Jed worked at Landis Music back in the early 80s. He sold pianos, and increasingly synthesisers. Jed was the man who found me a whole KORG MS modular system for $250. That immediately places him in Master of the Universe status.

Up on the wall was a picture of Jed in white tuxedo with a white bow tie, sitting at a piano. I seem to remember there were balloons in the background but that might be confabulation from the grog. The photo was from when he played the piano on cruise ships. I like to think that many pretty ladies swooned to hear him play and would drift to his cabin after all night tinkling. But then I know a guy that DJ’ed on a cruise ship years later and he said that most of the ladies tended to be rolled up and down the decks in wheelbarrows by their husbands.

I would buy just about anything Jed pointed at. I bought a whole host of Electroharmonix drum pads – Crash Pads, Syndrums and a thing called a Clockworks which was the ‘brain’ of the pads, if by brain you mean something that could count to 12. I still have that. The rest of it I hit too hard and broke. Jed said it was as if somebody had dropped bricks on them.

I was looking at synthesisers one time and it was a big decision between this and that – back then you’d get a new synthesiser maybe once a year, not like virtual instruments. I asked Jed about it and he said – people spend their life learning how to play the piano.

And as always if Jed said it, it is best to think hard upon it.

The day I walked into a room of my house and saw all the synthesisers I owned piled up in a circle like an electronic Stonehenge – it was Jed’s axiom that came to mind. I got rid of almost all of them, sold them, gave them away, passed them on at cost*. Over the years however, Stonehenge just moved from reality onto the hard drive. Around the beginning of this year it was ImageLine’s Harmless virtual synthesiser. I didn’t want another, but it was on special… and… it sounded nice and…

The first synthesiser I bought, I knew every tiny tweak and turn, every minor movement that would get the thing to do exactly what I wanted. Same for the MS20, I can still work that thing with my eyes closed, get everything from a woman’s voice to a planet dissolving. But let’s be honest: I have much less command over Absynth or Reaktor, MaxMSP or even Harmless. Just don’t have the patience or the time to sit and learn every control. I don’t really need Pro Tools plus Ableton Live plus FL Studio plus Soundtrack Pro. No one does. Anyone who has a passion for music struggles to focus their libido on composing and not on shopping. Like Stewart says, by the time you get electronic music gear set up you’ve forgotten the inspiration that led you there. He’s gone back to the bassoon.

This is a wider issue. Imagine a pack of baying hounds, running here and there chasing whatever fox or rumour of fox is current. The hounds at front are lost but they bark the loudest. Right now they are barking about one thing, tomorrow it’ll be something else; anything will do so long as it allows the chase to keep going. The running about never touches on the heart of the matter – it’s all about chasing ‘solutions’ to things we didn’t need solved.

Some are barking about HTML5 which apparently will bring a revolutionary change to the workings of the Internet – I guess the same change that VRML was going to bring back in ‘94, or perhaps DHTML or what about SVG; there’s been yapping going back a long way. They woof: HTML5 will free the slaves forced to use Adobe Flash (quite happily up to this point) – although how a banner advertisement will be any less annoying when open source remains mysterious.

Very few things made in Flash have so far been beautiful.
Maybe we should concentrate on that rather than learn another way to do the same thing.

There’s one hound up front with a turtle neck sweater and little round glasses – his yapping is all about how a particularly virginal mobile phone will not have any Flash derived software – it would defile the purity. The howling and baying strikes up across the pack: the phone won’t run Flash… but then it doesn’t run HTML5 either. In fact it won’t properly display many web pages, and the whole browsing experience is like knitting a sweater for ants.

Maybe the entire idea of reading on a telephone needs questioning.

There’s another pack of dogs who are howling for more touch screens, more knobs and ribbons and heart rate monitors and Wiimotes and anything else that could possibly modulate a sound or an image. They’ve forgotten that they were once seeking these things to make better music. The audience finds them irrelevant and are increasingly happy with Led Zeppelin. I can’t tease them enough but it’s hopeless, they can’t hear above the noise.

The endless hunt is empty and pointless but the hounds rush on to the next great idea for delivering nothing, faster. Will it be a cloud or pad or a thrown stick? Who knows, they don’t. Their baying deafens our ears.

I am not about to trash my laptop and go live in a tree. That’s pointless. Jed’s advice was to stop and use what you have – REALLY use it – in the service of inspiration. Hold the upgrades: I want to learn how to play an instrument, not buy ‘solutions’. I want to clear my mind of all the shit that pundits and marketers, CEOs and fan boys keep trying to wedge in there. I think we should tell them to get out of our face and we’ll be far better artists for it.

BTW don’t wait for the academics to lead the changes. I just got this in an email:

“This concept will need to incorporate a vibrant materialism of the image’s sensory and cognitive strata and an evanescent immaterialism of its affective qualities. Rather than locate our conference in the space of negotiation between disciplines or media (the “inter-“), we propose the opposition, transit and surpassing of the interdisciplinary by a “transdisciplinary aesthetics”, and its conceptual and physical practice of a “transdisciplinary imaging.”

Trans – the upgrade to Inter.

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* Recently a ‘lifestyle’ magazine contacted me for an interview. Everything seemed to be in place until I mentioned I didn’t have any ‘old gear’. That killed it; I mean who wants to talk about music when you can stand in front of old gear.