Having long since run out of readily available boots, I am approaching Hendrix from the peripheries. In unforeseen ways this has been rewarding, as it unearths new, unattributed concepts  from the same fertile mind. (I enjoy doing the same thing with Miles Davis, still have much further to go before I run out of his material (miserly Experience Hendrix, Ltd, etc.)

​The similarities between the opening acoustic pattern of "Mr. Guy Fawkes" (recorded October, 1968) and "All Along the Watchtower" (AATWT - recorded January to August, 1968)) are striking. The pastoral sensibilities of acoustic Donovan or Jimmy Page (interestingly, the same sound and rhythm appears in Shuggie Otis' "Strawberry Letter 23") paired to The Band influenced beat, strum pattern, and tambourine. Is that Jimi on bass? Makes sense sonically... the warmth of the playing is Hendrixian.*

With the first section, imagine Levon Helm instead of the Eire lead singer,  howling "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." Hendrix was such a Dylan aficionado that he took The Band at face value, from where they were coming...**

I'm guessing with this recording Hendrix directed the band members in the beginning, ala with Dave Mason's acoustic strum in AATWT. Based on who Jimi was jamming with in Los Angeles at the time, could have easily been Andy Summers or Robert Wyatt.

Delving into the beginning of the song further - it is as if the acoustic riff section of AATWT and the wildcat screech part were separated at birth, into orchestral movements.*** So the opening is actually more straightforwardly folksy and the end more straightforwardly jammy.

​The song quickly expands, with Hendrix' harmonic, rhythmic, and (dare I say orchestral) ideas at work. The vibe goes from The Band to decidedly British smooth harmonies at :023 that seem to include Hendrix in falsetto mode, as in "Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland)."

Then the creepily effective (even the lead singer's teeth-grinding voice works for this) transition of the song from a sleepy love song to a wretched tale of terrorism/social justice (full disclosure: I am reading Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent at the moment).

The protagonist turns out to be Guy Fawkes, a character made relevant these days by Watchmen and Anonymous, singing about blowing up an emblematic British structure (probably also about the gunpowder aspects of male/female relations):

He keeps her locked up in a metal box
and sings so softly
​I've got my love to keep me warm

Orchestral highlights of the song emerge here, an amazing late 1960s bridging-the-gap between prog rock and languid urban soul string section that I believe Hendrix must have had an integral part in creating.

​The atom bomb sound effect could have been a joint decision by a few musicians sitting around pretty late and pretty high. A very late 1960s sound effect, it was probably only really fresh on "A Day In the Life," with the acoustic, orchestra-generated bomb suggesting social holocaust. Perhaps it was put in after Hendrix left the producer's chair, as a way of bridging two dissimilar jams.

Or maybe it is not haphazardly placed. The bomb effect is a recurring motif in Hendrix' work. Whether in Machine Gun or the earlier avant-feedback sheets of sound that led into Purple Haze. (The latter had morphed into This is America - Star Spangled Banner by the landmark October, 1968, Winterland concerts). Hendrix was always thinking about the war in Vietnam, he probably knew some cats who wound up fighting and dying. He tried translating the sense of powerless anguish people felt within the machine. ***

If the bomb effect had been realized through avant-feedback and not through stock BBC footage, this section could have been a classic. Amazing missed opportunity, cuing you into maybe the corporate recording structure of the time. For all the talents of those Hendrix surrounded himself with, very few had real sonic ideas to match his. This was partly Jimi's fault––he did not have a full unit of communicating musicians, ala the Dead or Miles Davis (to bridge wildly disparate genres).

Nuclear detonation is followed by a proper electric guitar jam, with many of the climactic All Along the Watchtower licks. The difference being that the rhythm player has a whole different, proto prog-rock thing going. To me this is annoying, pointing to the idea that as early as 1968 Hendrix had gotten into a non-organic scene.

Next, we are in an atonal world of pure orchestration that is haunting, at first. Something that sounds '68 Floyd followed by these urban soul string stirrings that would not be out of place on Dionne Warwick's "Walk On By" or "Ode to Billie Joe." Sadly, the thumping strings that follow come across as heavy-handed, old fashioned––only made palatable by Pink Floyd in songs such as Atom Heart Mother by the fact they were distending the genre.

