Ambient Distractions (take 1)

Gettin' At It

There are some places you don't go unless you already know you belong. La Chispa nightclub is one of them, surrounded by trailer parks, pawn shops, and rotting industrialism. It's a low-slung building with white-washed walls. It sits in an expanse of long-neglected asphalt where weeds are slowly reclaiming the parking lot from faded strips of paint. The sign on the roof advertises live music and dancing with an almost primitive simplicity. On either side of it are two symbols: dancing couples from another era, bizarrely dissonant to the scene that unfolds nightly below it.

La Chispa is not America as it likes to see itself reflected in glossy magazine pages---underwear models, diversified portfolios, staid golf course communities---the slick semiology of first-world advertising. This is the third-world America, the America of just-enough-to-get-by. The America of cheap consolation prizes for the dream that got away. Mexican beer and rusty-razor hangovers that never quite take the edge off waiting for a government check or living with an outstanding warrant, alimony payments, or the ever-shifting pressure of shadow economics.

The name carries some funny associations. "The Spark:" it can be used in the context of electricity, wit, or fury. Its connotations extend, without having to travel very far, to drunkenness and weapons, which about sums up this ugly little dive.

We register brilliance only in contrast. Against the backdrop of a hot summer night, there are flashes of light: the rim of an Escalade in the parking lot, the spine of a pocket folder, glittering women waiting to dance and be coveted. A grim compensation for the darkness. Occasionally, inevitably, the scene is punctuated, punctured. Behind the building, a gun-shot in the back of the head. It makes the hedonism all the more frenetic as it revolves around the lolitas, gilt prizes in the primitive culture of the masculine ego. It's impossible not to fall under the spell this feral urgency.

La Chispa Lolitas

A simple little diddy I finished with the layout of the studio.

Vertigo

Two Steps Back Ain't Always Bad

A short and simple track to highlight how beautiful some delayed piano can be.

Cascades

My first attempt at 'pure techno'.  I believe this song came out nice and solid.  It sounds professionally recorded and mastered with nothing that signifigantly stands out as a flaw to the ear.  Enjoy this free download and share with your friends.

Giving Up and Moving On

Don't Let the Man Get You Down

This is in the middle of the whole project but as of this moment I am re-assembling my studio and will jump right back in the fire and finish this track A.S.A.P.!

WorQ it worth A...

It's often hard to say where the creation of a track begins. Emotional Triggers Pulled is an exception. The cut had its genesis in Roland's Virtual Analog synthesizer, the JP-8000. Fiddling with knobs in a wide-open exploration of the keyboard's sounds, Marsden programmed a pad that ended up providing the foundation for the rest of the track. It survives as almost an underscore--an element of the mix that is felt more than it is heard. Once it was in place, the rest of the track took shape along lines that seem, in retrospect, almost inevitable, from the delicacy of the introductory arpeggiation to the emphatic piano hook that becomes the piece's calling card. It's as if the music sprang, full bodied, from a moment in which the meaning of a sound was suddenly heard and apprehended. The rest was simply an unpacking of the implicit.

This is the limbic logic that overwhelms the rational world. That moment of understanding---not of the mind, but of the gut---has all the violent clarity of a gun shot. Perhaps this is why we speak of emotional triggers. And perhaps this is why the creative process is so draining and demands that we access places beyond the ratiocinative mind. These limbic explosions are destructive. They upend the order of the world. But in that upending is a new order, implicit and existing in a state of potentiality. Everyone who has ever felt any strong emotion knows something of that clairvoyant certainty, of seeing the world to come in the moment of succumbing.

Marsden Meyer

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