Eight Years of Furniture Music

Eight years ago today my senior composition recital was held at Smith Recital Hall at San Diego State University. The concert included nine different works I had composed over four years at SDSU, and these works quite appropriately represented my creative output from 2003–2007. Strangely though, I quickly lost interest in the works after I graduated, and today I rarely share anything I’ve ever composed prior to 2008. There are however, a couple works I gladly continue to share and those are the two bits of muzak—or furniture music as Erik Satie would call it—I composed as intermission music for the recital, “Causal Friday,” and “Easy Street.” These two tracks together have the most hits of all time on my soundcloud page (making them the most popular music I’ve ever written!), and one has even been included as on-hold music in an Israeli comedy short.

I eventually published the tracks as the two-track album Waitin’ Around on soundcloud, and the songs remain near and dear to me. There’s something fascinating about music that is not meant to be heard. Muzak is truly one of my guilty pleasures, and a my not-so-greatest secret is that I would love a regular job composing on-hold music for all those people, waiting around, on hold.

Blurred Lines: The Final Chapter (I hope)

In the light of the recent verdict regarding Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke’s 2013 hit, “Blurred Lines,” there has been a several articles positing the doomed future of music now that someone was found infringing upon another person’s material. Continue reading

“Vanishing Scarcity” at NABIG 2015

On Sunday March 1, I had the opportunity to present at the North American Basic Income Guarantee Congress (NABIG) on the issue of arts, technology, and basic income. Basic income is a form of social security in which every person, regardless of their wealth, health, or any other distinction, is given a certain amount of money regularly (once a month is the usual interval mentioned). Suffice to say this is a radical idea and currently no government or jurisdiction in the world awards a basic income to their citizens (Alaska has something similar with the Alaska Permanent Fund, and Brazil has the plans to enact a basic income). A basic income needs to meet the basic survival needs of an individual—enough to pay their food, shelter, and clothing costs—and nothing else. It is only there to ensure the survival of the individual. Continue reading