Category: music crisis

Music Crisis: Nick Drake

December 31st, 2022

“Nick Drake’s sadness is a colorful storm flooding the world” – A.I Art

I’ve become such a controlled man with age.

And you know what? It’s good for me, it’s probably saving me from a lot more pain than I have and even from an early death. It’s good for me, to be patient, structured, and controlled.

On the flip side…

Fuck, I can’t let it define me, I can’t let it entrap me!

And so, this small article I’m writing it’s me yielding to the pressure of unquiet waters inside me, that revolve in anger and the despair of ignoring the cosmic paradoxes that it’s often safe to just keep ignoring.

But not today.

Most of my friends are dead

It’s been quite a while since the last time I wrote a blog piece for jjosuminded, I’ve told you about it before, my depression and my hunger for meaning typically lure me out of my habits and especially those that involve communicating the external world. So, as usual, I apologize to my beautiful audience for the lack of content, I wish that you have a great time reading me, but for that to happen I need to have something meaningful to talk about, and that’s what I get from my intense inner explorations in which I embark for weeks.

I gotta say, I’m not in a grim mood currently, I’m OK.

I’m even more OK since yesterday I got to repair my computer; man, my computer is like a dear relative and also like a private chamber that’s comforting and full of my things, the things that make me feel at home. So when it broke, it was a tough time for me; I’m so thankful my wife had the grace of letting me use her’s unrestrictedly, but of course, it’s never the same. Her computer is her tool, and mine is a very private chamber, they signify very different things.

So that makes me feel good, trivial as it might look, mundane if you would but I’ve been through so much chaos and surrounded with so much of the absurd that I claim the right to be childish about this, won’t be ashamed.

But also, I get sad because I think more than it’s safe for a person to think.

I’ve recently discovered Nick Drake, such a talented young man! And he could have been my dad, by no means would he have been a young man today, if it weren’t because he didn’t get to see his 27th birthday. He died before he got to live much and that makes me sad.

And so, I realize most of my friends are dead, and if you’ve read me before you may know that I call friends people who don’t know me, but whose music reverberates with the depths of my soul. Nick Drake is my most recent dead friend.

I came to know him, because of the music of yet another dead friend: Elliot Smith; in my Spotify explorations I found Elliot Smith while exploring more of the alternative 90’s scene, which lead me to his folkish influences and: voilá, Nick Drake.

Please listen to him, he was so unknown and his music was so beautiful and I want more people to know that he existed. I’m overwhelmed by feelings right now, and this is why I can’t provide you with a more “cold-minded” or “technical” review of his music, as I said in the introduction, I’m yielding to my feelings and this is what’s coming out.

My music crisis has led me to meet a young poet, shy, lonely, deep, and beautiful. A beautiful man, probably too beautiful for this world, as most of my dead friends, were.
Music Crisis: Eric Satie

July 6th, 2022
Oh my God, why did I even think this was a good idea?

Don’t get me wrong, there’s hardly an artist whose life is so full of particularities to talk about, it’s just, oh man, Satie is in a different sphere and I’m just afraid my article won’t make him justice. But hey, “fortune favors the bold” so I’ll give it a try.

What I was looking for and what I found

If you’ve been reading my Music Crisis section you know it’s really about solving a very personal problem: music fatigue. When I find something I love, something that will make my brain produce happy chemicals, I’ll listen to it obsessively until I kinda “waste it”. In reality, it never does waste since it’s always going to be a source of good memories, and revisiting it will be rewarding, just not that often.

So this puts me again in the tiring and often inconvenient task of having to find something new. See, now that I decided to talk about Satie I’ll dare to say the following: some especially unhappy people will likely develop obsessive tendencies toward topics that trigger valuable moments of happiness. Satie was a rather unhappy genius, who treasured food and drink like few other things; he would spend all his money inviting his friends to dinner, as that procured him some happy moments among the very unhappy years of his life. Me, I listen to music, I discover music and find things that touch deep regions of my mind and soul: some of these regions store pain, others store violence, hope, beauty, and some host rather unknown things that I’d like to explore even if I can’t put my finger on them.

