What are you listening to right now?

Maaaannn I fuckin love this sequence of the album. Ben Sharp is a real one - an artist's artist.

This came out when I was 20 years old, and was my first exposure to cloudkicker's music. I had been playing guitar for 7 years at this point, and stuff like this was NOT in my vocabulary at all. I got my come-up learning Lamb of God albums... Chuck Schuldiner of Death and John Petrucci really got me in shape when it came to creating fast, aggressive, dynamic passages. I wanted the speed and the limit-pushing. But by 20 I was doing my first real living and realizing I don't have the toolkit to express the gamut of new emotions on my instrument. Shit like this was really cracking my tiny metalhead peabrain wide open. It still stands as one of my favorite bits of ambient post-rock guitar work.

It's pure expression, I can still get why it spoke to me as a guitar player back then, how it made me see a whole new horizon that I would go on to explore and develop into. I really appreciate this guy as an artist and lover of artistic expression - he was like a mystery man back in the day, almost no public presence but people at progressive metal shows talked about him. IIRC, he's a pilot, loves what he does, and didn't really get why certain people were so into his little passion projects. He didn't really care to be a rockstar, just a dude telling his story of being a pilot, with sick-ass, beautiful guitar playing. I think all of the titles come from post-crash black boxes, but the whole thing is actually just an ode to the guy's love of flying, and I think that's fuckin awesome. He just went "man, I love flying" thought back, and made incredible music, simple and pure. Maybe it isn't much in the end, but maybe it's all it ever needed to be.


Shit like this is the whole reason I ever started down the rabbit hole with post rock. Hell, it got me looking more towards atmospheric electronic music, too. Something in the loop-driven writing process this dude was using. I miss being that age and having the time and energy to burn through entire evenings pulling back the leaves on giant ecosystems of music that was totally new to my world. I feel like there's just as much of that to be doing NOW, but I don't have as much time.

 

f'ing beautiful! Thanks for the share. Hearing music and diving deep into it, what an adventure, a humbling, a community, a peek into the heart of others. What a journey.

 

Hell yeah, the whole reason I picked up an instrument when I was a kid, was to know what it feels like to be at the origin point of the same sorts of musical passages that so many artists have so graciously provided from their hearts and souls, and that moved mine in ways I myself couldn't and still can't fully account for. Music's been an adventure for as long as I can remember - it just moves through different pockets at different times. But it's never late to the moment for me. I never know my destination, but I know when I've arrived.

Spoiler: don't wanna clog up the thread with philosophical wax

I think probably the main reason I've been diligent with guitar for over 20 years of my life, with severe ADHD, is down to this inner drive to search. I have this sighthound brain that darts around looking for possibilities. There is a part of me that's always searching, that makes me listen to music that I can tell isn't even made with me in mind at all, and I don't even reflect on that because the story it's telling me is insightful and resonant on a human level. That searching part of me is almost never entirely whole though. I think I keep picking up a guitar as another layer of scratching that same itch, try to go directly to that newness in sound and expression by stepping into the feedback loop myself. I think it started when I was 5, no joke. I heard Sgt. Pepper's and understood then and there what albums were, and decided that was my favorite. I'm shooting to not be one of those people that narrows down their genre and era range with age.

What inspired me then is what inspired me now - that window through music where other people's inner worlds kind of bleed into your perception of your own. I've been thinking about that for a couple of decades and I still don't have all of the words together. But to outpace that inquiring drive, it suits me better to keep the pace of gaining new information surpassing the pace of the old dropping out. They say every combination of notes has been found and arranged an unknowable number of times, but people never run out of entirely bespoke statements to make with those same notes. I could never remember if I ever DID hear it all, anyway. And I wouldn't hear it the same, the next time around. ADHD-brain loves contextual chains, inductive reasoning and abstraction are a free-energy machine for me. Music is a morphing collective kaleidoscope of psychic imprints. It's like the biggest, shiniest ooo-shiny thing ever for me. Not too many days go by with less than 5-6 hours of listening. Another reason I wind up branching out. You have to, to put in those kinds of hours.

I'm tellin you, that sighthound stays in the kennel too long and he gets itchy. I don't think I could listen to the same stuff if I tried - there are just these semi-static handholds that stretch out in nested cycles over the years. I think it's good for your creative thinking to nurture a shifting foundation of taste, and honestly just danged enriching. But I would say that - I have a weird brain that makes it natural for me to diverge from whatever points of inertia I stop on. It's what makes me go, and it's probably most obvious in the things I most enjoy. Music is and has always been #1. ADHD can make you feel lost, music is something that rewards those most lost in it. Meant to be. From my perspective, I let music happen and it just keeps going. I just press green tortilla chip button and smile dumbly.

 

Dude is wildly creative.

 

Short but sweet. Sometimes with atmospheric jungle beats, letting it run increases the value - repetition legitimizes. But other times it's better not to play it out.

 

I love that people are still cooking up shit like this with drum breaks. What a vibe, dude! Really nice arrangement.

 

A little over a week ago I had the pleasure of seeing Hans Zimmer perform live in Baltimore!

I've been enjoying his live 2023 album since then. An absolute treat to listen to. I highly, highly recommend giving it a listen

 

not on youtube but been enjoying this release, jungle type album that I only clicked on a whim because I thought the art looked like a goosebumps book cover

https://kidlib.bandcamp.com/track/dj-mindhunter-mind-system