Sound Triggered Brain

Coheed and Cambria's In keeping Secrets of Silent Earth 3. from In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth 3

This Song is from Coheed and Cambria's second album, it released during the summer of my eighth grade year. I'd been listening to them a lot when the were still sort of unknown.

I remember my friend Derek had bought the CD and he showed me this song one day while we played badmittin. (Don't judge me, it's a sweet game.) It was the most awesome game of badmittin I had ever played. He had two brand new rackets, a black one and a gun metal one. Naturally I chose gun metal. We had been playing Badmittin in gym class for a while so I was used to the feel, but this racket was different, it was lighter but felt more stable all the while, It looked as though it were very well made, It had a brown leather handle which felt good in my hands.

When we started playing to the music the game seemed to have fallowed it. It was very slow at first and quite relaxed but then morphed into a very competitive almost war like game. And much like the song, the game became very intense. Spikes, lofters , side arms, and speeders. The game eventually ended and everything relaxed again. Derek and I spent most of that summer hanging out together. He and I remain best friends to this day. Every time I hear this song I think of Derek, and the times we had that summer.




Tool's Lateralus from Lateralus

I've liked Tool since I can remember, and this song to me is the pinnacle of their glory. Each of their albums embody a different emotion. From Disgusted, Humorous, Pessimistic, Optimistic, and Dogmatic. This is the Optimistic Album.

When I first started listening to Tool this was their most recent album, so this song was probably the first of Tool's work that I had heard, I've always been very big into poetry as well as music since I am a classical musician as well as a contemporary one. When I first started listening to Tool I loved the lyrics, they really spoke to me with meanings that were really pertinent to my life. Particularly the lyric "Over thinking, over analyzing separate the body from the mind." I liked Tool for a long time and then sort of fell away from them. I have revisited them recently and have developed a new love for them in a new way.

Through my musical training In theory and technique I've come to love the way this song lives it's message. it starts as one melody, almost as though a heartbeat, then it begins to mature rapidly through adding different instrumentation and the enhancement of vocal tone. It continues to spiral upward and mature through its climax and then falls out. The lyrics do the same. they go from "black and white are all I see in my infancy, red and yellow then came to be;" to "Spiral out, keep going, spiral out, keep going."

As my skill in music had evolved so had the complexity of the song that embodies evolution. It had evolved into a new song just as I had evolved.



Thursday's Steps Ascending from War All the Time.

Though I'm not a big fan of this type of music I've always loved this band, for as long as I've had a CD player I've listened to their music. I don't know where I first heard them. But they're an "Emo," band from New Jersey. The song is about trying to say goodbye to someone you've lost, particularly to guns.

DISCLAIMER: The event that inspired this writing is true and should not be looked upon with any pity, view it simply as a writing.

April 15th 1997 my father committed suicide by shooting himself through the his left side into his heart. He was an excellent father, attorney, and a hard worker.

I inherited the gun that my father committed suicide with. It's a Ruger KP90, it's aluminum and is mostly coated in polished chrome, it fires a .45 caliber round and has an eight round clip. I'm extremely accurate with it and it's still my favorite gun to shoot, however Ironic, morbid, or strange it may be. (I recognize that that is the case, I just don't think about it.) This gun is the only possession that I have that has a memory tied to my father. Every time I touch It I think of him.

This song, about a boy that was shot has lyrics that really match up with how I feel about my father as well as the gun. "Freeze the frame between the gunshot and the hole it makes, the spinning bullet hangs in the middle. There's no way to stop it, it will surely hit the mark." And the repeated use of the words "out of reach." This song always reminds my of my father, every time I listen to it, as well as the gun that reminds me in turn of my father.

Most of all when I hear this song, or clutch that Ruger, I think of the way that my fathers suicide impacted me positively. I would be a very different person today if he hadn't.

Rest in Peace John Arthur Rodenburg.



Modest Mouse's Bankrupt on Selling from The Lonesome Crowded West.

This Song was the very first song I ever learned how to play on the guitar. Though the message is the same as a lot of songs, which is that being genuine is the way to be happy. thats not why I love the song.

My brother is the spitting image of my father he begins to look more and more like him each year. He's about 22 now, an athletically built ectomorph with big lips and a smile just like mine. He's got unmatched dexterity, and is incredibly logical and intelligent. Though he's a sad fellow, because he lacks emotional connection. He and I have been great friends, rivals, and even enemies since we've been around. It sort of fluctuates between the three. After my father had died I looked up to Zach as well as other older males in my life as sorts of father figures as children often do. He played this song all the time, I never got tired of hearing it. I hadn't even heard the real song, only my brother play/singing it. I thought he wrote it.