The frustrating thing about this project is that for whatever reason (probably the usual, drugs), the momentum Hendrix had producing in the studio would soon be gone. The Experience performed in November, 1968, at the Philharmonic Hall with the New York Brass Quintet and "master harpsichordist" Ferdenando Valenti. Getting a proper, acoustically superior hall had not been easy (Lincoln Hall was the first choice). Unfortunately, this did not result in any inspired collaborations, as Mitch Mitchell breezily attests: 

“Lovely hall, very prestigious, no rock band had ever played there. Only one problem, a member of the band had to play in a symphonic context. Jimi and Noel flatly refused, so I thought OK, what the hell, I’ll do it. Would I mind having tea with Leonard Bernstein? Which I did; charming chap. He suggested that I might like to play percussion with The New York Brass Ensemble. It was fine, I went on with them, with a collar and tie on and did some Bach and a little Mozart after which the Experience played. It was a great gig...” 

​By the time the idea of symphonic orchestration caught up with Jimi again (Gypsies, Suns, & Moons was its own thing), with the planned Gil Evans collaboration that would presumably pull in Miles Davis, Hendrix was dead. Another month and they would have begun arranging the instrumentation in newly completed Electric Ladyland. Testament to this, album art by Mati Klarwein, the same guy who did Santana's Abraxas, had already been created.

Why is this all interesting to me? I have taken some Hendrix concepts that were only realized in acoustic hotel - home tape settings and started conceptualizing them in a semi-orchestral format as part of the "Fabric Suite" within the  project Fabric - Chasing Sun.

#endwriter

* That said... Hendrix respected the bass player of Eire Apparent, why would he necessarily take over the instrument? Maybe he jammed with him on the bass part, getting the sound right.

Joe Cocker (speaking of an Oct, 1968, LA jam): "At that time whenever Hendrix felt the urge to play at home he had the Irish guys from Eire Apparent on tap to back him up because he particularly liked their bass player Chris Stewart."(Team Rock, "Jimi Hendrix: His Life And Times," 2012). Unheralded Van Morrison connection: EA's Eric Wrickson had formerly been a member of Them.

** Woodstock.

***  The reason why AATWT sounds fresh to this day is not simply that it is a blues rendition of the Dylan acoustic song. It is a radical, yet balanced, melding of ethnic and social sensibilities. A bridge between people who might not always agree. And yeah, it has Jimi on guitar, a cat named Dylan on lyrics.

#fabric #JimiFlute #ChasingSun

The beauty of life as a cloud novelist is that I know I am not in it for the money. May it continue to rain. 

George Mobiot gets it exactly right:

"Using the industry’s own figures, it shows that burning the oil, gas and coal in the fields and mines that is already either in production or being developed, is likely to take the global temperature rise beyond 2C. And even if all coal mining were to be shut down today, the oil and gas lined up so far would take it past 1.5C. The notion that we can open any new reserves, whether by fracking for gas, drilling for oil or digging for coal, without scuppering the Paris commitments is simply untenable."

By design (evolution), nature is not unaware...

"Plants that heard caterpillar sounds released more mustard oils, which are unappealing to caterpillars and thus ward them off. What is remarkable is that the plants exposed to different vibrations, including those made by a gentle wind or different insect sounds that share some acoustic features with caterpillar feeding vibrations did not increase their chemical defenses. This indicates that the plants are able to distinguish feeding vibrations from other common sources of environmental vibration.'"

Must groove... Keith Jarret doing Chick Corea patterns behind Miles' wacky, dead-serious horn. Henderson and DeJohnette  keeping a lot of astronauts to a tight funk pattern.

Project Iceworm... how diabolically clever to hide the murder weapon in a block of ice. Naturally the culprit never cons​idered that the ice would melt when the global aircon kicked off.

Trump does not win in a million years, unless ghosts have won. Guess I am one of those "not doomed to repeat ourselves" people. If anyone forgets who to vote for, stick this on Youtube on repeat:

Meanwhile, Google is doing good work. First Google search tick of the day, when I was thinking about seeing the Oliver Stone movie Snowden... "Unless you want law enforcement to be able to trawl all your communications, don’t — under any circumstances — use Google’s newest messaging app, Allo, Edward Snowden just warned."

Followed by "Google swallows 11,000 novels to improve AI's conversation." To which I quipped on the Books Go Social Authors Group:

I forecast that we will have our first bestseller written (with maybe some human editing) by AI before the decade is out. And it will capture the zeitgeist so well it will be made into an HBO miniseries. 

When asked why I found this interesting, I replied:

1) None of these authors sampled for Google's potentially highly profitable AI language work were compensated and

​2) For a significant percentage of young people hooked into devices and believing that technology birthed them, the human hand may no longer matter. Think of a James Patterson scenario in which, instead of paid assistants to ghost write for him, he possessed really advanced bots. He would simply provide the finishing edits to the algorithmically produced materials and give it his imprimatur of authorship. Caveat: I am considering this scenario for EVEN.