Oftentimes, I don’t know what I was looking for until I find it, hence in a more general sense, I’m looking to feel something as I find life very boring typically. When I found Satie, I realized what I was looking for was rest, putting my mind at rest and allowing myself to feel complex things but in a simpler manner. I know, LOL.

Satie’s music does that, and of course, I’m listening to it as I write this (I always listen to the music I’m writing about, it’s yet another way to experience it). Satie is a pioneer of minimalism, this makes his compositions magical and relatively easy to listen to; he seriously intended to innovate and step away from the Romanticism of the 19th century, and create a sort of poetry with this piano, along with other interesting concepts like “Furniture Music” which we would know today as “ambient” music.

Through the minimalist eyes and hands of Erik Satie, I also come to be acquainted with some of the most marvelous music I’ve ever listened to (besides Satie’s own):
- Ludovico Einaudi
- Phillip Glass
- Yann Tiersen
are just a few names that come to mind, albeit unforgettable names I treasure in the wing of my heart that stores beauty.

Satie cultivated a very particular look, which was part of his signature as an artist.

Watch this if possible

“Satiesfictions: Promenades with Erik Satie” (directed by Anne-Kathrin Peitz, fl. 2011-2014 and Youlian Tabakov, 1975-; produced by Paul Smaczny)

This short video I posted is a trailer to the “Satiesfictions: Promenades with Erik Satie” documentary.

Now there’s a lot on Satie, being an eccentric and talented character with much influence in music history, I’ve already targeted a couple books where much of his personal journals and comments from contemporaries are captured. But this documentary, besides tackling the daunting task of informing us about the man’s life and personality, does it in a manner that is aesthetically pleasing and very much dignifying of the person he was, which is going further than the artistic aspect most would focus on.

Now I didn’t use the word “daunting” lightly here, Erik Satie was a rather mysterious man, not easy to understand. You can feel it in his music, you can really feel it; this was a man who dealt with much distress as it came to his own existence and purpose, a man who reached out for a reality deeper and brighter than the one the society of his time presented to him. In doing so, he managed to reach us generations later, while like many unique geniuses, most people of his time failed to see the treasure before their very eyes. Or maybe they where just a painful ingredient to completing the full picture of a man who, by knowing himself deeply isolated and misunderstood, decided to build a monument to his own genius through his work, even if only he would see it and understand it for what it was.

J.V
Music Crisis: Low Roar

June 24th, 2022
Music crisis is all about exploration friends, it’s all about expanding to unknown horizons and the discovery of this band was exactly that for me. I can’t remember how I came to find it, I believe this was after my first music crisis where I found a lot of atmospheric stuff, which often presents visuals related to the forests and cold landscapes, actually, the previous article in this category deals with that music in depth.

It’s fun how naturally resistant to change a person may be; let me elaborate, I was in a music crisis: yes, I needed something new: yes, I looked for something similar to the latest thing I discovered when I felt this way: also yes, xD. I’ve been listening to some psychology lectures about behavior and well, it seems humans tend to construct models of success based on experience, so I guess this is not completely illogical yet it’s a bit of a paradox when the subject is an exploration of the unknown!

So what does it have to do with “Low Roar”? Yeah, good question. Well again, I thought it maybe was some atmospheric metal thing, probably because the first record (which was the only one available at that time) displayed a moose and what seems to be a sound (roar?) coming out of its muzzle in the form of birds. So, quite a poetic and compelling illustration (that’s the image on top of this post in case you haven’t noticed yet).

Nothing further from metal, LOL. I was deceived by my genre bias, deceived but by no means disappointed! Once I started listening I couldn’t stop, and this doesn’t happen often with me, my attention span is let’s say, a struggle.