I had him teach me this song one day and now I play it all the time, I even wrote a harmony part to it so that we can sing/play it at the same time (and we have at a few public occasions.) I have no idea what it means to him. But to me this song is all about him. Intelligently written, rough around the edges and melancholy as hell.



Radiohead's Fake Plastic Trees from The Bends.

Radiohead has been one of my favorite artists since I was in seventh grade. This song was the very first song I ever performed at a coffee house in my hometown of Council Bluffs Iowa. I can still remember how clammy and cold my hands were clutching my John Lennon 1965 Casino Epiphone. It wasn't actually my guitar, but my uncle Aaron's guitar that he had let me barrow long term to learn how to play. It had a very sweet sound, it resonated very well, almost as well as any acoustic guitar. Though it did have an amp outlet, which I jacked into and played often.

Playing this song is really coincidental at this time because being that this song is about falling in love with an inanimate object or something unreal. In this case I created music that I love, and subsequently developed feelings for making music, and therefor my guitar.



The Mars Volta's Inertiatic ESP off of De-Loused in the Comatorium

I heard this song at first at the beginning of my Junior year I always thought that this song seemed to bring about confusion almost as a by product of listening to it.

This song bombards your senses with synth, bass, guitar, drums, and enhanced voice. Each bombarding or destroying your senses to the point where you can no longer dissect the music. The synth both plays re-enforcing chords, as well as creating another guitar part at times. The bass, plays a steady chord re-enforcement to the beat of the drums. The Drums go nuts during this song whenever the crazy chorus is raging the drums accent and accompany the insanity through use of time in 3, and syncopated patterns. The guitar manages to create an incredibly confusing counter melody to the warped vocal line that suggests confusion through it's lyrics. "Now I'm lo-host, now I'm lo-ha-ha-ha-host."

Many things in my life during the time I listened to this song were confusing, school, relationships, time, job, and especially home. This song is meant to be confusing and resembles quite well all of the different aspects of confusion that a person can experience just through audio perception. This mirrors quite well all of the forms of confusion a person can experience about any given subject, or multiple subjects.



Deftones' My Own Summer off of Around the Fur

This Song by the Deftones was the closing song for the band I was a part of my senior year of high school. I had been a fan of the Deftones for a short time before we played it, since then I've grown to really love them.

This song suggests a lot of power and confidence. A dethroning of an oppressive power. The words "Cloud come shove the sun aside," suggests a sort of desire to combat the oppression of whatever the sun represents, all the while the main riff has been emboldened from single notes into chords. Then during the bridge the song seems to evolve into a serene or glass-like surface, as though all is right.

Once I performed this song I felt as though power had been transfered to me from some other place I became supremely confident in my abilities as well as who I was every time I sang it. And with startling speed, developed a reputation as being confident, and calculated. I had destroyed the socially inept me and created one that had a reputation to precede it in that setting.



Imogen Heap's Hide and Seek off of Speak for Yourself.

This song was first shown to me by my girlfriend whom I've been with for four and a half years. She's a huge fan of European music, and Imogen Heap is a European superstar.

My girlfriend's name is Kristin, and like this song she's a very subtle person. She's very short and petite. She has a more round face with green eyes, mahogany hair and very pale skin. She manages to bring out the best in me always. Whenever I need to make a decision and I go against what she suggests it always turns out to bite me, when I listen to her things turn out right.

This song always reminds me of Kristin in that, like her it suggests a deeper understanding of things in life. This song refers to unveiling lies and other misleading things. It's harmonies are very tight and smooth in their progression, while building to a point of release which resembles a sudden clarity and understanding. All in all it resembles Kristin very much.

Worst video, EVER!!!

A quick note to whoever reads this: You MUST watch the entire video.

This video by Bonnie Tyler is quite possibly the best and worst video of all time it has everything for everyone, battle scenes, swimmers, ninjas, flying alter boys, psychotic people of every sort, winged crazy men, football players, dancing diaper men, and last but certainly not least, greasers.

