meditations on nick maybury

As the sun sets, let us say, take peace now. Our people were farming people, wandering people, genocidals. They took from the earth and animals and had few ways to communicate with eachother.

Self and other are no more in the face of beautiful music. Let your hungers sit themselves down into the depths of sorrow where you lay, aware of the sun and the curvature of the earth, and sorrow that brought us here. Cave painting, and song.

The way to optimism is not the way of truth. Optimism is fantasy as away of life. Lined with flowers, and vanilla sugar, rainbows, wee people, wee in the sight of the giant red poppies, the random acts of art creating bigness to make us feel small of delicate. As in the grey knave of the wax covered church, we are small, before immensity.

When nick maybury creates music, he creates huge tsunamis of sound, sound that washes over you like the great flood. Sound communicating with lost spirits, ancestors, and the future of humanity.

Bless that he live another day. Mortality sits grimly with a knife. That you might have this and nothing else, a song. In your mind when they send you to bagram, guantanamo, for eternal hell. Incarceration, human rights violations abound. The music of the concentration camps, all the world a prison until we find a way to justice, to liberation. The blood of extractions, the herero genocide, the genocides in australia, aboriginal exploitations seethe blood out of the eyeballs of this perfect face . . .

nick maybury has angelic qualities that conjure up the inocence I only remember when singing hark the heral d angels sing, in some paper wings at the church, as we enacted mythological beings. I have often wondered if it were love I feel. I think more truly it could be said I feel happiness, and the strength to go on, when I hear his music.

The last time I heard him play recently, at the baked potato in studio city california with leif garrett on june 7, 2010, I had more revelations. The way music is a dance, and playing is yoga, and the way flourish is often mistook for ego. As he wrote me later, “we are vessels,” I feel the egolessness of his talent, the transmission. He spoke of living like a monk, and going to the studio everyday to play, as a practice. I thought, like prayer, or meditation.

I told leif garret that I think I have synesthesia, but especially when I hear nick maybury's music. Some music is wordy and clever, cerebral. But when I hear nick's s ound I see things, visions, like his beautiful mother walking on a storming coast, thinking of her beautiful son so far away across the ocean. I feel sad silly things, like sentiment and victory. I feel like candide, it is all for the best.

Nick had a new song he was working on. He was almost apologetic for its sentiment. I told him no, that is what people need. They need sentimental songs to remind them of what it was like before they became robots, and stripped their hearts of compassion and humanity and emotion.

As nick played for me the jimi hendrix song about racism and oppression, I realized too, that nick's music is extremely political. Not in a jello biafra kind of way. But in a very poignant silent way. It is personal and emotional. Atmospheric and visual. By referencing the turmoil of the civil rights struggles of the psychadelic eras, nick is helping us to unlock exactly what keeps us as repressed as the people of the vietnam war era, or the segregated racist america.

I think often of the story my father told me about loving blues music in the 1950's and going across “the line” that separated the white washington D. C. from the black D. C. he would listen and buy the records, and bring them back to his affluent white world. The diplomat's children would listen to the blues music that was shaping the future of rock and roll, and it was like nothing they had ever heard. My father was a shy young man, but with his record collection he won favor.

The electricity which ignited our successive industrial revolutions has powered electric music, the festivals, the digital vocabularies of marketing seduction, the record industry and its demise, the pirate bay revolutions, and the free culture of music, which finds no locus, but has become diffuse.

Nick maybury is a part of the future of music. He has diligently plastered transmissions from his caring heart all over the internet, and works every night of the week to bring you wonderful live music with a variety of bands and artists.

More recent projects include the australian contemporary dance rock band “jump jump dance dance” and “bowery beasts” which lays claim to the psychadelic and melodic hard rock decades. Leif Garrett was a child star of the disco era. He was marketed to the repressed culture as a dangerously gorgeous teen with an amazing voice. Talking with him is like cutting through walls of deception. He is so deeply aware and in tune and took nick to Korea to play and wants future collaboration.

