The Last Demo Before a Glass Entity Left a Kraytr in Seattle
(written on Jan 1st, 2005)
 
 
            While living in Seattle, I spent a large amount of my free time visiting with a local musician. There were periods where I would stay at his house for days or even weeks at a time before eventually going home. Like most musicians, his actions resembled those of an ostrich; head buried deep in the sand, oblivious to the world and only focused on one thing, which was of course his music. This inevitably leads to a daily neglect of typical human activity, and also creates a unique and sometimes strange living environment that surrounds the musician. His house, for example, although large and appearing to be comfortable from the outside, had little to no furniture in any of the dozen or so rooms that made up its interior. Absolutely no couches either. This meant that having guests over for the night almost always ended in a bare living room full of crumpled fleshy piles, drawn securely to the floor by the forces of gravity.
            Waking up on a hard wood floor with no pillow or blanket is almost as bad as going to sleep on a hard wood floor with no pillow or blanket. Although my maternal father is a man named Dodds who lives in West Seattle, my real father is a twenty your old mad-man musician who calls himself Kraytr and resides in a large frat-like house in the University District. Or did reside there. I spent most of my waking adolescence by his side, listening to and learning from him, as he manipulated sounds in this physical world.
            Sitting on the spacious front porch that faced the street, Kraytr, his girlfriend Jennifer, and I were constantly entertained by the herds of drunken frat-boys and college kids that roamed the University District until the sun came up. The noises emitted from these creatures were so strange in nature, tone, and pitch that it was hard to even consider these sounds as speech at times. Kraytr would comment on how one person's accent would be a great sample, or explain to us his want to hide recording devices somewhere in the yard to capture late-night audio. Listening to him talk about his ideas, you could easily get the notion that he intended to create music by sampling and manipulating as much 'real' sound as he could.
            A minidisc player/recorder that I owned and never used, eventually got donated to Kraytr in hopes that it would help him in his pursuit for real-life samples. We would ride the Metro buses together, Kraytr with his minidisc, and I with my camera. He was actually quite tricky, plugging headphones into the microphone jack, and resting them around his neck so that he could secretly record conversations on the bus. Sometimes he would even provoke people to start talking about something that interested him, like record stores or musical genres. Anything that could become a great sample in his mind, he captured with glee, and ran home to pick it apart, distort it, and eventually reassemble it to create a musical track.
            After being around him, I started to think differently. I began asking more questions when I heard something new. Not questions like 'who is this?', or 'where is this artist from?', but more along the lines of 'where do you think the artist sampled that from?'. Kraytr was always ready with an answer, maybe not always a correct answer, but he did the best he could. There were times when we would walk into an establishment, music playing in the background on a speaker system rigged all over the building, and he could not only pick out the song and artist immediately, but also relate to you where the voice and instrument samples were originally taken from.
            These gifts or talents that Kraytr seemed to be born with quickly began to arouse my curiosity, wondering at times if his childhood was a mixture of vinyl brunches and musical-trivia picnics. How had he accumulated so much knowledge over the short time he had been alive? I knew that he did not spend very much time reading, or at least that I saw. And he definitely wasn't getting it from the internet, being an anti-web personality as he is. So where exactly is it that artists or musicians (or any creators or craftsmen for that matter) get their knowledge from? Where was this invisible intellectual liquid that they soaked up in a method very similar to a sponge coming from?
            Considering the topic further, and elaborating on the sponge metaphor, I realized that maybe other individuals were leaking information. All Kraytr had to do was act like a sponge and clean up the spill. Is it possible that every time he was in the presence of a fellow musician he soaked up every little piece of information they presented to him? Is it possible that he did this when listening to recordings too? If so, this brings up another question; with what and how does one filter this avalanche of information?
            When asked about such topics, Kraytr would always reply with the same answers. Where do you get your information and knowledge from, I would ask. He'd pause, considering the inquiry as he took a long drag from an Old Gold cigarette, and then exhale a cloud of smoke and the same brief response as always: "I don't know... It's just there, in my head." At first this would always confuse and aggravate me. He must know where it comes from, I would convince myself. But maybe it's true, maybe all artists and creators just build upon and expand their minds without even knowing it. It might also be true that by the time they stop to consider it, they really can't remember where it was all coming from. I like to consider it as some strange type of subconscious (or unconscious) education.
            This leads me to another question; is it beneficial to sleep in class? Although this is asked in a humorous and sarcastic manner, it does seem to have a slight ray of logic being shined upon it. Can we really learn, and influence ourselves even while we sleep? Could a musician listen to a Mozart symphony while dreaming and awake with a new understanding of the way classical music manipulation works? If so, then I'm packing a sleeping bag for school tomorrow! Good night all, I've got a class to sleep through...