Last night, Killola did a short live show that was available to people (like me) who had purchased their new album on the USB “dog tag.” I hadn’t seen this technology before but it was great!

I just plugged the album into a USB port, clicked on an option, and it opened a browser with a video window of the show, expandable to fullscreen, the live audio, and a chat area where fans could type to each other and to the band. It was a nice experience, second only to being there..

This morning, I had a long period of lucid dreams. I was constantly waking up thinking about Killola and in some cases hearing music in my head (which, unlike most people, never happens to me when I’m awake). At 6:22am, I got up and shut the windows and doors because of the noise from the birds. I hate birds.

In the first dream I remember, I was aware of myself walking around in a building, getting ready to go outside. It was night. As I approached the door, a large glass one with two large glass windows on either side, like the door in a business rather than a home, it appeared at first to be foggy outside. As I approached, I realized it was snowing! Visibility was limited; the ground was white. Maybe an inch had fallen; it was fine, slightly icy snow, the kind you get when it’s almost warm enough to sleet or freeze rain. I thought to myself, “Isn’t it July?” For a moment, I believed it was November and felt a moment of fear: Where have those four months gone? Was I in an accident? And that made me realize I was dreaming! I was completely aware of it and could carry on thoughts like I do when I’m awake. I often talk to myself in my mind and I think in my own voice. I wonder if that’s how other people think. But it was just like that.

The realization I was dreaming didn’t make it end like it typically does, and I stayed in that state and it persisted even if I moved around. After a short time, I tried to think a few things and the scene changed. Last night I had a nice call with April and I must have been thinking about her or about how much I miss her, because suddenly she was there, and it made me really happy so I kissed her (not something I normally do) and said, “that’s all,” abruptly finding myself in another scene.

I was listening to Goldfrapp — some kind of a CD-quality live recording that someone gave me and that I downloaded. For those of you who listen to Goldfrapp in real life, Alison can be pretty hard to understand. Very often, even though I’ve read the lyrics to her songs many times, I *still* don’t understand what she’s saying when I listen to them!
It’s a mysterious quality and some people aren’t into it, but I love her voice. Anyway, she was singing in perfect clarity; it was definitely her voice, but all the words were totally clear. It was just perfection, like how I felt when Kato kept the vocal take that Debbie recorded, the one that made me goosebumpy. I can almost remember some line about changing the day to night or about the day becoming night. It was so beautiful, I so wish I could remember the rest of it!

It’s so hot here, it feels like what I imagine a tropical forest to be like. It’s supposed to get much hotter too. And lately it’s been hot. A couple of days not long ago were the hottest in a decade.

From an email I sent to Chris:

I had a very cool dream about you this morning.  it was somewhat brief, but I was lucid, so let me see what I can recall of it.

We were at a soundcheck somewhere in a very old building with wooden construction.  A garage door was open to the outside, sort of like what it was at Metropol in Pittsburgh, 1994.  It was warm out, probably May, just like then.

You had a device that you were using to compose something.  It was far more advanced than any computer or program that I’ve ever seen, but it is within current technological capability.  The device had a fairly large, completely smooth glass-like touch screen, it was flat not like a laptop, and bright like the displays they have in aircraft cockpits that you can read in direct sunlight (years ago I interviewed at a company that makes them, they are near here but they didn’t hire me).  you obviously had used it a lot because you could operate it with exquisite dexterity.
You had recorded onto it a bunch of stuff: samples of things, people talking, some music, all sorts of stuff.

Here’s where it gets interesting:

The device autoprocessed all of this recorded information and displayed it almost as if it were a map of the land, like a map of the U.S. but I didn’t see the boundaries, and each spoken word was printed over the map like the label of a state.  A sentence was a series of states, most of them were rectangular but of varying sizes.  you would pan across the map and zoom in and out like on an iphone, but it was a full size screen and infinitely more responsive.  You were moving around and selecting words and fragments of words and notes and sounds and sending them to the construction area, assembling something.

You could zoom in on any of the single spoken words or even on a single note, and as you did, the device would break up a word into something that looked like counties, each with a letter or a note or a symbol representing inflection if it was a spoken sound.  zooming in on a single word would show you a zoomed in view of a state on a map which represented the word, broken down now into smaller pieces that were a combination of English letters, notes, and pauses.  you could choose from these and were adding them to your composition, sometimes a full word at a time, sometimes just word fragments or music notes.  you explained that you could take a sentence and directly reassemble it in a different order without using a cut and paste operation, you did it by just selecting the words or notes or fragments as objects instead of as a waveform like the sound editors I’ve used.  The view seemed to have limitless zoom in or out capability, which is a bit reminiscent of that film from the 70’s, “Powers of 10” where they repeatedly zoomed out by a factor of 10 into the scale of galaxies in space, later back in to the microscopic level.  you were doing this with great dexterity and quickly assembled a composition.

After a while, you went to the composition field and played it and it played all of your samples in order, maybe 40 seconds duration.  I remember it wasn’t overly musical but it was outrageously creative and easy for you as you had started it before and finished it while I watched.

And that’s all I have from it.  But it was fuckin cool.