Just Awesome

In May of this year, the great musician Vangelis passed away. When I heard about the death of Evangelos Papathanassiou (Vangelis), I was reading about the mystic king of Britain, Uther Pendragon, father of King Arthur. Both events inspired me to write this song.
Enjoy listening to it.
Frank

Instruments:
Augmented Voices
JX-3P
ANA 2
Dune
TR606
CS80
Largo

FX:
Valhalla Room
NeoVerb

Various sample libraries

Uther Pendragon meets Vangelis

Negentropy

Bandcamp

Sky Mirror

Inshallah is the Arabic expression for hope.  In Spanish it is ojalá, and in Portuguese, oxalá.  Six centuries ago, the Christian west and Muslim east lived in harmony on the Iberian peninsula.  Both shared the same language of hope.

Lyrics
Daybreak peers through ash
Child roams through debris
Your god saw the flash
Mine won’t set me free

Would I could not smell
We both know these fumes
Your clothes reek of hell
My soul builds its tomb

Still we tell our children
There will come a time
To play free without fear

Here, this ray of sunlight
Here, this act of grace
We come here in peace

Ojalá, Inshallah, Oxalá

Music & lyrics: Chris Curtis
Vocals: Chris Curtis & Michael Sellers
Musical arrangement, engineering & production: Sergio Aguilar
Guitars: Sergio Aguilar; Chris Curtis
Drums: Rodrigo Uribe
Album Cover photo: Image by Peter H from Pixabay
Cover design: Michael Sellers & Chris Curtis

Inshallah

(Free WAV Download available here under '••• More'; and eventually, as part of a future solo album)

Greetings my friends. I admit up front, this is a strange write-up… culminating from years of trying to navigate a world that no longer makes sense to me. And maybe that’s a good thing. We all needed a wake up call to just how ineffective and unsustainable it all is? And the last few years have provided examples of that… in abundance. 

Speaking of abundance (or in this case, lack thereof), Cheer and I have been discussing this one a lot lately; specifically in regards to the shops and restaurants we frequent. I finally gave up on building a DIY, music-centric desk I designed, because none of the local hardware stores had enough of the pieces in stock. We’ve watched our favorite Romaine lettuce disappear from the shelves, to be replaced by something half the size and twice the cost. Several of our favorite restaurants have closed permanently, and the wait times at others is painfully long now. 

Apparently, shop and restaurant owners can’t get anybody to work for $15/hr when it costs $30/hr to afford rent and groceries now. (How could we have ever predicted or prevented that? One might speculate.)

It’s enough to make the average mind go a little panicky. “Why don’t you have that in stock?”, ‘Why did the price on this just double overnight?”, “Why have we been waiting for 20 minutes just for the menus?”. All of these are very real, and very concerning… specifically if we never stop to question how much of that thinking is the result of being programmed to think like consumers our whole lives.

How often have you heard a commercial say something along the lines of “You deserve this because you are worth it.” Or “You should fear this. And our product/service can protect you.” Or “You should take this prescription, despite the list of side effects being longer than the list of benefits.”

I suggest we ask ourselves ‘Am I thinking with the mind of a consumer right now?’, and then be very willing to let those developing thoughts roll around in our heads for a while. 

Cheer and I concluded (with minor alarm) that we are both profoundly brainwashed by ‘consumer’ thinking; and it shows every time we feel a sense of panic in the store. Sure, things are a bit more scarce than they were 5 years ago… but does anyone (old enough) remember 30 years ago, when the stores contained half of what they offer now? (And none of us were freaking out over a lack of choices then). How about a time when you couldn’t have something shipped to your door overnight (many of us can still remember a time when 6-8 weeks was a decent shipping window).

Maybe the path to changing this paradigm is for us to get out of that ‘consumer’ thinking, and focus more on a ‘grateful for all the amazing things we have’ kind of thinking. I can still go to the store and choose from an abundance of fruits and vegetables, a teetering display of chips and dips, a bevy of beers from around the world. There are still more choices than my simple brain truly wants to think through, even if they are sold out of the Smoked Salmon and Ketchup flavored Cheetos I was specifically looking for.

So my plan going forward is to TASER myself (at least psychologically) every time I catch my brain being consumery. And the goal is to reach a point where I’m not thinking “It’s not fair my favorite restaurant closed.”, but instead thinking “How cool is it that I had that experience; and got to support the family that owned and worked that restaurant.” 

We’ve reached some critical tipping points that are well on their way to determining our future; and I believe a healthy attitude (dipped in gratitude) is the thing that’s going to keep us from gnawing each other’s faces off over the long haul. Them’s my weird thoughts for the day. Take em with a grain of salt (assuming the store carries the brand you like). I hope you enjoy my latest musical offering, ‘I’ll See It When I Believe It”. :)

WTF! The Musical

I'll See It When I Believe It

Taken from the forth-coming album Tales of Generation X the final frontier is a science fiction inspired space rock odyssey inspired by my 
love of the cosmos and my fascination with ufos and unexplained events ,this song went though many different forms and mixes eventually i got my friend the producer Russ sinfield to mix and master the track and also add a proper percussion section ,we also rebuilt the middle 8 which i call the star section and what you here is what we decided to release
written and produced. by Jim Manser
mixed and mastered by Russ sinfield
percussion by russ sinfield
visual video by Jim Manser made using storm and node tools
watch the inte-rsteller lyric video on youtube https://youtu.be/A7PIen-5U1Q

the video link

The final frontier [watch the  video on youtube]

Composed, arranged, performed, and produced by:
Carlos Vivanco

Light Flux

Lightning Sky

In Mexico, I played with bands like  "Atrás del Cosmos", "Queso Sagrado", " Broken Heart", "Decibel", "Bardo Thodol", "Kathmandu Ensemble", Silent Light. In New York City I played with Bands like, "King"s East", "In The Service Of", "Fist of Facts", "Desire", "Dense Undergrowth"," "Matahari", "Like Wow", "Devil's Breakfast", "Muse Mob", "Atlantis 3000", "Monster", "Zenith", "Andromeda Crash" "Night Shade", I also collaborated with Hector Zazou, Harold Budd, Elliott Levin, Dennis Charles, Tetsu Inoue, Bettina Koster. Barbara Gogan, Salvatore Principato, Ken Man, Scott Hartley, Thomas Truax , Johanna Hugring, Martina Hoogland, Amanda Garrett and many others. For many years I also wrote Jingles for a lot of products like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Mc Donalds, Toyota, Kodak, Payless Shoes, Rothman's, Salsa Tabasco, JC Penny, Liberty Science Center, American Heart Association, MCI, Reebok, AT&T, Fanta, Play Movil, etc, I also made music for Viacom writing music for cartoon networks, Bravo TV, Chanel 1, and MTV. Also wrote music for Bill Moyers (PBS)and also for Fax TV in Germany.