"To most people, I'm a stranger. Say out of the 7 or so billion people on earth, I'm a stranger to 6,999,999,821 of them. Makes me a pretty strange dude." -- Ogle B Straight
I FEEL LIKE I need to address this from time to time. It’s somewhat strange creating these episodes and putting them out online. I don’t always know what I’m doing, but if I didn’t spend a little time each week playing and recording something, I wouldn’t get to. . .I’ve got to have a way I can check up on myself and analyze what I’m doing and see if it’s going anywhere. The real trouble spot is that it’s easy to find the flaws, the inconsistencies, the times where I’m trying to get to something that might be good, but I also want it to be good and sometimes that want gets in the way and things start to sound. . .not the way I want them too.
It’s like that with the playing. It’s like that with this additional commentary. It can be like that just in life. In normal conversations. You ever tell a joke and mess it up completely? Like before you even get to the punchline? You’re trying to set it up and you fumble through some of the details. You try to restart and say, “No wait, hold up, it was a marmoset. A marmoset not a 2000 pound gorilla.” And you can’t even go on. You lose interest before the people you’re telling it to, so they’re still hanging on hoping you can at least get through it. That’s I how feel with this podcast sometimes. Actually, deep down I would still feel good at the end of the day if that’s where this was at. If you’re on the other end listening, hoping I’ll finish and just get to the music. I’d be alright with that.
It really depends on the music with how much I talk. How I’m kind of doing it now - probably have been for at least 5 episodes - is I’ll play and record the chunk of music, then I’ll open the track on the computer. I’ll quickly peruse through it. I have just played it so I should remember some key moments that I liked or want to check back on. I’ll kind of pop through it listening to a few spots every couple of minutes. If something sticks out I’ll note it and I’ll pretty much make all the temporary fade in and fade out points. When I do the recorded listen back those fades could change but for the most part I try to stick to it. It gives me durations of time that I then have to fill with stories or whatever. I find that to be a huge challenge and for the most part I like trying to do it. Through an episode - a 30 min period - I feel like I can go from trying to goof around and even get absurd to feeling like I want to be real and get to some truths. Listening back to it when I’m mixing. . .sometimes it gets strange because that’s when I can come around to thoughts of whether I like it or not. This particular podcast. Do I mean everything I’ve said? That comes up a lot and the answer is no. I don’t not mean everything, it’s just that I’m talking, I’m speaking and thinking - it’s all going by pretty fast and I’m trying to be conscious of how it fits with the music.
The worst part is that as I’m saying all of this, it starts to sound like I’m complaining and I can say for absolute real that I treasure the fact that I can even do this experiment. I do have a theory that I will discover something great through all of this. And I don’t go through all of this self evaluation during the music part. I’m just working to get more knowledge so I can do and say more with that. If I can get my speaking voice, that portion of things to feel the same way, it may all start to work together. It may become something.
HERE’S A WEIRD story about us. We’ve never met. You are probably not real. If you are, then you are not the exact person that I’m speaking to right now. You are just intercepting this message. But you, the person I mean, are someone I will never meet. In fact, if you are hearing this, then I no longer exist. I change often. I have never died but most pieces of me have drifted off and become bits of other things, other organisms, even other people. I saw a photo of myself from not too long ago. Probably several years. Surprisingly it resembled me, but it was not. It had memories that I’ve forgotten. It had hopes that never came true. It’s gone and I’m here. I’m recording this message to attempt to reach a ghost, a ghost for me but to you a real thing. See, I’m just imagining you and I do think that one day you’ll be real, but with time being what it is, we’ll never have the chance to see...to communicate...to even recognize...We’ll just have to keep imagining in opposite directions and make the connections...ourselves.
QUIBBELDEEBLANKS (ph.) an expression one uses when they work on something for a while and then they realize that all of it might be shit.
On February 21, this year would be 2015, there will be a live performance of music created by Karsh McCabe and Ogle B Straight. Their collaborations can only happen in brief circumstances like a weekend where the northern and eastern parts of the country (U.S.) are covered in snow. People are under duress. It’s cold, it’s bleak, dare I say . . . it’s pretty grim. But, grim to the brim? NO. Because it’s a weekend just like this where Karsh and Ogle B will come together and ‘Check the Stee’. They will determine whether they have conquered all of their fears. And one can only predict that they will play the following:
She Likes to Tinop
The Blenzian
Phils/Pads
Pieces
Tinop NaNinop
What Goes’ On [OBS Solo]
Go Baby Go [OBS Solo]
Once Uninhabited
Cosmos
There Was a Boy
Solar System Drag
The Dub
Journey
Editor’s Note: They did play this exactly with the following exceptions:
Karsh joined Ogle B on ‘What Goes On’
They did not play a new duotronic stee of ‘Once Uninhabited’
They did not play ‘Cosmos’
‘Solar System Drag’ segued into ‘Robert Walters’ which segued into ‘The Dub’
They defeated fears, maybe not conquered, maybe created new ones. Only futures can tell.