See my video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mda7QMTv09M
I was apart of this event having no knowledge of music before my first piece written on March 10, 2011. Since then, I have composed nearly 3 CDs or 6 volumes. As a poet, I felt neglected. I see songwriters getting all the attention, playing in clubs, making money on their craft. The bridge between words and music is a short one. In fact, a poem that is as sound and beautiful as T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" performs a melodic line in the mind. In that context, I had been listening to music all my life, which is not to say that I am not also listening to commercial music, but the connection to bits and pieces of sounds in space complements the interpretative aspects. There is music everywhere and the intimidation I felt to structured lessons on the guitar or piano, for example, was enough to react violently. I am left-handed and my teachers were right-handed. I couldn't surmount the handicap of trying to match what was the opposite. The structure was like a jail. Recently, I have picked up instruments and stayed with them. I laid tracks on Garage Band based on my interpretation of the distance between sounds. I wrote one track over the next until as an artist, graphic designer, poet, etc., that I am, I filled the air with a canvas of sound, something I was comfortable with. I like music akin to what one wants in a bookstore or a cafe, or when one writes and needs only the emotional landscape of a kind of peace and quiet. Before Soundwalk 2011, I had not played my harmonica in response to other sounds, but on that day, I played with music I had previously recorded, and I was told that it was good. I could see it in the faces of the audience. I asked them how it sounded. They said, "great!" As a poet too, I read works that felt complemented the meter of my short stories and poetry. There were two especially that I uttered while the music played and I felt were perfect metrical matches and the words became all the more real. I could feel a connection to a woman in the audience as I read: "I am a fine-lined poem, /A dance, /A culmination of dreams/The accumulation of rivers. /I am the brackishness of the digital facade, /I am homeliness and handsomeness combined. /I am at times, a weirdo..." (From: uncertainty) Some of us are like babies learning to speak in a voice we would like to have. We hear connections. We hear the voices in our lives. There is this "soulfulness," as Alan Quach remarked, that validates certain sounds apart from others. We go through life responding to dreams and melodies that represent who we are. This is what SoundWalk was. I was validated, I was accepted there, on the sidewalk playing before a woman who was doing (it seemed) the same woman's hair for the five hours. It was surreal. As we move through the political landscape of spun truth and the death of others so that we might live, we are reaching for truth in sounds and space, in others and ourselves. Music is this language of the heart that withstands such interference. The sounds on the "SoundWalk 2011 Audio Catalog" (See: http://soundwalk.org/) represent this purity of the self willing and wanting to communicate or document what is communicated. All of us have something to bring, whether sounds or some other art; all of us are listening to the soul of life. read more
