Thursday, November 3, 2022

Playing Around*

 



It was a raised back bar, meaning I was sitting two feet higher in my chair with my guitar and the bar opposite was handling the lunchtime crowd two feet lower at Porkers Bar and grill.  Carna was the barmaid.  She invited me to play my music the day before when I was grazing there (good German food). 

Where I was set up is important to the story.  It was all so very strange.  Imagine the hole of my guitar was 8 ft from the faces of a couple, man and woman, doughty, I would be kind.  They stared at me for 20 songs.  Stared.  Didn't acknowledge any recognition of songs, wag a finger, maybe say "That was a good one."  Nothing.  Stared.  Sometimes bit into their Weiner schnitzel.

Lunchtime crowds come and go.  It's a hard sell I have learned.  In this process of basically being ignored while I rehearsed, actually, for an upcoming show I got flustered, just unplugged and left.  The prettiest girl in the bar said, "I liked some of your songs."  She had tattoos all over, and was the property of her man.  I walked right past the Robottrons that gawked at me without saying a word. Carna kind of turned on me, it seemed, I don't know. Two trips, I was out of there.

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Distractions.  Nothing but distractions.  Blinking lights.  Big screens, sharp video cuts and the digitized mechanical noise.  People have adapted to the digital sound.  They take orders from machines (Press 1 to proceed), they are entrained to the digital voice.

A singer with an acoustic guitar doesn't stand a chance.

I'm built on a aural tradition of listening to the human voice, in my case in tune with my guitar, hopefully. Doing such sends out sound waves, healing sound waves, into the cellular bodies of those around me.  The exchange of ideas, values, emotion belong in those sound waves.

Digital sound is mechanical noise based on I and O.  It truly does not register on an oscilloscope like analog or aural.  If you see a sine wave for digital music it a representation of what we expect to see. Actually, it's computer language.  And people have melded completely with it and are part of the global machine.

A singer with an acoustic guitar doesn't stand a chance.

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