of their songs that got regular radio airplay, and I spent my senior skip day listening to my brothers' old Zep LPs (including #4) on a friend's turntable. Never let your schooling get in the way of your education.

If I had been told at that age that “Stairway to Heaven” had the hidden message “Here's to my sweet Satan” in it, I don't know what I would have done. I mean, I might not have been able to play it backwards for myself to check, but knowing how credulous I was I might have believed it. And that might have caused me even more psychic retardation. As it was, I got rid of a CD I bought of symphonic arrangements of Led Zeppelin songs when I was in my early 20s partly because the artwork made me uncomfortable. It was too . . . magical. I regret getting rid of that CD, partly because of my silly squeamishness, partly because the crushing rendition of “Kashmir” was worth the price alone.

Because the thing is, of course, Led Zeppelin is magical! Good British lads, they tapped into the same rich soil of Faerie that J.R.R. Tolkien did in their own way – after all, Tolkien was one of their big inspirations. I've written already about how much I loved fantasy fiction and role-playing as a teenager, and during that time I vehemently defended these hobbies against the accusations of Satanism that came from “ignorance andprejudice and fear.” I assuaged my feelings of guilt at listening to “Stairway to Heaven” with the thought that a new day dawning with laughter echoing in the forests could be understood not only as an image of the Millennium but also sounded like Bilbo and his buddies having a great time in the Shire (I'd be willing to bet my lunch tomorrow that Plant was thinking of something out of Tolkien when he wrote that line). Forests echoing with laughter sounds like the kind of world I would like to live in.  I want to pack my bags for the Misty Mountains!

If I had had cause to believe seriously that all of this was really tainted by an earnest profession of allegiance to Satan I might have turned decisively and ventured too far down the path away from all that: away from the color, vitality and wonder found in so many creative expressions influenced by or alluding to magic, whether labeled as fantasy or otherwise. I might never have picked up Robert Bly or Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung; I might have decided to really sever my relationship with fantasy fiction for good and all, I might have never started listening to King Crimson . . . who knows, I might have even decided that Harry Potter was of the Devil.

I don't like to think of myself in such a state.

Fortunately, my exposure to this strange and amusing sonic coincidence has come at a stage in my life where I'm more skeptical than I've ever been and also seldom shocked or offended by anything I see, hear or read. And I had already been inoculated against taking backmasking seriously. When I first heard about the “my sweet Satan” hidden message I thought the man was talking about a subliminal message that you might have to turn the sound up or speed up or slow down to hear, not a silly backwards thing. I don't know if I misheard or misremembered, or if the speaker was misinformed and simply took his bad information as a reliable report not needing any questions. I'm more inclined to believe the latter.

Being curious, I've still done my own investigation. I've heard the section of “Stairway to Heaven” backwards, listened to it slowed down, made phonetic transcriptions, heard multiple versions and gotten to the bottom of how that vocal line can sound like “my sweet Satan” backwards. Because I do have to admit: hearing it for the first time was unnerving. After all, hearing any human speech backwards gives an uncanny effect (as David Lynch exploited to hair-raising effect in Twin Peaks). If your mind is primed to hear “Satan” it's possible to assign that word to three utterances in the clip. This whole thing has been a good chance for me to reflect on what I learned in Linguistics about the brain's way of picking meaning out of sound, and the weird things that can result when we impose our need for pattern recognition on random stuff (think of A Beautiful Mind, for example). For years I've enjoyed reading mis-heard song lyrics, and the other day I just about wet my pants laughing to this video of Orff's “O Fortuna.”

Back to "Stairway."  Listening closely and repeatedly – as digital technology makes possible – shows that only the first utterance that you might parse as “Satan” really comes close to having all the right sounds. The others are really just “say” - reversed from “yes” and “fiy” reversed from “if” pronounced with a diphthong. But the glottal stop that Robert Plant started each does sound like a hasty N in reverse, giving those backwards utterances a resemblance to the Standard American pronunciation of “Satan.” In the first (or the last) Robert Plant led off from the glottal stop with a little nasal hum before articulating the dental fricative in “there's still time.” On the reversal that sounds like an N, giving the backwards “there's” a really close resemblance to “Satan,” priming the ear for the “yes” and “if.” Since he pronounces “time” more like “tom” the vowel keeps its purity in reverse and can sound like “my” or “mah” instead of “miah.” That makes it easier to hear “sweet” instead of the “tleet” that's really going on. The L is slightly rounded too, and with some aspiration (the common leaky articulation) of T forwards, there's your SW resemblance backwards. Also the background instruments obscure the vocal sounds, giving an even more vague input for the mind to try to process into something. With such mushy uncertainty, the pattern-making mind could fill in all sorts of weird things – like the nonsense of the rest of the supposed hidden message.

