music. religion. catharsis.
originally written february 2022, lightly edited for content/context and reposted july 2023
ln february 26, 2002, the album ruins by infinite singularity quietly entered to dallas/fort worth, and later global, music scene. the production was primitive, with high-pitched, tinny guitars, booming bass, dynamic drums that could have used a metronome, more than occasional ambient keyboards, and deep chorus-swelling vocals that would have benefited from some serious pitch fix in parts. the reviews were mixed. it was my first solo album, 20 years ago today, and it sold, fairly well for an underground effort with the aforementioned limitations, without my ever playing a live show. i still have copies left, and they’re available while they last in commemoration of the more than 20 years since that rather humble beginning.
i have long felt deeply ambivalent about music because it was such a part of my life then. there was a sense that it was something i slowly sacrificed for the sake of other pursuits, but i long felt this nagging sense of inadequacy, that i had failed to achieve my artistic goals. that first album took almost two years to get off the ground and i spent another decade after it pursuing a music career in earnest, recording two more solo albums—a sequel to that first infinite singularity concept album called silence in 2004 and a boozy twenty-something solo acoustic album called moderation in 2009 (as well as other acoustic works to be re-released at a future date). i fronted a couple of bands, notably according 2 legend back in fort worth, texas, played in a few others, helped manage a live music venue, ran shows and performed solo, for many years. it came to an abrupt and undignified end in the spring of 2012, even though it took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that it was over.
was it ever really over, though? is it over? i recorded a third infinite singularity album, monsters, in 2018-2019 while still living in kansas, but never released it other than on youtube (and it could use some serious mastering if i were to make it commercially available). other than a few karaoke bars, i haven’t performed in front of an audience since a brief stint of busking back in 2017. so why now?
songwriting-wise, when including all the instrumentals recorded in kansas under the moniker 12 keys, i was actually more prolific after quitting because i stopped caring about what others thought about me or wanted me to do and started focusing, once more, on the craft itself. it took a long time to realize that the sense of failure was produced by losing sight of what i was doing and why. that first album, and the other musical endeavors i pursued both before and since (i’ve been playing music for over 30 years now in total) do not fit into some coherent template when i think of them in terms of consistently failing to “make it” (whatever that means). music to me is more like a religious impulse, a channel through which to connect deep and strong emotion to the universe as it profoundly is, and to a sense of ultimate purpose—at worst, it arises out of an impulse to temporarily liberate myself from apparent absurdity. music is my anti-nihilism. that i feel like i have failed reflects the fact that i have not stayed true to this central reason for picking it up in the first place.
for me, music is best expressed when consciously separate from worldly things. i do not do it to gain profit or personal recognition, and in fact i scorn these goals in relation to music. but there is a tension: i do need money, because making music is notoriously expensive, and having been poor my whole life, this was always a site of conflict. i reject the cult of the “star” and its attendant frippery; i never wanted to be one and am unwilling to worship at the altar of another. i also do not make music because it is “fun” or because i think it will make me “happy”: fun implies a sense of play or frivolity that turns my stomach when i think of it in relation to music; happiness is vapid and trivial when pursued as a goal, rather than experienced as a byproduct of meeting a goal. i remember days now long past when “party” was a verb; as a wayward twenty-something it was nice to have lots of friends for a change, and i had a good time for what it’s worth, but the part of me from which music really comes sees that as a distraction at best, and a grotesque waste at worst.
i did not learn to play instruments because of any of these reasons, and i never set out to make music for any of them either. the trouble is that i often couldn’t articulate the reasons i did play, to friends or family or even fellow musicians, and so i got sucked into the heteronomous justifications i found around me. music is neither a vehicle for expressing a specific religion, nor is it a “religion” to me, with rites or rituals or worship; though i respect religion, am utterly fascinated by it, and support people’s right to practice as they see fit (provided they don’t inflict it on me or unwilling others), i am not a religious person. nor is it “spiritual” in some vague half-baked mystical sense. through music i feel i can achieve something analogous to a religious sense or experience, though i do not personally seek or find such a sense or experience in religion.
looking back, i think those first two albums best exemplified this, and i have found this sense only in fragmentary moments in the interim. is this just the declinist bias of a nostalgic man approaching middle age—that i lost something along the way in terms of music? i’m going to test this realization the only way i can, by making the time to play again, to reconnect with this sense, to reach deep and sacrifice, to find a bit of time here and there to pursue music, not the way i used to or could have, but the way i feel i should. i am sure it will be weird, as it was before, maybe more so.
i got the amps working again, dusted off the keyboards, plugged in the PA and hooked up the computer. the drums are within reach and the mixer is warming up. now to see whether anything truly cathartic happens.
image: infinite singularity: ruins, © 2002, stardust arts publishing co.
