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Music
In my spare time (heh) I'm known to torture the kids,
pets and neighbors by playing strange musical compositions on my
synthesizer. I have a few different musical styles,
none of them fitting very well into any particular genre.
I've composed hundreds of songs and recorded dozens
of hours of playing, but I never seem to find time to edit or mix down
my stuff ... too much else going on in my life... and of course,
although I deeply enjoy my compositions and improvisations, I can't
claim to be as talented in that regard as in AI, philosophy or creative
writing...
Anyway, at this point, almost the only stuff I've
gotten in a condition remotely approaching presentable are a few simple
instrumental songs w/out rhythmic accompaniment. A lot of my music is
very different than this stuff I've put online here -- I love loud
bass, electric guitar and drum samples ... over which I sing depressing
low-pitched lyrics ;-D ... but recording and mixing that stuff is more
complex and time-consuming, so all I've got here for now is some
simpler stuff....
I do have a rather particular philosophy of music: I
don't like to imitate anyone but myself. I like to approach the
keyboard as if it were a found object that no one had ever seen before,
and just fiddle with it and see what happens. Of course, I don't take
this philosophy too seriously and plenty of stuff I play is influenced
in various ways by other things I've heard.... The Dubuffet "naive art"
philosophy from painting and sculpture is fairly close to my philosophy
of music, I suppose. I started playing keyboard in 1982 (when at 18, I
bought myself a crappy Casio keyboard as a college graduation present)
and not until about 2002 did I decide to start seriously learning some
songs composed by people other than me (OK, not counting some Ministry
and other industrial stuff I used to play in the early 90's, or some
blues I used to jam with some guys in Australia in the 90s, etc.).
Close your eyes, put your fingers on the keyboard and feel ... quiet
the conscious mind and let yourself be an antenna for the mushroom god
from the 99'th AI Y-verse dimension ... that's the idea ... or
something like that ;-) ... then after doing that for a while you can
start to consciously shape the stuff your brain has channeled into
structured, thought-out compositions ... yadda yadda yadda ...
In addition to the music files linked from this page, there are some low-fi videos
of me playing some of my songs (and a couple cover songs) on an out-of-tune
piano, on the YouTube page of
Ben Goertzel's Evil Twin'
HERE GOES:
- The
Structure of Mind
... this is IMHO the best melody I've composed ... the song itself
exists in dozens of forms ... some with drums and lyrics and various
instruments ... this is a simple but improvisatory version with the
piano-sound only. This song really makes the most of a
quasi-Middle-Eastern scale that I work to death in my music, esp. stuff
I wrote in the period 1998-2006. The song first emerged in 1996 and was
called "Zarathustra's Roundelay" back then ... it's been reworked
continuously but the basic riff hasn't changed.
- The
Structure of Mind, short version
... another piano-only version ... this time with less digressive
improvisation and more purity ... these are the parts that are
basically constant across every version of the song I play...
- Azanmig
... composed and recorded August 2009, based on some sounds I heard in
a dream ... almost trance or psytrance or something, but with too much
fusiony solo-ing to quite fit that sort of genre ... a bit of a change
of pace for me ... but there's an interesting highly Bennish synth-sax
solo at the end ;)
- Walking in
the Cemetery ... composed originally in 1998 or so, and extensively
reworked thereafter. The song started out just for piano, but one day I
was playing it in a community center in middle-of-nowhere New Jersey
and someone picked up a flute and started accompanying me, and it
sounded good. So I started playing it with piano and flute sounds
together, and I like it.
- Corners
... another piano-only composition/improvisation ... Monk had his
"Brilliant Corners" but I just have corners ;-) ... to quote a video
game this one is all about the "harmony of dissonance" ...
this is one song that always sounds better in
my head and never comes out quite right: the melody is slow and simple
but the timing is occasionally odd and hard and I'm not Monk ... but
hey.... Parts of this were written in 2003, parts in 2005 ... the 2005
parts were inspired by a visit from a friend, Meg Heath, with a chronic
illness (so if there's sadness in there, that's what it's most
proximately about...)
- Sgtrane
... a melody I heard in a dream (mid 2009), crystallizing melody-fragments
I played a lot in 2008 ... and figured out in the
morning before the dream left my head. I've played this a lot in
a lot
of different ways; this is a somewhat minimalist version
- Sgtrane,
piano solo version: more like I typically play the song
for my own amusement ... piano only, and lots of wacky circular
improvisations
- Sgtrane
beatiuufl: a totally different version, with synth sounds and the
general vibe of Frank Zappa's Jazz
from Hell period. Don't be misled by the first 15 seconds;
it gets better ;)
- Goofopolis
... this is just some ridiculous off-the-cuff
playing-around-with-the-keyboard that I'm deciding to put online in a
moment of perversion ... it might sound better with a rhythm section
but I've not yet felt like adding one (it was recorded to a metronome,
unlike most of my stuff which has intentionally imperfect timing) ...
the repeated phrase at the end ("order" lurching out of the chaos)
actually strikes me as moving sometimes ... I think this was defecated
out in 2006 and then mixed down in 2008 one frustrated, insomniac
late-night when my brain was stuck on some tough algorithmic problem (I
eventually solved it)
- Bouree
... inspired by Bach's Bouree in E minor, but it's no longer in E minor
and it's no longer too much like Bach either ;-)
- Angles of Isolation
... something I made up in early 2009 and play for therapeutic purposes
when I'm in a bad mood. Piano solo ... it starts out by mangling
and
transposing some cliche' classical melody whose name I forget, and then
goes into some nice chunky herky-jerky Ben-music
If that's not enough sonic/emotional oddity for you,
tune in next year ... or after the Singularity ... or whenever I
actually get around to mixing down more of the umpteen MIDI and audio
files on my hard drive ;-p
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