Matt Sorum is the exceedly gracious and handsome drummer famous from the Guns 'n' Roses era of rock and roll glory on the sunset strip. He got involved in Velvet Revolver. Somehow he found nick to round out the dance and music showcase of the “Darling Stillettos.” Four intensely fit women dance their way through an amazingly high-powered hard rock set, with matt on drums and nick on guitar. It is something to behold, and when nick throws in his solo power, he becomes the centerpiece of a glorious confection of music and dance. The scene is amazing as it hearkens back to the tough women of rock and roll. It is extremely empowering, and reflects the sea change that is presently occurring as M.I.A., allison mosshart, ladyhawke, and la roux pioneer the way for tough girl chic. It is no longer necessary to be delicate and starving in a mini skirt to get noticed. Female rockers are the way of the future. Rock and roll will lay down the boy band dominance in favor of equality in music, and darling stillettos are a kick in the face of the not so subtle male domination of the stage.

This reminds me of the story of when swedish electro-pop brother sister duo the knife sent proxies in gorilla suits to receive their music award. The gorillas took off their mask, and said, “we are here to protest male domination of the music industry.”

when I hear him play I think of secret sacred songs I have never heard. I have never walked in the temples of india. I think of a dream I had about the seargent pepers lonely heart club band, when the east came to the bourgie west via the beatles. I think of shamisen, and music of different tonalities. The thai plucked harp I heard in thai town los angeles. I think of the wailing at the wailing wall. The prayers chanted of islam. Of philip glasses many repetitions. Of celtic sounds subverted through the modernity of electric guitar. I think of the bluegrass dark folk of gillian welch and david rawlins. I am not kidding when I tell nick I want him to be in a country music band. When nick plugged in his 1940's vintage electric slide he found in australia last winter, I was in heaven.

As nashville floods and the bp oil pollutes the southeastern united states, I may forsake nashville forever. So lucky our friend henry fenton did not move there, to have his life washed away by toxic waters.

I told nick I never really liked guitar. He said until you met me. Maybe so. I have had visions of dulcimers and violins, shamisens and theramins. Sitar. Nick takes the guitar places it has never been. Playing the strings with a bow is but one of his signature ways to make enormous waves of atmospheric sound.

Lately, I am getting into his programming beats, which fly straight over the heads of los angeles, and reflect the future of video-gamey beats and the best of raver culture. Blixa bargeld complained about the european obsessions with electro rave minimalism once. I watched him layer vocal loops over eachother until a huge unflowering of sound blossomed in the old church. Many times I think of kraftwerk and einsturzende neubaten in relation to nick. The creation of noise, melodic noise, expiramental attitudes, eariness. As when fassbinder puts the kraftwerk into the darkness of an overcast berlin afternoon.

Time is going so slowly. It is amazing anyone has time for hatred, war, or murder. If I were taken unreasonably back to the kafka novel of total incarceration, back to the gulag,or slaughterhouse, or to bagram air base prison, or to guantanamo, I would put my sound loops of nick maybury on in my head. To console me.

Plasticity has infected us. It fills our ocean. We drink it. We make music with it. Modernity is an oil drum. Ewaste and PVC.

I told nick I had the vision for the book. Originally I thought a biography, based on the loose scraps of facts I know from his family and the many fables I have heard. But then I realized that is not as important as the book of peace. That what we must write is the book of the future, peace through music, of tranquility, transcendence, kindness. That art is liberation. Ecstasy and peace.

Charlotte gainsbourg and beck are ever present in my heart, like angels, like nick maybury, or david koci. As nick helped me through the beautiful architecture of downtown los angeles union station I remembered the lyrics from “heaven can wait” off IRM: “you left your credentials in a greyhound station.” I was struggling for time and tickets and all the junk I accumulated. I was ashamed of my material existence. I told nick he might be my only real friend in los angeles. Its not so. But he's different. I told him about a political refugee from china who had his last $2000 stolen at union station.

