Keith Handy 1.999

R.I.P. Richard Wright

I still have the beat up, scratched-to-hell LP of Wish You Were Here that I received on my 12th birthday in 1981, and spun incessantly on a cheap portable record player in my blue-carpeted, plaid-wallpapered, upstairs bedroom on Ostrander Road in Elma, New York. The palette of synth textures emerging again and again from those grooves was like porn for the ears, instilling in me a life-long, lustful attraction to anything with knobs and a keyboard.

Today, the passing of Floyd founder and keyboardist Richard Wright took me by surprise. I simultaneously received emails from my friend Garrett and my sister Heather, plus an instant message from another friend Paul. I guess I’ve failed to keep secret how big a role the music of Pink Floyd has played in my life (as it has for many others), and I feel a strange gratitude for being remembered when news like this hits.

To me, Wright seemed to be at his most prolific during an awkward phase of Floyd’s career, starting with his contribution to the ill-fated early singles, as Syd was being phased out. Not only did these ditties tank commercially, but in all likelihood the band could never have pulled them off live, and probably had no desire to try. Yet there’s something endearing about songs like Paintbox and the later (but single-like) Summer ‘68, in their earnest aspiration to be “hip”. Just by virtue of featuring Rick on lead vocals, they were already a step towards the smoother, warmer Floyd sound that we’re more familiar with today, albeit with some stylistic fluff that would start to get trimmed back as the four members — briefly, anyway — came into closer agreement about their artistic vision.

In the grand scheme of things, while none of the four individuals grabbed the spotlight to be “rock stars” — leaving that to the cover art and light shows — Rick Wright grabbed it even less. You could kind-of-sort-of call him the George Harrison of the band, although analogies like that break down quickly under scrutiny. Some writers of obituaries will inevitably overstate his contribution to the band, as well as the band’s contribution to music, and that’s to be expected. All I know is, in the Pink Floyd music that made the biggest dent in my impressionable teenage ears and mind (and drove my family up the wall, no pun intended) — particularly Atom Heart Mother, Meddle, Dark Side of the Moon, and Wish You Were Here — his playing was an indispensable part of the sound, and the magic.

R.I.P., Rick, and thank you.

Edit 10/4/08: Here is a better obituary, care of my friend Vic in Ohio.

Free* (just kidding) to good home: creepy soundtrack bit

This weekend, the previously mentioned folks in the local improv group have been working on — or I guess trying to work on — a short film for the 48 Hour Film Project. They had invited me to contribute some creepy music. However, it seems the plans for the storyline, shooting schedule, etc., have been consistently changing for what is now already the majority of the 48 hours. Whether they’ll have something by the deadline is anybody’s guess. And I think the story they initially presented to me might bear so little resemblance to the end product that there won’t be a place in it for this creepy score I came up with:

Well, maybe it’s “stock creepy” instead of “brilliant creepy”, but that’s what I came up with in a few hours yesterday. Personally, I think I’ll need a quick dose of therapy after listening to it the requisite 500 times. Anyway, if not this film, I’m sure it can be recycled somewhere.

* “Free” is just a joke, and in no way constitutes a release into the public domain or any other such tomfoolery. But you’re free to listen to it and re-connect with your inner sociopath.

General updates

Oooh, “general updates” — how’s that for a knock-em-dead title? And once you notice the bold, sparse minimalism of the complete absence of any illustrative picture, by gum, you won’t be able to resist reading through to the end, glued to this post like the guy clinging for dear life to a hard hat affixed to a steel girder by a single drop of Krazy Glue. And therefore I owe you, at the very least, the return favor of making it worth your while.

I don’t know what this blog is about. I’ve tried to not make it a vanity blog, but it kinda sorta is. I mean, besides it being mine, and being about me… and featuring random glamour shots of me in the upper right, if you keep re-loading the page over and over, which I’m sure you do all the time… there’s a way to run a personal blog that isn’t necessarily the high tech equivalent of wearing a t-shirt bearing “HOT STUFF” in a glittery girlyfont. For example, I could keep it focused on a particular project, and actually stick with it from beginning to middle to end. But my working patterns just don’t work that way. It’s more like, beginning to middle to switching to something else to coming back to it a few years later and realizing I did it wrong so beginning again a different way and then getting distracted again and then realizing the second attempt is missing some of the soul and magic of the first attempt so beginning a third project that somehow fuses elements of the first and second and then years later realizing I’ve made a mess and needing to clean it up and simplify it again…

As I’ve mentioned, I’m getting my feet wet on Tracktion 3. I haven’t yet had a chance to use it as much as I want, but so far it seems well worth the upgrade price, if only for some of its new features. (The looping features aren’t that interesting to me; I’m just not a looper.) I took one old old old old old song that I’m too embarrassed to name in public, and did something nice and tidy with its second half, which kind of puts a smile on my face and makes me go, okay, I can leave it at that and call it “definitive”. I used Tracktion’s improved stretching algorithm to bring a sluggish studio recording closer to the tempo it was typically played live. And telling you it was ever “played live” should indicate how incredibly old of a thing I’m talking about.

