...MODELING IN TONE...

I.

… regularly exhausted
from having to wake up to
the initial catalyst
for that vision inside them
to eventually emerge,
they‘d spend some time desperately
try‘ng to put a lid on it,
suppressing the energy,
while slowly losing control
of rediscovering things…

II.

… he‘d realized that they‘d been
looking at this damn thing, way
out of reach, for years + years
‘The guitar can‘t speak unless
you hit it, as there‘s two sides
to every story‘, he said,
‘+ if there‘s no connection,
then you‘re getting - what? - like, two
+ a half stories? Somehow
you have to get those two sides
to love each other, learning
the feel + the touch of that
string + what it does against
the neck, the fret – then you can
add the effects later on‘
From list‘ning off that record
over + over again
they‘d learn what would prove to be
enough for them in terms of
getting started; they would spend
all day playing (maybe just
sublimating) for a while,
all their emotions going
into the obsessiveness
(whatever was happening
inside them, they would put it
all in there), sitting around,
basically trying to just
figure out the mysteries
of how to handle that stuff,
troubling each other to show
the simplest, most minimal
(yet maybe most beautiful,
so sustained + unresolved
sounding, still hypnotic - like
a blank canvas sitting on
an easel, waiting for strokes
of a brush to cover, like,
every damned inch of it, just
emitting some kind of pure,
raw, challenging energy -)
aspects of it to complete
strangers (who kinda could not
even be bothered to shift
their fingers for it at first),
coming in with their ideas,
turning it into something
far more interesting at times,
conveying their reactions
to what was going on there…

III.

… + then you find the cat, who'd
turned on the man, who turned the
man on (‘cause if this cat just
turns you on so much, he must
have listened to a cat that
had him turned on), + that‘s how
you just keep on learning more
+ more + more about things
(like their alternate tunings)
So it‘s this endless kind of
call + response, the 3 d
of it being to just leave
this space, this little bit of
silence here + there (as if
it was an extra tool, this
special way of pushing +
leaving off at certain points,
creating intense tension,
but far from being just, like,
another means to an end)
+ how to move it around
(There‘s no formula for this -
it really comes down to the
song, the material, +
the company, like, who you‘re
gonna end up playing with)
It‘s all about going through
a lot of semi-conceived
ideas being refiltered
through adding new colors +
making the whole thing stick out -
with all those different kinds of
‘what ifs‘ emerging during -
(th)a(t) process of producing
that depth, until it just strikes
people, for being so stark,
as probably one of the
heaviest hammers ever
to hit them, when they first hear
it, representing, like, the
very essence of just one
particular moment of
a certain experience ...

(CMH)