If it had been recorded today, someone might have parsed the reversal as “jest my tweet Satan.” Whatever meaning anyone might extract from that could make as much sense as that silly toolshed. (Now if it had been seeing something nasty in the woodshed, we might have a case here. Though I can't think of any lyrics that would make any sense to backmask “I saw something nasty in the woodshed.” The closest I can get is “the stove and tea, it's on, meat sauce, yeah.”)

Now why anyone would think that the mind's desperate attempts to make sense of backwards singing should mean that those improvised meanings are actually assimilated unconsciously going forward is hard to imagine . . . until you remember that people who come up with these kinds of scenarios aren't generally in the habit of thinking scientifically or even critically.

I feel silly admitting a need to have done so, but feels good to fully debunk this rumor through my own sonic/linguistic analysis. Like a Hogwarts wizard dispelling a boggart, I say “Riddikulus!” and laugh.

And I play the song for my children, glad that they are hearing it in its glory, without prejudice.

Typecast: a musical fantasy, Baroque this time

I wrote this while looking after a toddler, so if it's disjointed and ends hastily, you'll know why.

My latest post for the Jung Society of Utah

I've got more posts lined up for this blog, coming soon.  But right now I want to share a link to the latest post I contributed for the Jung Society of Utah:

Pop Psychology? Jungian Concepts in Popular Music: The Shadow

This is the first in a series of posts I've got planned for the Jung Society.  In this post I look briefly at a song by Death, and in the next one I'll look at Nick Cave.

My Sigur Rós fantasies, part 2 (or, brass buttons)

Brass buttons!  I have a navy peacoat that has brass buttons.  My sister gave it to me over 20 years ago and it used to fit me very nicely.  The thick wool is like armor.  It's shapewear, really: can you tell in this picture that I was overweight?

In Boston, at the birthplace of a great-great grandfather, 1998

Trench coats or dusters are a standard nerd uniform, but they don't have anywhere near the panache of thick wool and brass buttons.  I've decided that if I'm going to be odd, I'd rather do it in a way that aspired to an absolute elegance.

When Sigur Rós released Kveikur in 2012, I held off from getting it for a while, because I was sad that Kjartan had left.  But it's become one of my favorites - especially "Stormur" and "Bláþráður" which share a very similar sound.

In the video for "Glosoli" from their 2006 release Takk, a drummer boy in an old military-style coat leads a group of children.

And the band members have sported costumes reminiscent of military uniforms (or marching band - anyway, with lots of buttons):

Maybe that's why, when I listen to "Stormur" and "Bláþráður," I feel like some kind of fabulous cosmic dragoon, decked out in a splendid coat of sober color, with the thick wool covering a body formed in appropriately manly proportions.  Somewhat like that drummer boy, I imagine myself soaring above the landscape, taking in the vastness of it, or marching along on some purposeful errand - or maybe just on one of my hikes (I'll write more about that later).

I mentioned that my coat feels like armor.  In fact, I credit part of the impetus for my novel in progress to that coat: the refinement and elegance of industrialized aesthetics that produced the clean lines of such a coat (instead of the sweeping curves of 18th-century military dress) attract me greatly, but I wanted to visualize a society that could achieve this sort of thing - and early industrial technology - but without the dehumanizing weapons of modern warfare.  I imagined trains, wool coats, brass buttons and sabers - without firearms.

This was in my head long before I ever heard of steampunk - and my vision was of a cleaner look than the clutter I often see in steampunk illustration and cosplay.  It's been interesting to observe emanations of my teenage visions appearing in contemporary fantasy - from the Mistborn Trilogy to Frozen.

Frozen: Scandinavian aesthetics.  Is this my Danish background coming through?  I saw Babette's Feast for the first time in college, and those snappy military uniforms made quite an impression.  (One of my favorite scenes also is where the storekeeper puts on his postal hat to deliver a letter.)  I grew up in a household with Danish furniture and utensils and so maybe I imbibed an appreciation for Nordic design that way.

