020060122 22:40 • 
Cesare Marilungo has created a wonderful, 20 minute sandbox piece, Still Trying To Grasp The Zen Mind. It’s generative music he brought to life through a custom PureData program. Listening, I began thinking about why I write music, what music is to me, and why I am drawn to specific musical terrains I most love to live inside.
I find music in the world around me, every moment of every day. It’s in the spinning, dopplered shards of conversations I intersect with walking through a crowd of business people. I hear it in the metal-on-metal of subway couplings working through an almost-minor scale. It speaks to me in the chaotic rumblings and surges of the Bay beneath the ferry, in the clicks and hums of appliances chattering to each other over AC circuitry, in the screech of a barista’s steam-wand, in the fractal patterns of rain against the drum membrane of a window, in the slow creaks of wood as the house settles, and settles again.
There are often moments where I’m reading, thinking, dreaming, and realize I’m caught up in a symphony. My foot is tapping, my thoughts flowing in a cadence or melody to fit within the larger environment. I will alter my gait unconsciously to fit the construction worker beat of heavy machinery, find myself typing in counterpoint to whatever I’m listening to, speak to someone with a song in my mind and on my tongue.
I am highly synaesthetic. For me music is a very visual and textural experience. I can see the sounds breathing in space between the speakers, between my ears. Drawing a picture, with scratch of arcing pencil and sliding skin on paper, has the same effect on me as composing. For me, all creative experience has music at its core.
The rhythm of life is all around us.
Because music is everywhere, and I walk within it and of it, and know this… I can easily be driven crazy by not playing my part. I must give it further voice, or lament a broken instrument. My apologies and thanks yet again to all those in my life who have been near me when, for reasons internal or external, I was unable to create for extended periods. You have witnessed me at my lowest.
John Lennon famously said, “Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It’s like being possessed.”
In my world, I am both possessed and possessor, vessel for the idea and demon knowledge delivered from the air. I am embedded within and definer of without. I breathe in and the kick drops. I breathe out and the snare explodes.
Music is the system, working together, all parts in concert, all instruments playing the part only they may play. The orchestra is our world.
For me, everything is a song, and I am drawn to that which resonates. I love that which is playing in my own key. I join in the groove of the rhythm which moves me.
I write music because music is what I am.
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