Please Download the Most Recent Flash Player

MY CAUSE: Southern Poverty Law Center

"Messenger" article excerpt from Arcana IV, musicians on music


"MUSIC: Another world. As vital to human well-being as light, water, air, food.
I would assert that music is food. Nourishment for the dimension of human
existence relegated to the invisible; the animating quality of being that defies
restriction and like music, touches the physical without physicality. Were it
not for the psychoacoustic phenomenon, (apparently unique to humans) we
call music, I would not be sitting here in Spain, about to deliver a message…
I never truly know what the message is. I do accept that I am
“used” to demonstrate something to those who would gather to experience
by listening… or hearing. For me, music is born of silence, which I experi-
ence as a sound. I read somewhere that planet Earth is vibrating at a fre-
quency close to our tempered C#, and further, our human organism is
vibrating at about forty-two octaves above middle C. Can you hear that?
Or are there ways to listen to it that do not involve the human ear?
Most of the time, I concede to the notion that I AM the message, the
fact of me and beyond that, the light of me (as an aspect of a multidimen-
sional emanation of an animating quality of being). Is that light that I am,
audible or visible or both? If we listen/hear with more than our ears, [which
we do: we perceive sound with our entire resonant cavity (body), and the
skeletal framework that defines its contour] there must be incalculable sub-
tleties to the experience and interpretation of the message sent and received.
Permit me to digress here, if you will.
Some years ago, while attempting to hear an inner “voice”, I real-
ized that the voice I was listening for might not be “speaking” a spoken lan-
guage. My idea of listening expanded to include a potentially vast collection
of modalities limited only by my perceptual acuity of the moment. It was
and continues to be a dauntingly liberating approach to all things deemed
musical, and perception in general.

Consider what it might be to play one’s sound, that if one could
perceive the sound of one’s Self, and convey it as an audible emanation,
what sound would that be? Might that explain why some musicians play
one instrument or another or several?
Or is one’s sound a kind of sonic signature, often interpreted as
style, that like a fingerprint, or DNA, is singularly unique throughout the
spectrum of being? Perhaps it serves as a homing device, a designation that
aligns us with Earth’s planetary frequency and enables us to navigate/create
here? Additionally, it may be a signifier of belonging to a particular vibra-
tional “tribe” or “clan”, bearing a specific message or gift in the form of a
contribution to a vast vibrating whole.
Over twenty years ago, I recorded an LP. A first LP with a trio
called New Life. It was a cooperative effort. I listened to it several months
ago after not listening to it for many years. The young man who played gui-
tar on that recording (me) was playing as well as the man who plays guitar
on CDs today (me). The sound seemed essentially, in tact. In the most pri-
mary way I realized that, back then, I’d already been whoever I was musical-
ly going to become! I hear that same essence in music I recorded last year, and
all the music I’ve recorded since. So, what is it I have been “trying” to com-
municate, or what is it that has been trying to communicate (through) me?
Early on, I became aware that I was attracted to stillness in a given
musical moment/context. Not necessarily silence, but stillness.
Stillness, as I define it, is a state of heightened perception/aware-
ness. In a heightened state of perceiving, music can encompass whatever is
present in the environment as a part of itself. Music becomes so elemental
and abstract in my consciousness that sound and its “other”, silence, exist
in a kind of purity, (innocence) which opens/expands into a terrain of
“unlimited” behaviors of select sonic actions that develop/evolve in a
sequence or in a simultaneity.
Recently, that awareness has expanded into a personal intention
of mine, which I refer to as revealing essence. Essence for me is the qual-
ity of being that illuminates (and is illuminated by) awareness of (among
other things) stillness..."