The Fortress

Only a ghost can walk through your walls...



The Fortress

so why do you say you love me
while you run away so fast
maybe you just don’t love me
or maybe because you’re last
to know how you feel inside
burning like a secret lie, girl
you’re a fire inside alright
leaving me side by side
with your demons in the cold

i don’t want to be the one to go
and fight them all alone
without you
is all you’ve let me know

so why do you pull me close
while you hide away so scared
from your dreams of all you want
from those tears you never share
so how can i be your fire
to burn your love’s desire, girl
when your walls just keep you in
with your dreams on the other side
to slip away again

i don’t want to be the one to go
and climb these walls alone
without you
there’s only one now
with you
i’ve never known

BT: These Hopeful Machines

Brian Transeau, or “BT” as he’s billed, makes music. Lots of it. Not in a Ryan Adams-I’m-going-to-release-three-albums-in-one-year-way, but in a way that genuflects to nearly all varieties of music within a single career, if not within a single song. BT’s sonic prowess is no doubt encoded in computer language, but he utilizes this lexicon as a canvas to meld every invented genre into one: “music”. His latest release, These Hopeful Machines (Nettwerk Records) could not better exemplify of how BT imagines music as a vast, contiguous landscape.

While certainly drenched in electronic confetti throughout, These Hopeful Machines, unlike some of his previous work, understands that people don’t go to parties for the confectionary, but for the experience the confectionary augments. Hence, restraint is of the essence. Organic voices, guitars, strings, and drum kits alike weave between a digital interface so elegantly, it’s easy to embrace the intentional glitch tracks, stutter edits, and dare I say, “techno” beats, that accompany nearly every minute of this two-hour opus. One gets the sense while listening that the analog age is reluctantly signing a lease over to a new stranger, but a stranger that is kind enough to indulge in a conversation before unpacking.

Musically (and I mean things like melody and song structure), These Hopeful Machines is arguably simple. This isn’t to say it’s banal. Simplicity is the formula by which the complexity of genius can breathe. I would invoke examples of this argument in Nirvana’s Nevermind or some of the early Beatles albums. These Hopeful Machines is of the same formula. Many of the songs on this album were likely conceived on nothing more than a lonely guitar in a lonely room. What provides the complexity of genius is the added texture to the melodies, harmonies, and hooks. And BT layers texture like no one can - and i literally mean no one since he builds many of his machines and computer programs.

These Hopeful Machines is packaged as a two-part continuous listen, with “A Side” and “B Side” sold as two independent downloads, each having six disparate “movements”. Therefore, discussing specific songs is a bit of a disservice, but still relevant. The album opener, “Suddenly” idles for only 22 seconds before the 21st Century introduces itself. Loudly. But as if responding to a question from this bold stranger, BT’s human voice responds on behalf of the previous millennium with “You and your emotion/I’m on your side/I say your prayer”. A cordial conversation between these new friends ensues for the remaining hour and fifty-one minutes. The final word in this conversation is a necessary, albeit poignant goodbye from our analog past with a gorgeous, tape-recorded (seriously) cover of the Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost In You”. I have no doubt that this ghost will soon become the haunt of on old friend from times past.

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Introducing: "dKOTA"

For those that know me or have even followed this blog, music is important to me. I've been writing my own tunes and playing shows since my High School band, "Seven Day Sail" set...'sail' in Sioux Falls, South Dakota in 1995. Upon entering college, I traded my bass for a Martin acoustic and have been a closeted apartment performer ever since. Until now.

2009 saw my reintroduction into a bona fide band, now named, "dKOTA". I was reluctant to do so for many years, knowing that my perfectionism would be hard to satisfy in a music project with most of my focus on my Ph.D. degree. But the talents I stumbled upon over the past year or so were impossible to ignore, and so perfection became less of a concern when it took so little effort to have so much fun.

I first befriended a New York transplant, Peter, who in addition to being a great guy also happened to play guitar. But like me, his only Portland audience seemed to be his cantankerous apartment denizens. After our first jam session, I knew I was hearing something special -- Peter made my songs sing the way they were intended to, and he did so with a natural, minimal effort. So we played a couple gigs with just our guitars wailing (well, his guitar wailing), leaving all other instruments to fill only my imagination.

And then came Brad and Corey. They were also relatively new to Portland, and happened by one of these band-less performances. Seemingly before I could blink, I was in a house in NE Portland surrounded by the hum of electricity and cymbal rings ready for the first time in over a decade. And now, some months and two bass players later, dKOTA has released its first product: a modest demo recording.

It's not anything to sell or shout about too loudly, especially considering its 16 hour, $200 inception. But it does represent a milestone for myself in that with the band, I finally feel like I'm being heard -- something I think any artist strives for. We have a long ways to go musically, no doubt. But even if just this recording remains as the only token of dKOTA, I'll be happy to know that the emotion in some of my most sincere songs was translated into the language they were intended: a band.

