This Is My Brain On Life

How I Got My Spark Back

If you have kept in the know recently then you know my head has been all over the place. Bouncing this way and that with this project or that project. It had consumed all of my creativity and left me for dead, the Chaos. However it has been returning, thanks in part to my role in Cartoon Heart.

Initially I had thought we would ride this one out, my brother and I, and finally get a band going. The academic school year had different plans. Make no mistake we intend to keep working together, and hopefully spawn some amazing original music. But for now, it (at least in my part) has been pushed to the back burner. Everyone has life roles, preparing for their next phase and I am no different. And with summer coming, a break for them means an opportunity for me. They will continue to write and flush out original material and I will chip in here and there when I can. 

For the summer, I am continuing on my original mandate in the beginning of the year - growing my electronica project FM Glowe and my prowess as an electronic composer and programmer. 

I have begun to experiment with other methods of composing music. Intiially, when this began, I found haven within Audiotool - a quite robust web-application considering it’s free. Within a year and a half (or so), however, I have begun to exhaust the workflow and web-based environment it provided. I needed to flee elsewhere. I logically ended up at Reason as it was a more robust program, disk-based, and a lot of the same basic modular concepts of Audiotool were present. However the level of robust it was, was daunting, and was inhibiting my creative flow. I turned to a simpler mechanism of action - 

the iPad.

I began experimenting with different applications - trying to get my hands on whatever freeware I could for wallet and experimentations sake and began releasing sounds that were pent up in my head and within my being for the past year as I’ve laid dormant. 

With my juices flowing (albiet tired as I write this) good things are about. I feel somewhat at home again and the inaudible mess that was within my head is now becoming organized sound and music, note by note, chord by chord. The next several weeks promise a chaotic cluster of sounds and ideas no doubt. But that’s the hidden beauty of composing on an iPad - it’s so similar to real-world hardware in terms of physically touching something (as opposed to computer clicks) that I am able to sketch out ideas rather quickly and let myself be released to the spirits commanding my musical army. With this sketches and ideas (and I growing sense of theory) - I can later replicate the sounds that interest me most and build around them.

Brace yourselves. New FM Glowe is coming. 

Ruminations On The Mind

They say “A drunk mind speaks a sober heart.” But what is a drunk mind? It is only a chemically saturated one which frees our inhibitions to say what and how we feel. It breaks down the barriers which we put up on a day to day. If this is true, then what could be said about a sleeping mind? Are they not closely related?

Alcoholic substances are depressants. They convert us into a melancholy, almost sleep-like state, however we are awake. So with that, couldn’t the same be said about sleep in and of itself? Could we not argue that a “Sleeping mind speaks a woken heart?”

When we sleep we are resting at full capacity. Our bodies are recharging, healing, and refueling. Barriers are down, but this is a true form of release - a release unto the Universe and the thoughts we so harshly act to hide during our waken hours. We are at their mercy - the Thoughts. We are defenseless to them. This is where the subconscious takes over. 

But it is a more accurate depiction of who we really are. We are comprised of what we are when we sleep. There are no artificial chemical processes taking place. Only the pure infinite possibilities of the subconscious. What we think of as just “weird dreams” are, in reality, truths, coming to the surface, are they not? Could we not argue that, because we are so defenseless and open to the possibilities of the subconscious that whatever surfaces is in fact the same feeling garnered when intoxicated - the truth (if only on some level)?

It speaks to us when were most able to listen. The noises of the day have faded along with the stressors and aggravators. We are at peace when the sleeping mind speaks a waken heart. Yet we shrug them off all to often - the Thoughts, when they do come. 

But imagine, for a moment, what greatness and truths we could achieve, when we let our selves be in the same state awake, as we are asleep. Open. At peace. And receptive to the Forces that surround us and speak to us. 

We would know true happiness, true truth, and true emotion. Because we would no longer be shirking off the facts and feelings of life which we repress to the deepest corners of our mind, only to be eaten up by the subconscious and re-fed back to us in the form of dreams.

In effect, the subconscious rules us all. Because it tells us what we don’t want to hear, when were finally able to hear it. 

Recreate a video game cover using only comic sans and clipart:

aurorashaman:

I CAN’T STOP LAUGHING OMG WHY DID I DO THIS AHAHAHA

(via missmow)