I find this video absurd for the above reasons but also because our protagonist Bonnie Tyler often appears to be wearing very fine sheets, combined with her hedgehog-esque quaff we have a formidable foe to overcome in terms of taking a video seriously. The dramatic use of sheets juxtaposed in front of open doors to the journey being made by our protagonist through all the various walks of life. And let's not forget about the tremendously overdone effects to the eyes in this video, whatever it may mean, whether it's a reference to the lyric "bright eyes," or if it's some sort of symbol designed to demonstrate that when your heart eclipses you loss sight of who you are or something of that nature.

However let's not forget that this all could be taken as brilliant humor, the moment I watched the alter boy take flight I knew that we might possibly have the most genius comedic video in the entire world (Exaggeration). Nonetheless the video is actually worth something in the realm of entertainment for me because it's so bad. If it doesn't being a smile to your face, I don't know what will

This is The Greatest Lie by Circa Survive. This is by far my favorite band as of late, because simply put I think their instrumentals in combination with their vocalist is a perfect match, they change time signatures to fit the text of a song and go nuts in concert. Currently they are on tour with Thrice and Pelican, two more very good bands.

For some reason every time I listen to this song I seem to find one more really cool musical moment that's hidden in the layers that make it up. There's so much counterpoint
in this song it's almost hard to believe. if you listened to each part individually or listened to one and stacked the rest you would have what would seem like a very well written drum solo, groovy bass solo, progressive guitar solo, and a voice part that you might think would never mesh together. This is the primary reason why I love this band, they are considered to be what's called a Mathematical Progressive band. Which refers to the counterpoint involved in their music as well as their frequency of meter change. They may be in a simple quadruple meter and then switch to an irregular compound meter for only a few seconds. This can be seen in the chorus of this song in both the drum and guitar parts.

I have been writing music both for voice and guitar with the use of classical theory as well as guitar technique for about 2 years. And I still can't manage to understand how the guitar parts for this band are written. They are so unique that I just can't get enough of them. It's safe to say however that even though I'm a vocal major I don't really care about vocals when It comes to band. In this video the lead singer pushes himself sharp on several occasions. As well as having the voice of what seems like a 13 year old boy. But the passion with which he sings makes all of those things disappear for me. The lyrics to this song also have a very deep personal meaning and relation to my life. But that will be left for another day. Overall I think it's very safe to say that this is an incredibly talented band, thank whatever deity there may be that the record companies haven't taken them with their icy claws.

Thoughts

I sometimes wonder whether or not I might be crazy, I always have the strangest stuff pop into my head. And since I've been told that my family has a history of mental illness, I sometimes wonder. Though I'm sure that if I had anything other than a hefty case of Attention Deficit Disorder some sort of symptom would have shown itself by now. In any case all suspicions and worries aside I will tell you what my strange conversation was.

I few days ago I was asked the question of what I thought would be the worst way to die, as well as which would be the best, a strange and morbid question. But I'm no one to turn down any sort of discussion of a philosophical nature. As I thought of what would be the worst way to die, many different emotions popped into my head. PAIN, SUFFERING, SURPRISE, anticipation, loneliness, regret. "Which of these would be the worst?" I've always had a huge tolerance for pain, it might be because I've been a martial artist since I was 6, or because I've seen a lot of pain in my days elsewhere, who really cares, I don't think I'm afraid of that. As a matter of fact, none of those details of death really bother me. with the exception of surprise. It's a strange thing, most of the people I've talked to about this since then have said they'd like to just die suddenly, in their sleep would be the best way. I think that that would be the worst. As someone who lost a father very suddenly I'd say the idea is very selfish because it hits the family harder. I feel as though dying, separated from the ones who hold dear suddenly would be the worst way to go.

On the flip side of that I think the best way to go would be to drown. Which is something that most people said would be the worst way, And I realize It contradicts what I said in the previous paragraph because you can't really know if you're going to drown but my argument is pretty good. You're brain releases a chemical called DMT naturally, this chemical is commonly regarded as the cause of your life flashing before your eyes, interactions with deities, and life changing experiences or philosophies associated with death. Basically it makes you hallucinate like crazy. And drowning is a unique way to die because of the human body's reaction to water. Humans have what is called a mammalian diving reflex, which slows down oxygen use while submerged, as well, when water is inhaled or swallowed suddenly you experience a laryngospasm.
These two things in combination are said to release a massive amount of DMT to the brain causing a sense of euphoria and warmth, you relax and let go. That's my conclusion.

Enough of this dreary talk it's time for some entertainment.




This is Tony Vs. Paul, an excellent stop motion video that has an awesome song!