Good morning! I am sitting on a cushion on the floor in my second-floor apartment, with Circa and The D outside in view and listening to Loscil’s 2006 album Plume. The Canadian ambient artist’s music has coming through my Bose speakers in heavy rotation for some time now. It’s great for mediation, motivation and transcending pain, which is where I’m at right now. The extreme barometer drops caused my immune system to attack my central nervous system twice within five days. Kind of feels like you just stuck your finger in a live socket. My knees got hit hardest. Felt like they wanted to explode.
When it abates it’s like a refractory period. My muscles stop tensing and spasming, and a feeling of relaxation moves in to replace the agitation. Dealing with the health-industrial complex is a subject for another day, but I bring this up mainly because it’s why I released four albums, six singles and an EP since May 14. I had a window of time when my immune system did not attack my central nervous system for a few months, and I took full advantage by maxing out productivity. Every time I reached a new level there were three more levels within reach, and I just rode a riptide until the heat dome parked over the southwest a little over a week ago.
The latest single, “Run Koto, Run,” came out Friday. There are Apple Music and Spotify artist links at the end for anyone using streaming services (I’m an Apple). I’m deep into woodshedding with modes right now, and was expolring world music voicings when this came together. It’s a direction that’s beginning to emerge that I think of as “chrono-ambience,” where there’s an element reminiscent of time or a metronomic feel to rhythm or percussion.
The chrono-ambient concept kind of gelled with the previous single, which I was working on right about the right I saw an article about Eighth Dimension recording artist Q-Burns Abstract Message, who had a band called Tick Tick Tock. I also had an image of Tick Segerblom I wanted to use for the single but it got rejected by the distributor for depicting campaign flyers. So this image I took at Hyper X Sports Arena at Luxor took its place.
I released an album of covers under the Hank Williams tribute monicker Oak Hill Driver, and after it came out I heard a barely detectable metronome that got added to the track while making the master. It just sounds like someone in the room patting their lap to a guitar instrumental, but I released the song as a single without the metronome sound. It got more streams than any of the covers with vocals, so I’ll probably record more when I get around to retuning the guitars. Once they're in open tunings they stay that way for a while.
I like covers. I like hearing artists take songs and place their own spin on them, or bring a song back into the collective unconsciousness. I saw a post on X about a Louis Armstrong arrangement of Pharaoh Sanders’ “The Creator Has a Master Plan” and went down a Satchmo rabbit hole. The best cover is of “Everybody’s Talkin’” at the top of this page, but the most oddball was this arrangement of “Give Peace a Chance.”
Good stuff. Go down a music rabbit hole if you have the time today. Queue up my favorite music podcast, Coverville. I’m taking advantage of this refractory period to catch up on domestics. If you get a chance check out the artist and song links below, especially the first Meditation Music release. Stripstack and Stripsonic are symbiotic, so streaming music supports these posts (or “stacks”). Much thanks to mid-Century Modern real estate specialist Jack Levine of Very Vintage Vegas for becoming Stripstack’s first yearly subscriber, and Terri Southworth for being the newest.