11. Trail of the Pumpkin Stones

You ascend carefully, one rickety wooden stair at a time.

Each plank welcomes your footstep by drooping in the middle — exactly how a walkway in mid-air shouldn’t.

Criss-crossing logs support the trail here. They form a scaffold, as if propping up a roller coaster that wanders, town to town, broken down and re-assembled slapdash by a gang of hooligans so ragtag, even their membership rules are improvisatory.

The path floats a dizzying height, spanning a steep hypotenuse, from boulders far below to a cliff’s edge ahead. When you pause, the whole structure sways like tall reeds in a seaside breeze. (The actual air, stoic and unmoved, observes with eyebrows raised.)

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Clambering past the final wooden posts you emerge from precarious incline onto a flat expanse of interconnected tabletop mountains — covered, adorably, by a field of lumpy stones. Forest punctuates the far horizon, where your trail leads.

You notice a tall figure next to the path, tinkering with a tower-shaped device: perched on wheels and decked out in royal-blue fur. Her straw hat tips upward as she spots your arrival, then veers sideways to usher you into joining her preoccupation.

“Come — help me open up this Love Drone on the fritz.” Her voice, spoken with a melodious tempo, carries clearly across pebbled plains.

[Steady the contraption with a bear hug (lest it roll away) for the Field Researcher to expose inner machinery behind a fuzzy side-panel] —

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“I customized this one to collect memories further back, from about 500-million years ago. These newer models pipe in live performances from who knows where,” she furrows, then adds, “better than keeping a musician stuffed inside, eh?”

Entangled gears and glass tubes seem to spill out, whirring and glowing something spectacular.

“What is it showing now, can you check the latest capture?”

[Inspect a display, recessed into the side of the machine opposite the Researcher] —

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// Side B //

Welcome to Campfire Sparks . . . and thanks for tuning in — that was “the love drone”, recorded in 2013 right after moving to Brooklyn. I’d just finished school and for three months my main instrument was a Rhodes Mark II; that period was the closest I’ve ever gotten to living minimally, never to be repeated ||:

Weeks later, “Stranded Awake” appeared out of this same instrument, different in style but under the umbrella of a shared approach¹. Back then I understood the concept of playing jazz standards on stage and studio, but it took many years of conversations², travels, . . .

. . . and a worldwide pandemic before I could wrap my head around publishing anything of my own. Seven years elapsed for Travel Poems . Chapter 1 . Secret towns³ (including “Stranded Awake”) to peek its alien antennae⁴ out into the world. Then another three years, for me to begin talking about what the songs mean to me:

A personal tale told in 10 morsels: behind the music, the soundscapes for this track, and a bit of history about the Rhodes and its fascinating inventor.

I find this journey fascinating, because it’s accelerating 🎢

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Troy Carter: The Prince Vault is this legendary thing. So my first visit to Paisley, of course the first place that I wanted to go was to— to see the vault. It’s literally a vault. (LAUGH) It’s a room full of shelves floor to ceiling, with tapes. You have recorded music. A video archive. Then you have a written archive. You know, just looking at the penmanship, the drawings that he would do.

60 Minutes interview from 2021

It’s beyond wonderful that Prince left this specific vault. Given that vaults are already exciting from the get-go! Many of us have our own vaults, don’t we? Plus our own ideas for what we’d like to happen with them. (Do you?)

Each week roughly 10 compositions are added to the music wing of the Pan Vault. Creative availability has increased over the years, and so factory production continues apace, faster and faster. But where do they end up? Here we plop into key considerations differing from Prince’s concept:

1. I want the music to be mingling in open air — published — rather than puttering around under the desert inside a cave of wonders.

2. 80% of the songs need polishing; 50% of those require a few hours each to become a Finished Song; 10% of those need weeks of experimentation, maturation, and (sometimes) lyrics co-evolving, to become a Finished Song.

Basically: less vault, more greenhouse.

Therefore “How do I let this music outside, without interrupting the existing flow of new ideas?” is the latest puzzle to ponder (and I’m totally turning to you for inspiration).

My most radical idea is to publish everything — thousands of vaulted recordings along with the stream of new arrivals — as tokens on decentralized databases, to facilitate their resale while provenance tracks itself, as a way of helping “what’s most interesting” crowdsource its way to the surface. Copyright still holds if need be; I could then return later with a wheelbarrow to collect the audibly ripened pieces for further development, while triggering compensation for those who’ve assisted with curation.

It’s an intriguing idea. I think the act of creating and trusting such a system would carry symbolic weight and express my belief that the process of art is art itself. But there’s at least one fatal flaw — chiefly, interference with the creative process, because #2 above must be well-tended, in-house, before the delivery trucks arrive for morning pick-up.

Which brings us to another scary idea that I constantly find drifting around like phosphenes: publish with rapidity and do the damn gardening. Should I accelerate towards “daily”; and what would be the cost?

Has anyone ’round the campfire dealt with these issues? If you’ve got answers, or should a curious brainstorm strike you while you’re strolling, kindly enclose it with your reply to this letter :)

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Two music recs this week!

Sufjan Stevens, Timo Andres, Conor Hanick - “Mnemosyne”, from the album Reflections — just shy of a ¾-world away from last issue’s Side B:

Warpaint - “Altar”, from the album Radiate Like This:

1. “improvisational polyrhythmic melodic ambient” — represent!

2. my immense gratitude to Jay, Claudia, Yen, Sophie, Gaby, Emma, Leah, Brian, Virgil, Melanie, Michelle, Josephine, and other lovelies I’m surely forgetting

3. “pumpkins” is the coupon code for you, dear listener, to purchase anything from my Bandcamp, for 30% off until mid-month. (You’re also cordially invited to buy on October 6th, the holiday called “Bandcamp Friday” where the platform passes their cut of sales back to all the artists 🎃)

4. filed under “jazz-adjacent instrumental snippets with narrative soundscapes” at your neighborhood Tower Records