I asked nick how much an album costs, $5000 or what. He said yeah or 25,000 or 500,000 depending on what you want. I want the nick maybury album to manifest. Not that I believe in making money from art. But art for art's sake, as a beautiful document, and to save people like me, who rely on music like a cruch to limp through the apocalypse. I am not being daff when I say music saved my life. It still does. And the hope for more.

As for quality or quantity, all the rules are falling apart. I'd rather have all the versions of every song. The 2004 version and the 2010 version, the live version, the haf-asleep version, the videoblogged version, the drunk version, the youtubed. It is what my father would call being “thorough.” when I beg nick to release all his old tunes, the juvenalia so to speak, it is with the beauty of realizing he will have a long and prosperous career in music. As I watched him, ever youthful and graceful, on the stage at the baked potato, I realized he will be playing when he is seventy and grey. He will still be wowing us. I want to be there, to follow him around like a devoted deadhead, and make the bootlegs, and vimeos and youtubes.

Charlotte gainsbourg sang me through may 2010. oil gushed into the gulf, and music into my mind. The nick maybury solo songs I want to tell you about are these:

“going insane” the most tonally profound song since elliott smith. I could feel elliott in the room as nick played this live. In descending scales, and melody unusual and eerie, the separation from loved ones and family, the sacrifices made for art, laid plain with a separtation from health, and the attempts to restore health.

“love” the only song i'd ever need. A song someone like sophia coppola would put in a movie as delicate as the “virgin suicides,” a song of strife and resolution. “Love breaks my fall, love conquers all, what are we fighting for?”

“lying in my bed” which was hosted on imeem prior to the recent acquisition which has effectively shut it down as I can see. Lying in my bed is the song of genesis and motivation, the beginning of a long career.

“los feliz” a magical song, so melodic and evocative of an enchantment like the fitzgerald era of hollywood, of a beautiful time.

“peices” a song out fragmented love, pieces of love, of self, fragmented, parcellated, minced.

“constance” an industrial track written for the ethereal constance mae grande.

the “LA song” about down and out no home no car no job in LA.

A new one that goes “i'm standing here my heart's a mess.” he made it sound like a band doing all his bass and drums.

A mystery song, I heard based off a guitar lick I heard at dakota bar 4-4-09 with dave lamar. It was the lovliest most sentimental thing since rachmaninoff. In august 09 nick told me it is a part of a larger song. In june 2010, I heard it for the first time. Whimperingly.

Break free is an amazing niky may remix of blasted mechanism's song of liberation from mental slavery.

There are some other songs I heard only once. Mermaids or butterflies I think. And nicky is keeping it all secret on one solitary hard drive, just to torment me with anxiety it feels, lest his computer get swiped or crash.

I used to have this amazing musical genius friend who suffered heroin addiction. I would massage his twisting muscles as he writhed in the pain of withdrawl. Another friend got severe tendonitus and carpal tunnel syndrome from practicing flute seven hours a day. When I see nick working so hard for music, I wonder why it is, he spends his life and health to communicate with us in this way. The delicate human frame was not made for a guitar, or the computer keyboard either. What are we pulling off? Hoodwinking the disbelievers, with a jingle, a tune against holocaust, a lullaby?

I am really happy about jack white and allison mosshart. They are making the gritty old blues famous. The nashville sound is an international sound. The UK loves country. Australia loves country. Folk music, and polka, music of the people.

Ithink a lot about the artistry of nigel godrich, a prodigy if ever there was. Creating th eatmosphere of beck's sea change, or sonic youth, or radiohead, or the signature sound he lay across charlotte gainsbourg's 5:55 with air. I wonder if beck learned from him, and that is part of why IRM is so perfect.