I also grew up in a family where we were expected to dress up for many occasions.  This meant that I quite often wore a blazer - and hated it.  I think back on this as something like the way I hated math, even though I was good at it, and for a time even was a member of a competitive "Math League" in junior high.  It turned out that wearing a navy blue wool jacket - with brass buttons - was ideal for playing soldiers after church.  Perhaps I would have been mollified more often in my father's dress code requirements had he appealed to that sense of fantasy - you don't have to dress up, you get to do cosplay.  After all, I did find his old military gear and regalia irresistible, and I have enjoyed dressing in olive and khaki, despite my pacifism.
 

Minneopa State Park, Mankato, Minnesota, 1999

But that's another story. 
 (This post contains affiliate links, which I put in whenever and however I like.  Click or don't, as you wish.)

My Sigur Rós fantasies, part 1

(Part 1: Introduction)

I discovered Sigur Rós in 2001, right as they were starting to make big waves across the Atlantic.  Like countless other 20-somethings, I swooned to "Svefn-g-englar" in my candlelit bachelor apartment.  I saw them perform in DC that year, and after the show I stuck around to bug them.  I remember talking to Orri as he smoked and looked around as if he couldn't wait to finish talking with me and get on with the rest of his evening.  As I was leaving the venue I spotted Kjartan and called out "Thanks for the show!"  "No problem," he replied.

Afterwards I felt foolish.  I already knew about fame and how it puts sensible musicians on their guard (I listen to Rush, for heaven's sake).  Watching the interview sections in Heima I was reminded of that.  When people make music that reaches a large audience, their music comes to mean many things for all those different people, and that means there has to be a boundary set up, to prevent the listeners from imposing their projections on their fellow human beings who make the music, who have their own separate lives.

I recognize this, and despite my seven-year-old daughter's wish to fly to Iceland and visit Jónsi (yes, she's a fan too, like many children, as I understand) I know that most likely I'll never be in the same room with those guys again and that I have no right to expect that just because I like their music they'd want to be my friends.

But in my own personal take on their music, and my own interaction with the copy of the version of their persona that reaches me, Sigur Rós is my band in a way that few others are.  For one thing, those guys are my age (I'm not quite two months older than Orri).  Right now the only other band I can think of that I listen to, with members my age, is Aloha.  Since I discovered them I've followed them through the phases of the twenties and thirties, and I've had moments of deep empathetic resonance (which again I recognize can only go so far).  For example, when I saw a clip of their second film Inni, especially with Orri wearing that crown of his.  I can't quite explain, but something in that sight struck me with a deep familiarity.  What was it?  I don't know if I can explain.

Maybe it was a simple recognition of the impulse to dress up when playing the drums.  I have done my share of theatrical self-presentation as a drummer:

And as I wrote not too long ago, I have been feeling this desire for more personal adornment lately.  I wonder how much of it comes from my approaching middle age.  I've been wearing jeans and t-shirts for over 20 years, and as I see more grey hairs in the mirror, not only do I feel a wish to present myself to the world with a dignity and a distinction, but I still have enough of my youthful idealism and turn-of-the-century experience that I want my distinction and dignity to be something more universal, more human, more psychologically whole than the dominant image of the businessman of the 20th century industrialized world.

Sporting my rainforest jasper pendant, brass cuff and a homemade bead bracelet.

  So seeing Orri in that garb was an affirmation, but I could say it was a reminder of our collective mortality also.  However I might explain it, something clicked as I watched, spoke a kind of resigned peace to my mind: these guys will grow old too, as I will.  Watching this with the benefit of my limited experience in a drum chair on the stage, and with the amplification of my own imaginings, I felt I was arriving at a better understanding of what it looks like "from both sides now" to be a creator who reaches a large audience - a goal I still aspire to.

It helps to sweep away even more of the hero-worship that held sway over me in my youth.

I'm going to write in later posts about some of the things their music means to me.  After all, they have encouraged this, with the wordless liner notes and title-less tracks of their third album, and their experimental video projects.  So this is the introduction and there will be more to come in this series.

Quillcast: Pinecones

I wrote this about four years ago, along with music.  One of my goals is to get an ensemble together to record it.