You can hear and download dKOTA's demo for free HERE

And here is our MySpace page (no download option): dKOTA Music

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It’s Not Just What You Have, But How You Use It

Somewhere about 1.1 billion years ago the first chemical synapse, the Ursynapse, reared its infant existence into the biological milieu. This exotic structure, a microcosm of the less-evolved “Dude-Bro Fist Pound,” provided biology with a means to perceive and adapt to a dynamic, often hostile environment. Naturally, selected organisms with exclusive Hollywood access to “The Synapse” were more likely to write their fortunes into a lucrative genetic will for generations to inherit. Add a few days to this process, say, between Adam’s failed Spiked Fruit Punch Bowl-A-Thon pun and Noah’s “I’m On A Boat: The Musical,” the synapse crawled from its fish-like primordium into one of the most bemusing, complex phenomena in the natural world. The modern version of the synapse, which emerged from the George W. Bush and deuterostome split about 900 million years ago, can not only perceive and respond to the environment, but it can orchestrate a synchronized symphony of synaptic activity to allow an organism to manipulate the environment.

Environmental manipulation is indeed an observable consequence of sophisticated synaptic activity, but this ability is not unique to humans. The use of tools, a good rubric of environmental manipulation, is achieved from birds to dogs, from elephants to chimpanzees, from humans to Hummer drivers. Yet, the synaptic structure of different species, while seemingly identical at first electrophysiologic glance, can differ dramatically in their proteinacious scaffold. Further, the synapse alone may not fully explain organismal fitness in the same way that my Intel Core 2 Duo processor in my MacBook isn’t much good installed into my TI-83 graphing calculator from college: the hardware (i.e. neuronal architecture) isn’t compatible. So what is it, then, in the < 2% genetic difference between chimpanzees, our closest extant genetic ally, and ourselves that makes the differences between jumping onto a tree and jumping onto the moon? The answer may not be the synaptic tool itself, but how that tool is used.

With such a similar genetic portfolio between the chimp and human, the search for what makes us human is narrowed to the corners of our 2% genetic divergence from a common ancestor nearly 6 million years ago. Some of this divergence is a part of the “Human Accelerated Region,” or “HAR,” which is a fruitful, albeit small archipelago among a sea of genetic doldrums. The HAR archives genetic instructions ubiquitous to the Great Apes – even most vertebrates – yet unique enough in humans to prescribe distinct proteins with (proposed) distinct functions; it’s as though our current genome is the latest version of the ape software: v2.0 OS Human (because Apple ran out of cat names). Not surprisingly, much of the HAR’s archipelago resides within the brain’s governmental jurisdiction. It is here that our ursynaptic family tree first sprouted, and it is here that our human identity and its unchartered future may lie.

The HAR is suspected to code only 49 proteins. This is compared to the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of proteins that comprise the entire human proteome. But given that we parted from our hairier-than-thou family ancestors a mere 6 million years ago (remember the ursynapse is nearly 1 billion years old), 49 proteins in 6 million years is a hedge fund with some high risk, high gain return. Literally. The risk in our beloved synaptic moxie is that it carries the baggage of an unrefined, imperfect system that can result in neural dysfunction. For example, there is no known correlate of schizophrenia or neurofibrillary tangles (Alzheimer’s disease) in chimpanzees, let alone in our more distal relatives. It is as though v2.0 OS Human is the beta version in anticipation of the debugged and improved v2.1.

Ignoring for a moment the flirt from v2.1 winking at us from the corner, the most salient phenotype of v2.0 compared to v1.7: OS Ape is certainly a profound manifestation of consciousness. While environmental manipulation and tool use can be found in other “lesser” species, humans are the only example of what I’ll call “existential validation,” which is our conscious ability to ponder the essence of our self-awareness. To be self-aware is one thing – something dolphins even exhibit – but to ponder the essence of self-awareness is something entirely more complex, if not uniquely human. Not-so-coincidentally, both psychosis and the faculty of language are thought to have contemporaneously arrived from a single genetic “big bang” event unique to the human species. Hence, it doesn’t require a giant leap for Apekind to posit that this event may be interdigitated with the other rapid genetic changes taking place some 6 million years ago as we upgraded from v1.7 OS Ape to v2.0 OS Human, albeit with some quirks (psychosis, neurodegeneration, etc.) in our new synaptic software.

