Center of Small Small World

I moved to Taiwan and married a girl, a woman really. It was romantic. I rode a bike around a lot and made up songs. CNTR of a SMALL WORLD is a song I'd sing to myself. Even though being in Taiwan felt like being in Fremont after awhile, I guess I felt like I'd made a big move. Finally I was seeing the world.

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I laid this one down with a cha - cha box and Derek Taylor played the cocktail kit in his bedroom. I don't know if there's a trace of that but he pointed me in the right direction. Speaking in Tongues isnt about the Talking Heads, though that wouldn't be a bad thing. My friends when I was a teen would stay up all night talking about religion, world affairs and the occult. It's nice sometimes to look out at the multifarious world from a very specific vantage point.

Justify

Much of my gear is borrowed from friends. Like the echoplex Mitch loaned me. I like to use it to layer guitar parts. It soothes me beyond words. It sounds like Malian magic. I can jam to it for hours and then switch it off and it's gone forever. The music of the song JUSTIFY was born of that process. Nothing on the grid. Nothing against the grid I just don't know how to use it.

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The voice tells the story of an Iranian woman who is harassed by the basij, mere teen-agers. A group of strangers comes to her aid to defeat the assault of the government men. The vocal here is in Farsi and it was handled by a woman named Nasim Irani. I met Nasim through a friend on facebook and asked her if she'd mind doing this translation and performing the voice. She was game. We did it all in one afternoon at her home the very afternoon that we met. What a champ. The vocal sample is not authorized but I'll tell you: It's Deeyah, a singer from Norway who has been called the Muslim Madonna. Well, she's badass anyway and the phrase "How do I justify myself ... I don't. I don't have to justify myself or my existence to anybody" is too perfect not use.

FUTURE PEOPLE

I'm a trip. I trip myself out. I talk to myself a lot and I spend too much time by myself. Duke Ellington said the down side of being a composer is you have to remove yourself from the company of other people all the time. It's lame. FUTURE PEOPLE is the kind of conversation that goes on in my head when I'm hanging out with folks but I'm really off somewhere trying to vibe on my own thing. I recorded the synth drums while tuning out music in different time. Then there is the 80s Miles thing. I saw Miles in '87. People were criticizing Miles for being difficult. When he played he had his back to the audience and all that yada yada. They forgot one thing: he was Miles Davis.

Colossal Frequency

Hawks mean a lot to me. I'm a vulture becoming a hawk. I wont tell you how old this song is. I believe it came to me tomorrow. I started it on a Korg piece of crap and a mini-disc recorder in an APT on 10th and V, Sac. I've carried it a long time in a suitcase painted gold. I no longer know what this music is. It'll be a teenager soon and I can kick it out into the street and it'll come back better than I ever was.

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The track has all sorts of funny characteristics, historical anomalies and interference from the Roland SP-808 machine that I emphasized rather than filtered out. The vocal was meant to hold the place of a verse but I kept it. The 'synthetic beat' was added after I became part owner of 'fun machine' with Rusty Miller. This is the point when cut-up cha-cha boxes became emblematic of the CF sound.

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Pete Newsom did the live drums, improvising to the track he'd never heard before. He did a great couple of takes and I gave him a copy of Miles "Filles de Kilmanjaro". Dana Gumbinder helped engineer. Rudy Van Gelder helped me in my mind.

Who is Anonymous Rex? I'm a Man

I met Anonymous Rex in a train yard in Sac. He was hunting rats and said he had a plan to sell them to the folks at UC Davis for big $. Anyway, it's a gig, he said. Later he'd had a change of heart and was spending $40 a week on food and medicine to nurse those rats to health before releasing them back into the wild. I never thought much of it. Like a million other dropouts he had many great ideas and none of them as far as I was concerned would ever see the light of day.

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In 2006 I got a letter from Eastern Europe. It was an RSVP for a wedding I knew nothing about. It said "Sorry, ARex will not attend ..." and after that a handwritten link to a ghost account from an academic site about particle physics. Hacked into the page were a bunch of audio tracks that became the source material for I'm a Man.

Travelismo

Written in an afternoon for a newborn child. Only later it morphed into a funny lounge singer scenario set in a post-everything 5 star hotel in Myanmar. I was glad to feature my old friend Frankie Fanon on this. I added the Fabulous to his name without asking but I already know he won't like it. His take on the song helped bring it back to life for me, the song was missing the commanding presence of a world-class singer. Frankie suggested the title of the song to me. He said it makes it sound like the calling card of a movement. It makes you think something is happening. He says things like that.

TRAGEDY of COMMON THINGS

Some say the history of the humans is about the distribution of finite resources. Great. They're running out. We wont innovate our way out of not having enough clean air or water. We wont invent ways of maintaining the status quo. We wont change, physics will change us. It's gonna happen. Economists say things held in common will be squandered because people don't have an interest in preserving them. We better work on that. Private ownership of the basic means of subsistance doesnt seem to be a great idea. Privatization of water is a particularly bad idea. It is anti-democratic and dumb. People will tell you that geoengineering and GMOs will do the trick. Maybe they will. How do we assess these things? Where is the discussion going on? Is the average citizen prepared to engage in this discussion. If not, we are failing as a society and the show wont go on for long.

Gypsy Ride, Ride On

We are told to be open minded. There is always room for debate. Does that principle apply when the hegemonic philosophy is killing us? In other words, don't you just wish sometimes that these assholes would fly off to another planet and leave our planet alone? On some level we are all complicit in the mess. If the land was Eden again wouldn't we end up in the same predicament? I think about this: every couple of generations should have a major push towards giving it another go. Maybe that's the moment we live in. We will either step up to the plate and attempt some great things, control our lives and find a new way to live on this planet, or we will let the greedy elite continue to tell us how it's gonna be while they hold on to the dwindling supply of the basic means of subsistence. This is not rhetorical exercise, this is our life. This is our moment. Either way, any myriad of ways, we must live it.