More about music: alternative skating rink mix

This evening we took our seven-year-old to a roller rink for a school party.  I could write a book about this.  I went to skating parties when I was in elementary school - in fact I saw one boy who looked just like me at 10.  Not just in the color of his hair and the shape of his face, it was also the way he wobbled unsteadily on the skates as he tried to keep his balance and figure out how to push himself along.  I wanted to go give him a big hug and tell him "it's all right, everything will be all right."

Maybe it was the nostalgia, but I found myself enjoying this evening's outing immensely, even the dance-beat pop music that played loudly over the speakers.  But I still thought of other music that might be interesting to roller skate to - or to watch people roller skate to.  What would some of the teens and preteens who were so amazingly agile (so glad to see that youth are still skating!) make of something like "ZNS" that I posted a few days ago?  Or . . . well, let's come up with a few more possibilities.

I would pay money to watch choreographed roller skate performances to these.

Some music offerings for Halloween

What's Halloween without some suitable music?

Today we went to our first-grader's school costume party (some of you longtime readers may recall, with me, when this girl was first born.  In particular, I believe it was Michael Clemens who warned me that before I knew it, she would be telling me about her boyfriends in Kindergarten.  Alas, 'twas all too true.

I digress.  At the school they played The Monster Mash.  not just the well-known song, but the entire Bobby Pickett album.  I hadn't known there was a whole album.  I hadn't known that the guy who did the voice was named Bobby Pickett.(1)

In our family we usually listen to Midnight Syndicate around Halloween.  They're great fun as long as you don't take them seriously.  We have several of their spooky Halloween albums, bought over the years from trips to Halloween stores.  Our seven-year-old loves them - she's constructed mythologies around them involving characters of her own device.(2)

Then there are our Type O Negative CDs, kept in the Halloween box.  Heavy metal and Halloween: a match made in . . . don't say it.

I saw Type O Negative in 1994 when they opened for Queensrÿche, whose Rage for Order stands for me as the definitive statement of vampire-themed heavy metal.  I'll be forever grateful to my sister for buying it on vinyl and letting me inherit it.

But check this out:

I've been a fan of Einstürzende Neubauten for about 14 years now.  The song for the video above, "ZNS" comes from their 1985 masterpiece Halber Mensch.  So does this:

Trick or treat!



-----
(1)  I hadn't known there was a deluxe re-release of the thing on purple vinyl:

I love the internet.

(2)  Born of the Night was the first one we bought and probably still my favorite.  They now have a Halloween Music Collection on Amazon as an mp3 download.

Dream, Dare, Do

The morning of September 9, 2013 I saw a stream of sixth graders walking in front of the building in the lovely cool morning – first hint of autumn, magic magic magic. Even walking past the school building later that afternoon and not forgetting the terror and captivity, I felt magic from the red bricks, from the cool air, from the memory of pencils. Shouldn't there be a place for the honor of that, as part of autumn's enchantment in childhood?

But I was thinking about the morning first. Those sixth-graders filed past the door in tune with the morning's loveliness. Then I heard an adult voice bark “single file straight line!” as if they were a bunch of jailbirds – reminding me that, in fact, they are.

When I called the sixth-grade school they said that these students had attended an assembly at the middle school, some anti-bullying thing. Very much on everyone's mind these days. I called the middle school and found out they contract with some outfit to come and give them this presentation every year.

Apparently it's a big deal: they set up three big screens in the gym and have a powerful sound system. They're very proud of it, saying it “will encourage students to clarify dreams, look clearly at obstacles, and through hard work and determination, turn their dreams into a reality. Students will learn positive methods for dealing with the pressure, stress and fear they feel inside, and they'll understand the importance of setting short-term goals for their lives.” And of course there's the personal responsibility that adults never tire of invoking when it comes to making younger people do things: this show “will help students realize that it's time to stop passing the blame to someone else and start taking responsibility for their futures.”

Their website offers a shrunk-down version of the presentation, which I watched. They certainly do try to make an overwhelming show of sight and sound. The shrunken preview can't match the experience of the real thing, they say, and I believe them.

A powerful, high-impact character lesson, they say. What it is is loud and vapid, the art of saying nothing over forty minutes refined near to perfection. I can imagine sitting in the bleachers in the gym with those sights spread out over huge screens and the sound blasted into your head – no escape. I imagine all the adults, having their ears pressed flat to their skulls by the angry-sounding pop metal music in the thing, maybe not enjoying it at all but thinking that these guys who made it sure must be legit cuz they've got all this badass-sounding music that the teenagers like.

