Yesterday, while troubleshooting glitching technology, again, rather than practicing music, again, I came to a place of silence. I stopped hitting buttons and searching google, and sat, and thought.
I had already emailed the event coordinators for Tomb and the Womb and said that due to technical difficulties I would not be singing “Covering Lisa” for their show.
When I made that decision, immediately and in one swift motion, I was reminded all at once of every single one of the countless hours I’ve spent agonizing over unreliable equipment.
How that collection of experience lurking in the shadows of nearly every musical performance I have ever done has limited me, angered me, and frustrated me to the point of wanting to bash my own head inside out.
I remembered having to cancel the first house concert I was invited to because of similar problems. I remembered how often technological music equipment and every step in that direction has conformed me around the limits of the equipment.
[singlepic id=756 w=320 h=240 float=right]I remembered that encountering this is part of the reason I don’t perform often. I remembered that, after years of thinking I was just stupid, hiring a sound engineer had not only failed to alleviate my tech problems, they had added to them and to my anxiety.
I once again got in touch with that deep festering feeling – my growing hatred for technology – remembering how it so easily came to rule my life. How insidiously my bad habits and obliviousness toward its role in my existence remain, having grown up consuming gadgets and socializing on computers, still sucking on tech like a dried shriveled up tit that stopped actually feeding me years ago.
I sat there thinking, playing an internal game of eeny, meeny, miney, moe.
Would it be the new mixer, whose highly reviewed onboard effects – the reason I bought the fucking thing to begin with – every single one of them, make me sound like a fucking diseased hobo barfing into a tin can?
Would it be the everpresent annoyance of my iPhone, which was currently skipping every other fucking letter I typed into a text message and interrupting me 3 times in the 45 seconds it was taking me to type and edit the fucking thing to let me know that, guess what, T-Mobile’s service is a fucking raging puss filled sac of fail and has cut out again? and again? and again? DO YOU WANT TO GO TO YOUR SETTINGS (which won’t let you turn this fucking message off)?
Or would it be my synthesizer, whose MIDI fuckups and inability to keep the default settings has been quietly invading my trust since preparing for Embodied?
I thought about the limits and usefulness of all of these things for at least 20 minutes, as my anger simmered. I thought about each piece of equipment, its monetary value, my relationships to them, my history with them, and I decided which one was the one that I wanted to be complete with.
[singlepic id=4932 w=440 float=left]I then spent the next few minutes silently raising my Roland XP-30 over my head and slamming it into the ground as hard as I could. I used my whole body for every throwdown, whistling it through the air and dropping it full force into the floor.
Each time I watched it hit the ground and react while a surge of energy ran through my body. Once it hit the ground, if it still had any piano keys attached, it went back up for another wide armed slam from over my head. Over, and over, and over.
With each throw I gave myself some time to soak it in all before continuing. I was half flourishing and half emotionless while I systematically destroyed the synthesizer I’ve used for almost exclusively for 10 years.
It felt like breaking out of a cage.
Once plastic stopped sailing away from the synths body when it hit the floor, I started taking a hammer to its fleshless metal skeleton. With each tiny crater my hammer made in the body of my synth I felt new space give way in my life.
I’ve been thinking about that space today, as I’ve searched around for the guilt, for the remorse, for the backlash of deciding to break the living shit out of my gear. I am finding that I have none.
Sure, there is a loss there, and a sadness, among other things, that surrounds it. I know at least one person who is likely upset that they won’t hear that music again. Era’s ending are tough, afterall.
Throughout my musical evolution, I’ve been restrained by these giant hulking heavy spacehog fucking keyboards, the problems they have and the sounds they make.
[singlepic id=1094 w=440 float=right]For 13 years I’ve looped endlessly between the same songs, the same sounds the same feelings, the same rutt, over and over again, barely inching forward with a new song every few years since my mp3.com explosion in 2000.
While identifying with what opportunities they paved for me a lifetime ago while I was discovering them, I’ve also identified with the barriers having them has placed on me and my musical freedom to explore.
I’ve held onto my synths because I identify with them. Because maybe one day years from now I will want to play a show again. Because I was afraid to let them go.
The UI for the XP-30 is horrible for my exploration and creation of new music. There are no sliders, no knobs, no instant gratification for sound editing, no accessible creativity for me like I have with the Junos. It was good to me in how far its default sounds took me, and I did some cool things with it.
However, the instrument had run its course, and the MIDI being nonfunctional was pissing me the fuck off. It was worth about $400 and I had just spent $150 getting a key replaced on it last year. I didn’t want to subject myself to another money pit diagnostic/repair bill.
I could have sold it, sure. But there’s no ritual in that. There’s no art in that. There’s no catharsis in that. There’s no finality in that. There’s no closure in that. And while none of these rationalities came to play while I was annihilating my instrument, I sensed that I needed a cleansing.
One awesome thing about being an unsigned, virtually unknown musician is that I don’t fucking owe anyone anything. I’m not obligated to play the same songs for 40 fucking years to giant arenas. I don’t have crowds of fans who are pressuring me to perform my classics. I’m not swept up in contracts and deadlines and money.
My XP-30 no longer exists, and because of that I will not play my songs from it as they were recorded again. In its demise a symbolism is also unearthed, as well as a new more flexible approach to my music.
I am thinking like a newbie again, feeling excited to experiment. The amount of agony I will endure bashing my head against a wall trying to make my shit work is diminishing. And the effort I am willing to spend searching the same places for the sounds and ease that excite me as a musician is a fraction of what it was before.
Tomorrow, I purge my music gear. Anything that isn’t high quality cabling/basics and doesn’t answer “YES” to all of these is for sale:
1) Do I like how it sounds?
2) Is it easy for me to use and intuitive to troubleshoot?
3) Do I ENJOY playing it?
4) Does it fuel me creatively?
For now, I am enjoying the immense flood of inspiration and creative ideas that are swirling into my consciousness about music, and brainstorming what I may want to trade for new stuff.
If I ever change my mind, I can rent or buy another XP-30 to play the songs I created with it. That inconvenience is worth the sense of satisfaction I got when I finally took that raging bull by its fucking nutsac, and slammed it into the floor. I hadn’t even realized I’d grown to hate that fucking synth.
Sometimes it takes a loss to break an infinite loop. I get the feeling I’m the person in my circle of friends who gets that the most.