About Me
Please note: for more music (and other assorted goodies) check out these other projects on MySpace that I am or have been known to be involved with:
Quickthorn, Stone Breath, Crow Tongue, and Green Crown
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So here is where I'm supposed to let everyone know, backed up by the manipulated evidence of sound and image, how cool and significant I am, the embodiment of whatever myth or archetype you and I conspire to choose and lend the validation of respectively self-serving belief. Hate to disappoint, but when it comes down to it I'm not much more nor less than a predominantly Italian kid from Brooklyn, who, chiefly through parental sacrifice, was blessed throughout my child- and young adulthood with a freedom from any true need sufficient to allow, alongside a continuing sequence of academic day jobs, an obsessive pursuit of music-making for most of my adult life. Indeed, I spent much of my 20s and 30s running about in a narcissistic haze, chasing a need to believe in my projected self-image of Musician (and thereby in some way 'other'), and treading blindly on way too many feelings and emotions in the process. Mostly, in retrospect, I was burning my way through gallon after gallon of petrol, driving hither and yon to perform for people who'd driven hither and yon to get there, and completely missing the point of Mike Heron's sage advice that 'Music is so much less than what you are...'.
At its best, music can be an encapsulation of subjective emotions and sensations that transcends the temporal limits of its finite, mortal creators and practitioners to touch the lives of others across space and time. As such, it can be an incredibly powerful and moving force, and one of very few reasons to mourn mankind's increasingly imminent ease-driven rush towards self-destruction. If any of the sounds and words I have ever produced, through the air or on record, fall into this category, then I am grateful for the opportunity to have been a participant in the process, and my sincere thanks to any and all of you for listening.
In this day and age, however, 'music' (and especially perhaps the gadgets on and channels through which it is experienced) has become to an alarming degree just another disposable commodity that the global corporate plutocracy can use to extract the life's time that we call money, and thence (even more) power, from an ever-growing population of the bored and starved for meaning. On the one hand, music becomes, like clothing or hairstyle, merely a normative way of projecting our chosen 'this is who I am' to the world. On the other, it provides one more avenue towards perpetuating a million vague and actionless ponderings on how things should change, beside a comfortable haven within which the realization that saving the future begins at home need never arise above the level of the general warm glow. But in the words of philosopher Stan Marsh, 'Is there anything more selfish than doing nothing but getting high and listening to music all day long?' By being born, we're bad for the planet (entropic surfers and bio-hazardous waste-producers that we are) - it's the 'the original sin that dare not speak its name' of the Green movement. All we can do in response is work to minimize the harm we do (back to the land, brothers and sisters!), while striving to extract from our lifetimes every possible drop of true living that we can.
In the midst of that, music (and why not music made with and among family, friends, and neighbours?) retains its time-honoured place as a potent, and potentially spiritual, recharger of batteries. But if when you stop and think it seems like it's been awhile since you really stopped and took notice of a tree, or made contact with earth that wasn't covered in tarmac or concrete, then please don't sit here listening to me. Turn off the computer, go outside, and have a shot at enjoying the world aright. She would, after all, love you to.