I sat through plenty of clumsy agitprop while I was in school, and of course we saw through the grown-ups' feeble attempts to appropriate our vernacular and poured derision thereon when they were safely out of earshot. I'm 36 and have only the vaguest idea what kids are listening to these days, but watching this it looks like (alas) the propaganda engineers have gotten much better at what they do over the past quarter century. The music in this presentation sure didn't sound like the cheesy stuff that tried to inspire my generation to love school. This stuff was like a hammer to your brain, along with the rapid editing of shots (including plenty from action movies) smashing away at any attempt by a viewer to formulate and consider any thoughts of substance or consequence.

-Which served its purpose, since what would happen if too many people really started asking questions like: what if my hopes and dreams are in fact blocked by having to go to school every day? Just how exactly do my good grades in each subject prepare me to reach my dream? How do the standardized programs of learning even help me to find what my true dream is? Are the grotesquely-amplified examples of athletes and singers really relevant to my life? How would the authorities over me react if I dreamed of a life outside of this system and dared to do what I had to in order to bring that about?

How much can the school environment even bear the concept of an individual life's calling?

And on and on. I haven't the energy to write much more about it; I don't know if it even deserves the dignity of a detailed consideration or rebuttal – there's not really much to argue against, because it's damn near impossible to argue against emotion.

 Of course this thing doesn't show any sex or tantalizing views of certain body parts, but it's as pornographic as anything, stroking the feelings of your lower chakras in a calculated move to make a flood of feelings that will drown ideas. People pay for this kind of opiate in theaters or in their own homes to escape the meaninglessness of their over-regimented lives, or in the case of music, the powerless band together in communities around angry protest songs: punk, heavy metal, rap. I don't know if this production company really pulls off a convincing appropriation of that protest in the perception of its young captives. Despite the in-your-face, no-escape presentation method, I hope that the young people saw through it.

Maybe it's vain to hope too much: we constantly hear complaints about today's youth: about their apathy, their addiction to screens, their susceptibility to the persuasion of violent and titillating images on those screens – this presentation was tailored exactly to such, and depends on non-thinking recipients for its success. But I still hope. I hope there were a lot of closed eyes, and mouths in cupped hands pressed to ears, during the onslaught: respectful human touch is the best antidote to pornography.

Typecast: Mankato Waters

Typecast: office radios, soon digressing

Quillcast: incomprehensible Yes lyrics

Another placeholder post of sorts: here's one of my favorite lines from "Heart of the Sunrise" written with my Reformed Gothic alphabet.

Quillcast: Rush quote: Available Light

A bit of calligraphy practice, using the opening lines of "Available Light."  Lyrics by Neil Peart.  The song is the closing track on Rush's Presto album.

Typecast: bad decisions

Typecast: still waiting for

Re-engineering my tambourine

For the past 11 years or so I’ve been interested in frame drums. It started with my Brazilian friend in college who played the pandeiro and was kick-started by my discovery of the 1990s Nordic folk revival. In 2001 I bought first one, then two basic frame drums and have been doum-takking with them on and off ever since.

(Trying to be Glen Velez in 2001)

The more I look, the more richness there is to potentially explore in this deceptively simple instrument: variations in dimension, tuning, jingles, and playing techniques. In particular, I have wished to imitate Björn Tollin’s adaptation of kanjira techniques to his tambourine, which started a whole new style in Sweden. I already had a little tambourine but its head was broken, so I bought a cheap tunable one in an import store about six years ago and started experimenting with it.

I’ve been making some progress, but the jingles were too bright. Traditional riqs, tamburelli/tammorre, pandeiros and panderetas all have drier sounding jingles than the conventional tambourine that you’re most likely to find for cheap prices in import shops. It finally occurred to me that I could try to take out the jingles and re-shape them instead of waiting for the day when I had the disposable income to buy a “real” pandeiro.

It was surprisingly easy, with the help of a few pairs of pliers.

Removing the jingles with wire cutting pliers.

Re-shaping them with pliers.

The re-shaped jingles replaced (I only put in four pairs).

I added some little Chinese coins too, for fun.

Typecast: scripts and percussion

Typecast: reading _Drummer Hoff_ to my daughter

(Click here to see an image of the book cover, since blogger still won't upload pictures from URLs.)The Diana Wynne Jones quote/paraphrase is from The Homeward Bounders.