August 2010
Monthly Archive
When you’re not trying to actually name your own band, names are cheap and easy. The Ring Tones. Hz. DJ Dev Null. The Upgrades. The Downgrades. Autoload. Curb.
But when it came time to pick a name for this new music project thingy I was up to, I drew a blank. Cricket And The Tumbleweeds was pretty much the state of things. I toyed around with a couple of rough drafts (The Rough Drafts! shouts my mind) but nothing really clicked.
Meanwhile, it turns out that the contemporary way of launching a music project is to martial a plan that would rival the invasion of Normandy. Remember the bad old days when all you had to do was get picked up by a label and they putatively did all the rest? Yeah. Good times. *sniff* Now you have to [blah blah blah, tedious list of administrative tasks mercifully deleted], all of which is very complex and requires planning, and planning requires extrapolation, and extrapolation gives rise to contingencies, and eventually you figure, “I have a foolproof plan for musical domination unless, of course, the world continues to occur in which case, forget it.”
Which pretty much sums us all up: except for the world, we’re set.
~ + ~
Modulo is a kind of curious word that enjoys rather ambiguous usage. In mathematics it is fairly well defined, more or less, but it’s been co-opted by other disciplines and its meaning has kind of…wandered. The usage that most catches my ear is the one that means except for variations explained or caused by. For example, “I’ll be there in 20 minutes, modulo traffic.” Or, “We should be able to enjoy a nice quiet dinner…modulo dog.”
A tidy and clever construct, that. I’m a sucker for tidy, clever constructs.
And since mundi is the whole world, modulo mundi is the all-purpose comprehensive disclaimer.
So, we’re all set and everything is worked out and it’s all going to work exactly according to all of our exceedingly clever plans…modulo mundi.
All things are equally absurd and profound. I find that the more I examine life, such as we know it, the more this proves itself. And in no place is this more vividly, violently true than in the Black Rock Desert at the close of summer every year.
“What is Burning Man?” This is a very simple question that is surprisingly difficult to answer. There doesn’t seem to be an applicable noun – “festival” is as useful a word as “geological feature” is to the Grand Canyon – and mere language seems to lack sufficient adjectives or adverbs. And much like with the Grand Canyon, the sheer scale of it is difficult to express.
The Event, as it tends to be called, is a place so interesting that it can be traumatic. It is like being locked in a room with Robin Williams on coke for a week. Sure, the initial experience is simply amazing but after a couple hours you wonder if you can keep up the laughter, and eventually you may find yourself begging for a break. Days into it you need to have punched through some sort of mental wall simply to deal with it.
Burning Man is like that. It is like being ceaselessly bludgeoned by beauty and wonder until you cry. At high speeds and intense temperatures the brutal and the whimsical collide and become an alloy and you are folded into it. Spend long enough immersed in this pulsing world of the impossible and suspension of disbelief becomes a permanent, involuntary state. Magic is accepted as truth, and vice versa. It is Alice in Wonderland, scripted by Kubrick, directed by Gilliam, scored by Hawtin.
It is a cauldron of raw, primitive motives; of unrelenting awe; of immediacy to the point of synesthesia; of happiness to the point of despair.
– ~ –
There is a word: fey. In modern usage it tends to mean insubstantial or without character, but it derives from a word that once described the strange peaceful calm that comes over a person when they know they are about to die.
There is a certain fey quality that comes over people in this situation. It’s not giving up the fight, it’s letting the fight wash through you.
This, then, is the tranquility crucible: a place where all things absurd and profound are forged into you until you find peace with all that you are.
The first single from the upcoming Modulo Mundi EP The Tranquility Crucible is now available for download! Some Of The Stars Are Moving features six hand-crafted tracks and is available for the low, low price of $1,999.99 $4.99 at CD Baby. Buy now »
Some Of The Stars Are Moving will soon be available from fine retailers such as iTunes, Amazon.com, and Rhapsody just as soon as they finish crunching the bits. Which isn’t nearly as painful as it sounds, I assure you.
In honor of the 2010 Burn – the major inspiration for The Tranquility Crucible – Modulo Mundi is gifting two versions of Whatever Experience They Want to the community at large.
As those of you who create art know, there is a lot of time, effort, and expense involved. If you would like to help support these efforts, the single will be available for purchase online starting Monday, August 16th. Your help is deeply, deeply appreciated!
Please enjoy:
[ Whatever Experience They Want (Album Version) ]
[ Whatever Experience They Want (Opulent Version) ]
Mark Morford once wrote:
[Adventure] is what we are designed for. Emotional (and physical, and spiritual) scarring and discoloration is, in a way, what we do. Our spirits are, after all, here to experience and taste and immerse in it all. But it’s when you deny this fact, when you choose to see all the sex and drugs and tattoos and mortgages as a giant drawer of scary sharp knives that the gods sigh and frown and say, Well, why in the hell did we set up this mad gorgeous kitchen for you in the first place if you’re not going to slice off the tip of your finger now and then, and scream, and get a bandage and heal awkwardly and then do it all over again?
Or as another sage person once said into a walkie talkie, “We are not here to keep people from being stupid. Once they are stupid we will pick up the pieces, but we’re not going to stop people from having whatever experience they want to have.”
Burning Man is not about living safely, nor is it about living dangerously. It is about living vividly. An excellent lesson.
Multicolor explosions surrounding the Raygun Gothic Rocketship, Burning Man, 2009. Photo by Steph Goralnick.
The album version of Whatever Experience They Want is a soundtrack to what I see when I close my eyes and run a fast-forward video of all my memories of the madhouse beauty that is found in the desert. If you’ve been, you know exactly what I mean: the feeling of finding out what happens if you experience too much joy.
Whatever Experience They Want (Opulent Version) is a different thing: the darker, more urgent, more apocalyptic feeling of pushing beyond the engineering limits of your self. Buckle yourself in, or don’t, it doesn’t much matter: you’re going on a ride that’s going to turn you inside out.
Isn’t that what you came here for?