๐๐โจ New Single! "Transparent" from The Age of Reunion
Music for our ominous-but-numinous lives online, staring down the barrel of our metamorphosis (and microblogging about it constantly)...
Stream/Download/Follow on Spotify, Bandcamp, Apple Music, YouTube
โTransparentโ is probably the single on this album, if there were one. It was originally improvised live on stage during the world's first "stream your own point-of-view" performance with Google Glass at Gratifly Festival on Carl Jung and Aldous Huxley's birthday in July 2013. (You can hear that โis he on acidโ first take here, see clips from the show in my video EPK, and read LostInSoundโs review of that history-making performance here.) I later performed it again, complete with Google Glass POV video feedback loop, for the #P3M5 theatrical production at The Vortex Repository Theatre in Austin, Texas as part of a series of short performances on how surveillance capitalism has transformed society. And then Google bricked Glass, at which point my adventures as an augmented reality guinea pig ended until this year. But the song persisted, like the high water line of a tsunami leaving jetsam on a mountainside.
Iโve played this song live probably 200 times, including at my biggest concert ever at Boom Festival 2016 and most recently with an amazing full band at Santa Fe Brewing Company. But I always enter the studio committed to producing versions that I canโt achieve on stage, and this track is a perfect example of how different it can get when I give myself YEARS to chip away at the marble of a definitive sound sculpture.
(Some of you heard early mixes, but Iโm finally happy with it and hope you are too.)
Fun Easter egg: given the songโs allusion to human brain-uploading, I went full tilt with my sampling. The percussion is an Ableton Live drum rack I built from treating my guitar like a cajon (download that rack for free here), and the backing vocals come from an inspired live improv session with a random audience member at my old Paint Jam ATX residency who happened to be a trained Persian classical singer I looped on stage and then turned into a synthesizer patch.
Anyway, here is the video, which really nails the vibe โ perhaps my favorite from the album (which again, you can preorder here). As per the lyrics, please share!
You wanna talk the erosion of privacy?
Any hill goes, you're bound to find some bones in there.
The holy mountain of the separate self
Falls into ocean like an ice shelf.
None of it comes with any anomie,
A bloom of novelty and sunlight, not enemies.
But as our skeletons become transparent
We would be scared if we weren't sharing it.