I’ve recently gone to some improv comedy shows, and it has got my mental wheels a-spinning. I think these are the kind of people I need to recruit for my film project. In fact, I’m pretty certain of it. Beyond that, though, it’s just inspiring to see people push themselves to be as creative as possible, on the spot, in front of an audience, with no pre-planning, no guarantees, no safety net. Just to expand my universe a little, I stayed after for one of their “open jams”, which is more like a series of games and exercises. It was fun, but it was slightly unnerving to be whisked back to 1987 and the realization that I was once again in the midst of theater people…

I want to put a better quality audio player on the site, to make it easier to hear a wider range of my stuff without leaking bandwidth to Chinese bots… and this is pretty important to me… not because I have anything against the Chinese, but because I want to have a lot more music available than I do… but at last check, there are some minor technical problems with my DivShare account, causing me to not be able to do what I want to do the way I want to do it. Hang tight.

Tracktion 3

I write about Tracktion a lot, because it’s affordable, has a cool (dare I say “fun”) interface, and it’s what I use when I’m doing my stuff. So basically, I can’t not be writing about it. But, I’ve been putting off upgrading from 2 to 3. The upgrade doesn’t cost all that much, and since this is something I use all the time, I might as well.

I haven’t had time to really dive into it yet, but just from playing with the demos, one thing I like right off the bat is the “text” plugin. It’s a plugin that doesn’t actually do anything, except that you can write notes to yourself in it. You can insert as many of these in as many relevant places as you need, sort of like leaving 3M stickies all over the project to remind yourself what you were doing. Yes, I’m sure the developers spent a whopping 20 minutes implementing that feature, but still, I think it’s great.

I suppose I will either amend this post or write follow-ups if I discover any other goodies.

Newly unearthed Handywisdoms

By “unearthed”, I mean I’m sifting through notebooks and miscellaneous papers that have accumulated in a small cardboard box in the corner. The wisdoms below were written around the edges of a staff memo, while sitting in an eighth-floor office where I processed auto loans — a data entry job — sometime around May 2003. I’ll even kick things off with an inspirational photo of the sky across my street after yesterday’s thunderstorm, so it’s like those cheezy new-agey feel-good posters — only more verbose and neo-quantum.

Every event has some relationship with every other event in the great family tree of things that happen everywhere.

Everything that happens is a member of a family and can be connected to everything else that happens.

Whenever you move something, you make something.

Every object that you have is a thing that is happening.

Every action you take is an object that exists.

What you’re doing right this second is probably not exactly what you think.

Everything that seems wasteful or irrelevant is actually necessary, but usually for reasons far more complex than you would guess.

All the things that bother you can be looked at in an entirely different way when you really think about how they are connected to everything you care about.

Whether there is a “master purpose” or “ultimate meaning” is irrelevant, because every event and every object is related to any purpose or meaning you could ever choose for yourself.

Funnily enough, I actually kind of believe all this, or at least believe that there are benefits to looking at life this way — and just think, it predates all that “Secret” and “What the Bleep” stuff! As I recall, it actually made me feel better about trudging through auto loan applications that day as well.

Ideas

Here are a few ideas that have been vaguely floating around in my brain:

1. Improvisation club/network - advertise locally, inviting musicians and singers who like to improvise to join a network or mailing list, so we can all call on one another to participate in projects. For me, in particular, to get more recording projects going that start as improvisations, but can then be refined with editing and overdubbing (this is just something I really enjoy).

2. Microfilming - filming things so up close that they are unrecognizable. A children’s version of National Geographic magazine, called World, used to do these, but they were done as a “guess what this is” game rather than an artistic expression, so some of the pictures weren’t as aesthetically pleasing as I’d like to… “shoot for” (pardon the pun).

3. Live sessions - bringing a laptop with partially-complete sessions on it to a gig (making sure there are backup copies on another computer!), and actually recording guitar and vocal tracks in front of an audience. I wouldn’t be able to do multiple takes or punch-ins — without alienating the audience — but if I performed like this more than once, then I could cherry-pick the best bits from each show. Yes, there would be some bleed-through and audience noise on the vocal track, but I can manage with stuff like that. I could also have the software I’m using projected on a screen behind me.

Added 7/23/08:

4. Music theory book - “Music theory for people who hate music theory”. Kind of self-explanatory here.

5. DVD based on the “So You Want…” series - again, self-explanatory.