90 Days of ILP

Big ups to all my integral and other peeps who came out to our party last night. Live music! Along with Ballard the Ukele Demon (pictured), my brother and I got a chance to run with some tunes, as well as my local buddies The Stand Still, and Naropa folk-rock sensation Bucky Coe.

There's a certain pleasure to be had in playing music live for friends, and some important things relevant to practice. For one: there is the catharsis, working one's shadows out in a safe and appropriate environment (the sweat-dripping basement stage). Especially for someone like me, who spends the majority of his time pumping caffiene in his veins and prostrating before Apple hardware products, any chance I can get to reconnect with my body is a welcome one. But there's more than that.

In music we find an energetic compound -- a living substance -- unavailable anywhere else. In music, especially its live form, we find a group of individuals graced, blessed, or just plain cocky enough to get the torch of this mysterious etherium, and to transmit that sonic vision through tuned instruments and stretched drum skins and a very cheap plastic grammar school flutophone (uh, that would have been my band, you had to be there).

There's something wicked about these repeated movements, and the reactions they elicit in an expanding sphere starting with the performer and working its way out into the strings/keys/sticks/microphone, and into the amps, and into the audience ears, and into the audience bodies, and into the audience's collected lives. Like casting stones in an already rippling pond, we've a chance to add texture to an already textured world, to rip through the surface of genteel mediocrity with a stab made in the direction of excellence, art, and sheer excitement.

Does that sound a little to Bill and Ted's? So be it.