I'm a one take, hasty kind of artist. I think art is so fragile, that repetition kills the mood, that artists can learn to create more and more by loosening the bounds of perfectionism. As we have enterred the age of internet ubiquity, the ever present bootleg and youtube will rule the scene. Apple's colonizing itunes is fine for people who have a dollar. Or $1.25. what I want to know is that if thousands of songs prolifically are issued for the future world peace, we could forgive ourselves our perfectionism, and begin singing for peace. If every festival could be for peace and equality and earth justice, all the live streams, and videoblogs will fade into the ever present reality of human beings treating eachother kindly here in the now. And as the city burns, as the poems fall into the water or the wastebasket, so too might the new poems of the ever flowering hear awaken us to the realities of war, murder, genocide, desertification, oil crisis, water crisis, food crisis, homelessness epidemic.

The fragile human spirit needs a mercedes sometimes. But as that mercedes zooms by whooshing a puff of petrol fumes into the face of the human being sleeping on the pavement, who is the human being here, and who is the slave?

I am coming into the land of air and oxygen and watching the trees.

The dilemma: how to apportion time. Nick is so good to every soul who wants to play with him. He makes everyone sound good, and look good too. Apart from his music talents, he would make an amazing manager, booker, or agent by sheer weight of his etiquette and finesse and marketing genius, and attention to human needs for kindness, communication, networking.

We know nick maybury can play guitar rather well in a variety of styles. But I woder about his songs and compositions. Layering beautiful electronic tracks, guitar, guitar with bow, drum loops, vocal layers.

I want him to be as lucky and prolific as beck. I often think of beck's early “golden feelings” album of spun out blues. And how every song sounds like the first take, so human, and unmastered. And how it's about my favorite. I love it. I think of peter dogherty's prolific songwriting and nonchalant brazen delivery.

Music thrown into the abyss, off the cuff, to fill our empty hearts.

I always feel empty around nick, like a shell, like I don't exist. I thought of shelly's poem about being the windharp, and the wind merely blows through him. Nick says “we are vessels.” of the divine? He has had such luck to play in front of so many huge crowds. With his various bands and projects. 5,000 loving exuberant fans in japan on the mink tour, or the coachellas and lollapalooza. When I am privy to his inner world, I feel almost the same as when I first met him, that I undersatnd entirely, he is good and pure.

We all are.

And beautiful innocent music helps us to feel beautiful again. When I listen to “love” over and over I think of the mountaintops in sweden where the primitive folk music between mountain top shepherds, recounted the numbers of animals to eachother.

Lately I am thinking of the umbrellas of cherbourg, a musical movie with catherine deneueve entirely sung. And of the feeling that everything could be a song. And the difference in communication. What if we were to sing to each other . . . daily, at every moment . . . and I can see nicky singing, at stray moments, listening for the voice on the other side of the self, “where I end and you begin.”

and truly we are up in the clouds. When I speak to my friend eric hamilton about nick, he says, he is like thom yorke. Missing a show, would be like missing radiohead. There is something about keeping the mood profound.

Eva watler also drew the thom yorke analogy. Thom opened up new ways for us to feel in the “ok computer” age.

Thom yorke reminded us that true love lives on lollipops and crisps and waits in haunted attics. That just when you feel it, you don't. Climbing upthe walls . . .

thom changed the way music was made, with a heart in the internet age. He cried into the microphone, and wrote about the environment in the radiohead blog. He wrote about politics and said he was to angry to be like bono, smiling at war-mongering politicians, but more power to him, that he can wage diplomacy.

I think the future of the nick maybury sound will be the branding of world peace as meaning method beginning and end. And that festivals have got to get greener and greener. Lollapalooza is picking up the lead with a distinct emphasis on the greenest way. The only music of the future that will make any sense will be political music. Peacefulness is political transcendence. The music against environmental exploitation, against genocide, will be the music I want to hear.

When rachmaninoff left russia, he never wrote another composition, but toured ruthlessly, to express what he had experienced as a pianist playing his own work. I hope that nick continues to play. And that his music might move people as it has moved me. And that we will all treat eachother more kindly, for having encountered such a being of light.