Tune to Sixty Hurts

A band of musicians should tune to whatever their power source is.  Those lucky enough to play off of solar batteries have the luxury of truly free music because their power is DC, and has no tonal implication at all.  But the bulk of rock bands use amps powered by the wall, which in america, resonates at sixty hertz.  Hertz is a homophone with hurts, and it is ironic because the frequency of sixty hertz is the most lethal for electricity.  Also confer with the argument, stated in TIMARATERIALS, that Fox Strangways, when he transcribed the musics of tribal peoples into hertz and cents, that he hurt them by setting a fixed tone to their music. 

Rock musicians have two decisions: just stand up there on stage rocking away ignorant of this massive buzzing tone that is irrelevant to their music, or they can make it relevant, and in so doing, harness the power of all our american dynamos, the dams and nuclear plants that spin them at this giant frequency sixty hurts. 

My Rock band, the Gongs, did tune to sixty hurts at one point, with our primitive string "guys", in a seven tone equal tempered scale.  We also had a drum machine, called "the man with the red steam," that I would tune the oscillators of to harmonize with sixty hurts.  That drum machine, "the man with the red steam," has gone into hiding at D.L.'s house, and i am left with no machine.  But lo, i have changed that, and brought this drum machine back under the name "Plumbutter".  The only other parts of the Gongs equation, are a chakhe, a long slide string, and guys, the simple seventet tars.  Then I could call up the members of that band, in New York, Oakland, and somewhere in Ohio, and get back together as middle agers w/w/o babies.

In personal news, I am working on a program that recreates some of the feel of previous solo records "The Sound of Doves in a Cave" and "Luteus".  This program mixes evenly computer music and analog synthesis.  I have always explored this dialectic by putting representative pieces side by side on vinyl. 

The computer music is composed in SuperCollider 2, on Macintosh OS Nine.  The pieces mostly are about modelling some botanical concept, such as various mulberry trees, or a pawpaw plant through the seasons.  The analog pieces will be solo explorations on the Plumbutter, based loosely on the theme of "Polychlorinated Biphenyls".  Any of these pieces have arbitrary tones, like the Solar Battery Musician, generated by computer music or analog modules equally.  These arbitrary tones, synthesized, are then mimiced by mine own vocal cords and also a chakhe, a solo long string bluesy slidey instrument.  This time around, I will subcontract the chakhe work to my musical friend, Carson.

Also, some lullabies that I sang to my baby when he was really small, vocal improvisations.  And speaking of my baby, I do need to put Spiderman 67 through the Cocoquantus.