John Doppler:  I respectfully disagree. Here's why:

1. None of the authors were compensated because it's unquestionably fair use under US law. They are not entitled to special compensation.

2. The unique, recognizable content produced by any one author — the intellectual property at the heart of copyright — is not being reproduced in any way.

3. This is a proof of concept, not a commercial product.

4. The technophobes at Authors Guild have a longstanding grudge against Google, so they're eager to seize on something like this as proof that the world is coming to an end.

5. Experiments in AI-written content have been dismal failures. We have a long way to go before that content is viable, much less in competition with human authors.

I do like the comparison to James Patterson churning out ghostwritten titles, and I think that's a little closer to what we may see in the future: works roughly assembled by AI, then polished by human authors. That authentic human voice is something that computers have not been able to reproduce, and likely won't for a quarter century or more.

Damon Shulenberger:  Imagine if the "proof of concept" work resulted in a loss of a profession for many writers down the line. As you said, a quarter of a century (I think it will be 10 years max). A blink of the eye.

John Doppler: Change is inevitable, but the strength of indie authors lies in our ability to adapt to and exploit that change. If the rise of AI authorship presents competition — and I remain skeptical — perhaps the "handcrafted" aspect of a traditionally-written title will become the selling point that lifts human authors above the mass-produced stories.

Additionally, readers are loyal to their favorite authors. Can a synthetic author attract and hold a fan base? Again, I'm skeptical.

In any event, if AIs become competition, we'll just have to step up our game as authors have done in response to every other disruptive technology. Ebooks, print on demand, easy self-publishing, Kindle Unlimited, scamphlet fraud... we adapt to these challenges or perish.

Damon Shulenberger:  I am thinking of having my penultimate work written strictly on leatherbound acid-free hemp, far from the threat of bots and data loss––first I need acolytes.

Meanwhile, Duterte land just keeps getting weirder and weirder. The duly elected Philippine president keeps assuring people he does not want to be a dictator while taking all possible steps.

It is kind of like when someone pretends to be bluffing and yet has all his money on the table. 

#endwriter #EVEN ​

The Fabric project... forward-thinking and aspirational. To create such a platform will require time and effort.

I am not primarily a business-focused person. To me art is a much clearer conveyor of the aspects of life worth considering. I will spend more time listening to a Marley, Beatles, Hendrix, Dylan, Mitchell, Cohen, Young or whoever expresses truth as he or she sees it.

This necessarily cuts into my time listening to speeches by politicians, no matter how able. 

Fabric is now the title of the loose band that I have conceived... I have always felt uncomfortable using my own name for music-–Shulenberger** carries with it cultural assumptions. Fine for writing, there is an Arvid-guided tradition associated with that I suppose....

Fabric: a collection of musicians no better or worse than myself, similarly committed to new sounds and to the meanings contained therein. I have met a few musicians in Dumaguete who inspire and/or haunt me. Paulo Ramos, who has taken the title "music interpreter" and the inimitable Aletheia are among these. John, Ramke, Dyck, Louie, Japhoy, Ralph, Jin, DJ Tong, Davide, Mariano, Peter, Paul, and George... the list goes on. They have had the willingness to improv with me until we get things right. 

The album is actually turning out to be quite a process. Fly Away Home has about three distinct archeological eras of editing involved. The first fast-paced instrumental track with John on bass, Rocky on guitar, and me on flute. This provided the early 1970s Sesame Street guitar sound and the bed of the urban Manila paranoia and longing that I am trying to convey. Followed by... well let that whet the appetite for the actual album, sometime before Christmas.

Suffice it to say, I believe that each song kind of magically captures a moment. Each is distinct, many with approximations of field-recorded patterns and tunings (thanks Paolo). Lyrics that are my own. Fabric - Chasing Sun, coming soon. 

To be followed by a new Fabric song cycle spanning Raleigh, Miami Beach, Tulum, the Bay Area?

The Magnificent Seven remake was the first cinematic experience in my life that I walked out of just prior to the climax. Admittedly very tired, I just could not take all the killing and smirking. A perfect encapsulation of what is wrong with America... the message being that, as long as all manner of diversity is represented we can kill gleefully as part of a team.

PC fascism in action, welcome to the world of big guns in the sand box, courtesy of Andrew Jackson, huckster Trump, and the Texas sniper. 

