I imagined having a team of employees in a lab, who I could task with organizing all this material I recorded into various insightful bites. For example, while going through this recorded conversation with Thom Lucero, it felt important to notice how much of a word I could cut off in a loop and still find it understandable, how quickly did we smoosh together words sometimes, and what sounds existed among the words? How often were we talking simultaneously and why do I feel like I'm supposed to dislike that even though I experienced those moments as exciting and warm? It felt like a study on speech that I wanted a team to help me with.

But it was just me here, so I came up with a few experiments I could conduct on my own. For track 2 I gathered samples of the sound of searching the internet (keyboard clacking) and really focused in on those patterns. Every typist is a bit of a drummer, and we're all typists these days. Folk Art people, folk art.

For track 3 I cut out about 92% of a recording of Thom and I chatting after he showed up to my place to work on this album. There's absolutely no way you know what we're talking about YET, there's enough to develop some sense of a story, right? enough chunks that have the capacity to point to more developed narratives, yeah? So like, maybe in the way you hear only a partial word but know the full word, you hear a partial thought and fill in the rest? And I thought, that might not occur with one listen, but what about multiple listens? But that could get boring before the imagination takes flight and sustains your attention span so what if simultaneously you explore the ability to increase the speed and still pick things up? I suspect it may actually increase 'Perceived-Comprehension' :)

Which brings me here:

How many things have you spiraled out about, that may have been misunderstandings to begin with? Is it always a misunderstanding? To just re-understand, forever, without it being a task--is that the only solution?

A 'task' a thing that drains energy instead of generating it. for whom is what a task? Could be useful to identify, definitely for sure, in the process of organizing. But to have a conversation asking this question, requires a lot of clarity in communication--what if different parties have different ideas of what are tasks and what are generative activities? Well, the answer is in the energy, which is to say the energy in each individual NOT in the group seen as group. An answer to "max group energy" cannot be an arrangement wherein any group is asked to engage in tasks. Is this possible? in music, for sure yes, FOR SURE. So that's evidence of something, right? To have this eternal thing that has been around absolutely since the beginning of time, that is, if we include in music, any pattern created that produces sound waves. A pattern can even be a very long note, because eventually that note will resolve and it will have wavered while it existed and whatever caused that wavering is EXACTLY what you're trying to look at, it's exactly your clue to the information you need--what has sent this quiver through my being? This we call 'Points of Communication.'

I love communicating. Know what I don't love? Nervous communication. Any nervous communication exists as a minefield for your future retrospective self. There is no way, no way at all, that after a nervous communication, EVEN IF IT SEEMED TO GO SMOOTHLY IN THE MOMENT, that you won't be able to reflect upon it and find a nagging unexplained curiosity. And what will that become? It becomes whatever field the space of your reflection feeds it--a magical bean stock to the heavens? A bougainvillea? A datura inoxia flower? Mung beans?

Miscommunication can happen in retrospect, is what I'm saying. In the way that memory is so fallible that eye-witness reports are unreliable evidence, so too can be the idea I/you build about an interaction after I've/you've had it. So don't make the mistake our court systems make, and erroneously treat the information you've gathered as immovable, objective truth. Don't believe anything, including yourself, is what I'm saying. Only trust the quivers that run through your spine, just follow those because those don't know how to lie to you in the way you know how to lie to yourself.

So Thom and I hung out for a while and came up with a space to move around in. A space we didn't feel nervous in, a space to feel comfortable and move freely, with the understanding that the other party in the room was a supportive and generous presence interested in thinking together, say, as opposed to thinking against. And I hope you know that I'm considering thinking against to mean 'enemizing' as in, one party thinking with a mission to purge the other party's thinking, as opposed to assume their thinking as a given thinking of reality, if that makes sense. Sometimes a challenge is a quick route to clarification so long as it doesn't bother the other party too much. You've got to be sensitive to the other party to truly believe you're not acting as an Enemy. I'm just speaking generally, really truly, none of this is about Thom. Thom and I were already quite comfortable with each other so for us it was more about comfortable with the idea of making something together we're both interested in.
And he knew it meant letting me reflect on it later, which made me immediately extra comfortable with the situation because it obviously gave me a lot of control of the final product and his trust in me sculpting a final product MEANS THE WORLD, really. I have a lot of people I trust like that and I hope they appreciate what respect I think that implies. To trust a friend because they have got it from here is, I think, I an important kind of friendship to have. They'll carry their weight in a situation you both have responsibility for.

Thank you friends, Thank you. Also, I'm sorry for the times I've not carried my weight, I'm trying all the time to be stronger.

THANK YOU Sun Ra, THANK YOU Everyone