And so what may come to define v2.1 OS Human? Unfortunately, the ability to understand v2.1 may violate Marty McFly’s time continuum paradox since understanding v2.1 may require exactly that: v2.1 – “Great Scott!”. I realize this is heavy, despite there being no problem with gravity in the future, but it’s no different than trying to illustrate a sphere to an entity that lives in two dimensions: three dimensions are required for a sphere to exist, without which only a circle exists and it’s a logic violation to illustrate a sphere in two dimensions. How then, stranded upon the islands of existential validation, language, and (non-family holiday) psychotic breakdowns, can humans persuade evolution to vote us off our v2.0 island in favor of v2.1? Perhaps we need to add another dimension.

While it is illogical for a 2-dimensional stick person to draw a sphere, it is not illogical for Stick Person (or “Stee-P” as they’re known in the hood) to ponder a sphere. In fact, humans ponder higher-order dimensions right here in v2.0, filling our cortex with the hubris of the 11-dimensional energetic vibrations of String Theory. Except for the tantalizing imagery that may project in most women, it is impossible to illustrate 11 vibrational dimensions in our cozy 4-dimensional realm (including time, thanks to that one German guy, among others). So what might the next dimension of v2.0 OS Human look like that will allow us access to the unchartered v2.1? Of course, no one knows – especially me. But we can certainly ponder.

Very little is understood about the functions of the Human Accelerated Region (HAR), but early indications point toward roles in cortical lamination (the ordered neuronal layers in the cortex of the brain; humans have six layers) and neuronal migration. This furthers the notion that while human synapses largely mirror that of the chimpanzee, it is the hardware by which those synapses align that give us the conscious advantage. The extended consequence of this unique alignment mandates our behavior since, among other extroversions, the functional output of the brain includes behavior no less than the functional output of the heart includes pumping blood and tattooing emo kids. And so if the HAR is dictating a uniquely human proteome that directs a uniquely human behavior, how then could any behavior we elicit usurp the dictation of a genetic mandate? In other words, how can our behavior, from our conscious creation of antibiotics and the internet to nuclear weapons and pollution, be any other than the prescription of our genes selected upon through our environment, which we paradoxically manipulate? If true, this apostasy threatens the intellect of free will into a biological dystopia of Genetic Big Brother. A caveat, however, is warranted here since in the collective sense – that is, the amalgamation of human conscious behavior (nuclear weapons, for instance, were not created by one conscious person) – would be behind the upper-dimensional steering wheel of v2.1, leaving our free-willed, individual behavior as an ignorant stochastic contributor. This is akin to Stee-P’s ignorant creation of a circle that may only be a 2-dimensional projection of a sphere in three dimensions – a dimension Stee-P doesn’t comprehend no matter the pedagogic savvy.

Alas, the seemingly dystopic Genetic Big Brother may actually have a utopic even-bigger sister where 2 + 2 really does = 5, albeit only from the perspective of v2.1 OS Human. The nature of human behavior, dictated collectively by our genes (and possibly the HAR) is an amalgamation of individual behaviors that seeks survival, not extinction. Therefore, perhaps the sum equation of human behavior can only perpetuate our existence. For example, global warming (or “Global Hotting” if you lived in the Pacific Northwest last summer) may actually be a genetically intended consequence of industrialization in that the stress global warming injects into the system incites new behaviors (i.e. technology) to resolve that stress, thereby advancing our species one step closer v2.1. Evolution as we know it is contingent on organismal stress, without which there would be no need for genetic modifications. The uniqueness of the evolutionary pressures on humans is that our consciousness is paradoxically manipulating the environment by which we are being stressed; it’s as though conscious thought in n-dimensions is acting through collective behaviors to evolve itself by perpetuating a constant stress in the system. And of course, we would be completely ignorant to this process since it would be operating from a foreign code, or “dimension,” that is uninterpretable to human consciousness as we know it in v2.0 OS Human.

The human story is most certainly a unique story, no matter the language in which it is told. Our current genetic version is simply the most recent revision of a tale that has percolated the conscious lexicon for centuries, perhaps best framed by Rene Descartes with his “cogito ergo sum”. While the characters and settings in this story are often lucid and resolute, the plot is often cryptic and the finale remains unwritten. Or is it? Perhaps the language of the Creator (yes, that portly white guy with the beard), in all its infinite dimensional contortions, has concealed the plot and its finale much like concealing the nature of a sphere from Stee-P living on a 2-dimensional piece of paper. Humans could very well be just like Stee-P where an n-dimensional sphere passing through our 4-dimensional world is beyond our relegated v2.0 OS Human comprehension.

Or I could be wrong. Completely. The musings above may only serve the purpose to inject a stress, in this case into the reader, and cause everything I say to be consciously ignored in favor of species propagation. After all, a chimpanzee could have flexed its genetic wit to write 98% of this column. Ironically, it took the other 2% for me to realize this. And so it looks like I’ll be stuck with v2.0 for a while longer.