The tonic of course (as ever) is the Beatles.... the only unit that I know of to transcend its boy band roots, majestically. Despite Ron Howard's gloss-over approach to nearly everything (all the interesting parts were left out of the Fab Four's ill-fated visit to the Philippines and nearly lethal snub of Imelda Marcos, for example) the visceral power of watching four musicians break through the bullshit and create was inspiring. Highlights included a snippet of John Lennon playing the opening part of Strawberry Fields Forever on some kind of melodica back in late 1964.

Roots of sounds go deep, man.

The Shea Stadium concert* and in fact most of the packed hysteria scenes made me tired after just a couple hours. Don't know how The Beatles put up with the madness for three solid years. The best song of that concert, and by that I mean the only moment when the live harmonies sent shivers down my spine was Baby's In Black. Right up there with my other early Beatles favorite Yes It Is. 

Why the hiatus from the #endwriter project, some regular readers want to know? I am immersed in creating a Fabric album Chasing Sun. The songs are coming together in demo and field recording form as a cohesive whole and it is... taking me somewhere. Have just crossed the threshold where I see that a concept album is not only achievable but likely.

It will have personal and political aspects, hopefully I am eloquent enough to communicate the message broadly. It is not just me, a lot of people have been involved... hence the floating pick-up band name Fabric.

A nomadic group of the Gods, Chasing Sun. 

And yes I am still polishing Arisugawa Park 1.29 - Uneventful Circuit. 

 #AriPark

Thanks patient readers, Arisugawa Park is proceeding at a slug's pace. A casing from a hollow point literary bullet lies on the floor, aimed at fascism's recurrent heart. Those who know me (or read the news) will know what I mean.

Love in a time of Duterte and all that.

The gratifying thing about the cloud novel experience (unlike the hashtag novel Testcut, which was a little contrived, though worth revisiting if I make it back to Tulum) is that I can proceed at my own pace. There are a few hundred readers who seem to come back and read, whatever I put up.

Arisugawa Park - 1.29 - Freedom in the Groove is coming in a day or so. The above sketch should let you know we are still with Hayao in noire Roppongi. 

Anyone playing catch up, this is a great opportunity. A hundred pages in, we are still in Chapter One, after all. 

#God is still not an algorithmist, no matter how hard the tinfoil hat crowd insists. 

Music is hard to fathom or penetrate. Every time I think I have it locked in, it escapes.

#ChasingSun

I am putting together an interesting mix that actually has to do with the way in which Jimi embodies a tribal flute-sympatique musical vision. In other words, though I don't think we have recorded examples of Jimi actually playing flute, there is a lot of tribal atonalism to his music––from the early live feedback experiences to the later studio and home tunes where he was channeling a Native American past and future vision.

Pretty groovy for a guy some claim created heavy rock. Maybe the music simply came from a heavy place. 

#JimiFlute

In tribal playing, the thing is often not the notes, but the vibe.* Once I join these rough demo tracks, which I believe are public domain (they have never been released commercially and 50 years is expiring) it creates a hypnotic vision of where I think Jimi was going with his New Rising Sun concept.

Before Europe happened to blot the Maui chill. 

I'll put it up on Youtube I guess. I need to select accompanying pictures, also from the Internet public domain. I'll  start with this one from Rainbow Bridge (photographer name insert here), which appeared when I typed 'Jimi Flute' into Google as part of my Heaven Research Project.

#endwriter

*By "vibe" I mean breath, micro variations of the type familiar to those of you who still boil water in a kettle. On top of that force of breath being expelled, positioning of the lips and of the tongue inside the mouth. Definers of sound beyond trad notes. Oh yeah, as they say, Western ears unattuned.

Maybe that is my real place of strength in penning Arisugawa Park––being a musically inclined sort I took time to get to know the local ways of music and words, and the intent within tones that come across dry in translation. 

A storm is coming to the Phils and I have an idea for a new project. I have been researching Jimi Hendrix the past few months, as the feedback-laden music conveyed on his "public saxophone" somehow fits the friction of the times, in the Philippines (where I am staying) and other parts of the globe.

The political and peace movements of the 1960s were not pacifistic in origin. Just as Jesus would not have come to his enlightened concepts without a surrounding atmosphere of hatred and (non-nuclearized) suspicion, Jimi did not come to the peaceful aspirations most remember him for through acceptance of the status quo.

Forget the drugs and groupies scene laid on him. He overcame an entire system and way of thinking that was deeply embedded in people's psyches of the time and opened up new forms of communication. The beauty of it was that it was not simply about Hendrix, but the people he reached through the sounds. He was reaching those who needed to find wisdom the most––not the cool kids, though they were not excluded. The vulnerable, the questers.

