I’ll be playing in Mr. Pacman again on Friday, March 11 at The Syntax Physics Opera!

It’s the Magic Cyclop’s Sweet Sixteen Anniversary Party, or something grandiose like that.  There will be some special guests from some of Denver’s more popular bands (Munly, Slim Cessna, Snake Snake Rattle Rattle, Kip Winger, etc.) paying homage to the man, the machine, the air guitarist extra-ordinary and lover of all things Funko: The Magic Cyclops!

If you’ve never checked out Maharajapuram Santhanam’s interpretations of Dikshitar’s Krithis then you’re missing out!

My distant relative, Kyle Mabson puts out a compilation of artists covering some of the top tracks of the previous year. It came out this morning. The styles range from straight ‘underground’ laptop dance music to noise to casio core to some amusing and inventive remixes. My personal favorites are Simon Soo’s “Good for You”, Treasure Mammal’s “It’s a Fucking Tuna Phish Bro!”, Margot Pauline’s “Cheerleader” and the one that blew my mind, Greenday With Reverb’s “beeswax is GOOD FOR YOUr dreads”.

Take a listen here….

http://mabsonenterprises.bandcamp.com/album/2015-what-a-rush-ooo-boy

I was never very good at the Choose Your Own Adventure books. I loved them as a young reader but I think I loved the concept more than the end product.

I owned two as a child. One I had got new, another at a garage sale and had checked out most of the rest that the Wilmot Library (our local library) had.

Once read through, I would backtrack through all of the other story lines. Searching for that thread that I had missed leading to, perhaps a more exciting conclusion or a gruesome death. Sadly, this never took long and then I knew all of the secrets of the book and my two copies sat on my bookshelf for years in the same spot.

Years later I picked up the books again, getting hooked on the concept again. Choosing your own adventure is an exciting notion in a novel but quickly into the rereads, I stopped.

And it was then that I discovered why I truly didn’t like those books. I understood the core of the feelings, the adventures were kind of boring.

Almost all of the books followed some unspoken writing trope: a haunting, discovering an ancient city, mummies, werewolves…..there was nothing mysterious about these settings. By ten or eleven I had read pretty much everything I could get my hands on about these subjects and it seems so had the authors of the Choose Your Own Adventure books.

I wanted true mystery, something that would leave me puzzled for days. Forcing me to think in new ways and understand my world in new exciting ways or making the world ‘scary’ and ‘exciting’ to me again.

It was that search for mystery that lead me to study physics in college, drew me into what could be loosely labeled as ‘outsider’ art and has become one of the main intents behind my music and art projects.

Somehow, I’d like to create a world that exists inside our own world. One where mystery and awe still exist instead of this scripted existence I see everyday.

Oh yeah….

Welcome to 2016!

My favorite version of this Thyagaraja classic! If you’ve never listened to his music take a gander, he’s one of South India’s gems.