Selected References:

Crow, T.J. The "big bang" Theory of the origin of psychosis and the faculty of language. Schizophr Res 102(1-2):31-52 (2008).

Emes, R.D., Pocklington, A.J., Anderson, C.N.G., Bayes, A., Collins, M.O., et al. Evolutionary expansion and anatomical specialization of synapse proteome complexity. Nat Neurosci 11(7): 799-806 (2008).

Hill, R.S., Walsh, C.A. Molecular insights into human brain evolution. Nat Cell Biol 437(7055): 64-7 (2005).

Pollard, K.S., Salama, S.R., Lambert, N., Lambot, M., Coppins, S., Pederson, J.P., et al. An RNA gene expressed during cortical development evolved rapidly in humans. Nature 443(7108): 167-72 (2006).

Ryan, T.J., Grant, S.G.N. The origin and evolution of synapses. Nat Rev Neurosci 10(10): 701-12 (2009).

d.J Presents: Urban Legends Vol. 2!

A continuous mix of data-pulsed life in the communicative form of "hip-hop," as some might be inclined to call it.

Free download; I hope you enjoy!

Free download here: Urban Legends vol. 2!

Urban Legends: Vol. 2*

*Well, not yet. But the unexpected popularity of my hip-hop mix, Urban Legends Vol. 1, a couple years back has finally prompted a response for me to continue mixing, mashing, and pushing the social voice that is hip-hop music. It's looking like this one will be a two disc set using the stitch of rhythm to unify eclecticisms from Tool to Nas. It'll be a lot of fun and I hope to have it completed by the end of September.

In the meantime, enjoy the golden sun that is Autumn in these northern latitudes. I know that I still have an ambitious agenda to fill before the rains return, starting perhaps with a bike ride to Bend this weekend, a summit on Mt. Adams later this month, and at least one more camp among the trees and stars.

Write Handed

There was a time in my youth when I wanted to be an artist. I suppose it could be argued that I most certainly am one today (perhaps more so than a scientist), but my creative toolbox no longer contains the pen. I abandoned drawing long ago in pursuit of the musical canvas, one that decorates my personal gallery to this day. But at times this gallery is deaf to my acoustics and wishes for a painting outside of the sonic domain. A picture can indeed impress a thousand cliches, but a thousands cliches is at a loss to impress a single picture. For example, there is a mastery that allows a single drawing or painting, such as the Mosa Lisa, to pervade volumes of discourse for centuries. This is more than can be said about many books or works of music.

I don't have the talent, however, to impress an indelible image through the hand, although some talent (albeit to only a modest degree) has leaked into developing images through the lens. Drawing takes a certain preternatural command of the pen that may have more to do with chromosomes than with a waste basket full of attempt. And even those in ownership of such chromosomal fortune must employ diligent refinement. That said, I do think I had a spark of talent years ago, that with a little more flattery, could have smoldered into a brighter flame.

The images below are a selection of drawings that I recently rediscovered upon cleaning out my closet. This is a collection of a lost art, so to speak, most of which was created from the incomplete mind of an adolescent school boy. While they certainly don't feature a command of the pen, I think they do feature an incipient talent in translating the abstract to the actual. Alas, I may never again pick up a pen, perhaps for the better. But if my sonic gallery is ever in shambles, I know just the tool to try for repair.

My New Do-ing!

After four years of being a blogsmonaut, I thought it was about time for a makeover. I hope to tinker further with the template, including an updating photo stream using Picasa, so keep your eye out for further changes to The Astrosite.

d.J Presents: OceanLab - Sirens Of The Sea

My, my have I been busy lately. I just finished writing and submitting an American Heart Association predoctoral grant (5th grant I've written so far, with a 0-4 record), and I haven't slowed down the sciencing experimentations because 1) I needed preliminary data to bolster my grant, especially since I've only been working with this project for 6 months, and 2) I want to graduate -- now.

But in between paragraphs I worked to ease my mind with a mix featuring the lovely summer-laden soundscapes of OceanLab. All tracks are from OceanLab's (a.k.a. Above & Beyond) latest, fantastically poppy-warm album, "Sirens of the Sea". This was my first attempt at mixing trance, which was WAY more difficult than I expected, especially since I was mixing all tracks from the same artist (albeit from various remixers). My usual progressive house tracks are easier to mix, i think, because there are simply less melodies to weave together, most unlike "Sirens of the Sea".

Anyway, I didn't want to spend too much time on this, as I want to have something to listen to during my months among the summer breeze, which since my grant is now submitted, begin...NOW!

I hope you enjoy "Sirens Of The Sea" as much as I enjoyed making it. The mix is divided into two themes, a lower BPM "Daylight" as a simmer, and the higher BPM "Nightlight" to reach a balmy boil.

Free download: HERE

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My Debut Performance With A (Band)