First Impressions

Ryan Karazija – Composer

I’ve always been into guitar, I like the inviting sound of an acoustic guitar playing arpeggios and emotional tunes; this is exactly what I had at the very beginning with the song “Give Up” from the first record which is by the way entitled: Low Roar. Damn, it was like, straight to the heart! It’s beautiful and nostalgic and his voice is… like calming, not sure how else to describe it, calming and sweet. But there’s something else, what he was feeling, what he expresses in that song, even before learning the lyrics I knew we had something in common and it was an instant connection, this made his music super special to me up to this day.

Now, if I’m to describe the feelings and thoughts I get when I listen to any Low Roar song, this would become a really weird book that probably only makes sense to me, so I wanted to just focus on that first impression of the first song that pretty much won me as a life-long fan. The cool thing about this whole musical accident is that to me it was a treasure from there onwards, something very exclusive and something not a lot of people knew; also given my experience with absolutely beautiful musical projects that only launch one record, I was seriously hoping that didn’t happen with this one. Fortunately, it didn’t!

Ryan’s Story: The Source of the Connection

Northern Lights in Iceland

As I said before, the connection I made with this music was very immediate and also very emotional; so it was also a simple connection, facilitated by the magic and emotion of the music. This means it didn’t require a lot of research about this guy’s life or point of view, except for what he wrote in the YouTube video where I found his record, and unfortunately, I don’t have a way to retrieve that, since that old video probably disappeared long ago but he was basically explaining that he’d recently moved to Iceland, that it was a big life change for him and a struggle to get adapted, to begin a new life in a foreign country.

I thought about the situation he had at that time and how it’s represented beautifully in the music he composed; yeah maybe this wasn’t a tragedy, maybe this was just a decision with unforeseen consequences (I don’t know the details), but the feeling of being absolutely lost in life, the pain of caring deeply for things that others don’t seem to even contemplate as important, the fear, and pressure of not achieving success, the anxiety concerning relationships and the absolute uncertainty when most of your life is in uncharted territory. All of this may potentially be right in front of an immigrant in a new country, and even if I haven’t experienced it fully myself (I’ve been away for prolonged seasons but not permanently), I can definitely empathize and relate to all of these feelings, through other types of experiences I’ve had.

So glad to see you again!

What’s Norman Reedus doing here?

So yeah, what’s a digital Norman Reedus doing in this article? Well, you may know the answer depends on how much you are into gaming; this is a scene from Death Stranding, a Kojima game that has a unique story and luxury cast. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but hey, that happens with excellent stuff I’m still playing it and enjoy it quite a bit. Now, part of the difficulty in the game is related to walking: the main character is a delivery guy, in a post-apocalyptic dystopia where being the delivery guy is pretty much as badass as it gets since it’s just too dangerous to be out of shelters (it’s a long story).

OK, so what about Low Roar? Well you know, if you’re always into music, sometimes you stop listening to artists you like for periods of time, as you’re discovering new stuff. I kept listening to Low Roar for quite a while, when the “0” record came out I was thrilled but I didn’t keep up to date with much else (I was just glad Ryan kept publishing music). To my absolute surprise, my first long walk playing Death Stranding which included a soundtrack was… guess what? Low Roar! Oh my God I couldn’t believe it, this was so exciting! And for various reasons:
1. I love the game
2. I love the music
3. I feel like I knew this guy since he was in a moment of so much uncertainty, and seeing him in a deal this size is just fulfilling!
I don’t know what the impact of this collab has been for Low Roar, but I mean this is a game with a large budget and I’m guessing it was a pretty good deal. Regardless of the details, I love it that it seems we will have Low Roar for a while, I’ve been visiting the website and see a lot of concerts in a lot of cities and the whole presence of the artist on the Internet is way different to what it used to be; and even with all of this, it seems the indie essence of the project remains.

I’m happy with this review time to say goodbye for now.

J.V
Composition 1

June 24th, 2022

Tonight I chose to publish a poem, with no words on it.

Enjoy it and let me know your thoughts.

J.V