He was in-his-way very (pre-Silicon Valley) urban into nature West Coast. I knew people like him growing up in Oakland and they invariably looked beyond black and white, though they may have sat at the back of the class.

The beauty of this story is how labyrinthine and imperfectly captured it is. Hearsay, hazy recollections, vaults of sounds still unreleased, the  revealing fragments and cosmic extrapolations.

How do we get there from here? How so we take wisdom and apply it in organic ways, no chemicals ingested? How to convey these ideas in a way that can have a real effect?

Jimi was not pro drugs, far from it. He was complex enough to want to change and intelligent enough to see the full bounds of the prison in which he was trapped. Room full of mirrors.

A lethal combination of fame and self-reflection––on the road to Rainbow Bridge he never quite found his own belly-button window. 

The power of Hendrix, or a similar synaesthesistic force, is unequivocally this: he reaches people around the world and not just those who are in good situations. Two months ago on Boracay I walked past Captain Haddock's, an art shop that used to feature a cartoon depiction of the fabled sailor and is a beacon of the arts (and hand-rolled tobacco) on the island.

It was one of April Jardine's favorite places and her lokal words counted a lot in my perception of what made the place special. In fact, her artwork led me to the concept of Earth Fabric as a poetic pathway––nature-based aesthetics, they exist in every culture (despite the country's reputation for the garbage-strewn and the tacky, there is a pulsing tribal heart that can be fostered, valued, linked with GNH-tied sustainability).

Two months ago Clint Eastwood-inspired Rody Duterte was elected President of the Philippines by a wide margin and a portrait of Adolph Hitler went up next to the usual Johnny Depp and Bob Marley playing soccer images. These are by  by C--- who specializes in quick portraits for 350 pesos, yet is an artist's artist.

Anti-Nazi as I may be I didn't  stir waves, I wanted to see what happened to the picture, of its own volition. Sure enough it stayed up for a couple weeks, no one defaced it or seemed to notice, and then––it was replaced by an astounding channeling of Hendrix, long hands on guitar. Wearing his Swinging '60s British military regalia (transformed into a cosmic coat straight out of Fantasia) and with a deeply local tribal sensibility. Speaking peace, even at full volume.

What had happened here? Evolution, without my even willing it. A manifestation of fabric. This at a time when my listening was shifting back toward rare demo/live/jam Hendrix. I was inspired that that vision was still in some sense universal.*

A cosmic sign, then, and this time I led the effort to take the image down (through the teeth that make fabric work: cold, hard cash). For the next couple months, I will hang cosmic Jimi wherever I travel and then it will go into cold, hard monthly storage until I have enough fabric (bread) for my own place. 

#endwriter #fabric

* The picture notably did not depict a DJ––God is still not an algorithmist, no matter how hard the tinfoil hat crowd insists.

Expanded tolerance,
love in a time of Duterte
as the  noose closes tighter,
frictions multiply

I stay Pacific in a center of 
something tightly held to understand,
the imprint of freedom face down 
in some kind of mutable finality.

Will you stay with me tonight, 
will you open your other eye 
and let me breathe as usual,
upside-down banana shape? 

#endwriter

For what it's worth, another music recording is up, Be Something Tonight. I think it's quite good personally but these things get very few listens, so it is hard to say.

Originality is the byword.

I'll just stay out of the way and put up a picture and the liner notes. It is something quite diff from the other stuff, a lot more rock, though still acoustic.

1. Be Something Tonight
2. Eat the Fruit
3. Out of Here (Ramble)
4. Big Muffler Jam

This was a nice jam session organized by Aletheia Elwood Cediño and her husband Dyck, of Nomadic Collective. The first song Be Something Tonight is Marco's creation and apparently has no title, being in embryonic verse stage. He is a bass player who seems to have something Chili Peppers-esque in the tune, or that is how I interpreted it.

Aletheia next channels Billie Holiday in her original Eat the Fruit. With my Winehouse-inspired attempt at a slowed down ending.
​
The next one is also title-less, based on a Marco riff––I call it tentatively Out of Here (Ramble), representing the twin Axes of All Along the Watchtower and Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You.

The final excursion Big Muffler Jam is me picking semi-randomly on top of Marcos' more consistent pattern and Aletheia gracing us with her notes. Jethro on bongos (always wanted to say that). Then I switch to flute.

This is why I do field recordings, call me the magpie.
​
Can we cook these tunes up in the studio? Let's see if I can get back to Alchemy at sometime in the not-too-far-distant future.

​#ChasingSun #endwriter