Thursday, August 2, 2012
Shores benefit concert
Hi all!
It's been a long time since we've posted in Shores Blog, over a year! We took a hiatus but have been back rehearsing and recording all summer to put together a full length album. Much information to come on that, including a series of new video releases, but in the meantime we want to announce a benefit concert we are throwing to help raise funds for the album. The concert will be in the Fools Court at the Faithful Fools street ministry in the Tenderloin, with whom we will be sharing donations and celebration the night of Thursday, August 9. We hope to see you there, and thank you for your support,
We Are Shores
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
2 shows this weekend, & opening for Lumerians
Heyall we got two shows coming up this weekend. The first is the big one, opening for Lumerians this Friday 4/22 with Late Young at Catacombs in SF. Here is the FB event link for info, and, here is the cool flyer:
Then on the next day Saturday 4/23 we're playing a house party at our friend and sound engineer Leslie's house. He's celebrating the 20 year anniversary of his car hehe... A couple members of Animal Liberation Orchestra will be playing solo stuff and our good friends friends Antenna will also be performing. Here's the FB event link for that one and here is its flyer:
Then on the next day Saturday 4/23 we're playing a house party at our friend and sound engineer Leslie's house. He's celebrating the 20 year anniversary of his car hehe... A couple members of Animal Liberation Orchestra will be playing solo stuff and our good friends friends Antenna will also be performing. Here's the FB event link for that one and here is its flyer:
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Hemlock Show -- February 3rd with the Lickets and Mangled Bohemians
Hi Shores friends, sorry it's been such a long time since we've rapped at ya. We have been working, mainly in rehearsals on developing material for the new album, which we'll start recording in the next month hopefully. More details to emerge....
In the meantime, we have one show planned coming up, on Thursday February 3rd at the Hemlock (link: http://www.hemlocktavern.com/prog_guide.php?adate_id=2011-02-03). We'll be playing with our friends the Lickets as well as Mangled Bohemian. We play first, at 9:00 p.m. and will be previewing some of the new album material we've been working on. Looking forward to it!
In the meantime, we have one show planned coming up, on Thursday February 3rd at the Hemlock (link: http://www.hemlocktavern.com/prog_guide.php?adate_id=2011-02-03). We'll be playing with our friends the Lickets as well as Mangled Bohemian. We play first, at 9:00 p.m. and will be previewing some of the new album material we've been working on. Looking forward to it!
Thursday, July 22, 2010
We Are Shores EP: (our first Shores release!)
Ok our We Are Shores EP is ready at last! This is a set of four demo recordings plus one remix, and we're very happy with how they've come out.
Here is the album cover (photo by Jude):
The record has 5 songs, 46 minutes, 6 bucks: what a deal!
Right now we're only selling them in person or through mail order with Paypal. You can contact us at our email address weareshores@gmail.com if you'd like to order a copy. Thank you all for your support, awesomeness!
Here is the album cover (photo by Jude):
The record has 5 songs, 46 minutes, 6 bucks: what a deal!
Right now we're only selling them in person or through mail order with Paypal. You can contact us at our email address weareshores@gmail.com if you'd like to order a copy. Thank you all for your support, awesomeness!
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Friday, June 25, 2010
Opened-In
In its neural capacity, the brain is networked and methodic, a process-oriented apparatus that is in part computational, like a computer. Both words (computer and computation) derive from the Latin verb putare ('to think', or 'arrange') plus the the prefix com- (also 'con-, col-, cor- or co-'), which can mean 'together' (or 'with'), or can translate roughly as 'wholly, full on, or completely'. I say roughly because this prefix also works as a non-verbal intensifier--- kind of a linguistic exclamation point, but moreover emphasizing action and heightening its performance. By 'heightener' I mean both senses of the word-- it is more noticeable or conscious, and it signals more going on than typical routine action.
So, for example, the Latin verb iacere means more simply 'to throw or toss' (like you would lob a ball to a friend or toss treat to a pet), whereas its intensified version conicere means 'to hurl, or heave' or even aim and shoot or fling or dart-- like a skilled baseball player will fire a ball to home plate, or lovers will shoot or send knowing or feeling looks to each other across a crowded room. An example of the prefix in English might be 'sequence' vs 'consequence'; the former signifies actions in a row, the latter the causes and effects between them. Or how the word 'note' means to 'observe, mark, or notice', but 'connote' means to 'suggest, intimate, or predicate', therefore implying a deeper meaning than the literal one we just make a note of happening (usually, we take a note to look into something later, when we look more closely into its connotations...).
I go into this much depth because there's an analogy in how the brain works like this too. Our brain's total action is heightened-- there's always more potentially going on. In its collective, simultaneous computations, the mind serves as kind of a mainframe running our bodies' networks like a laptop's hard drive runs all its systems. Some processes, like those of the organs or skeleton, are complex in physique but simple (or rather 'unconscious') in operation: with these, once we've learned the action, the neurons always fire in the same patterns and areas in our brains. In our typical routine actions, whether it be in the brain's sending signals to the heart processing our blood or lungs our breathing, or in those parts of our thoughts that transmit info on our daily habits (to see this, follow the basic thought patterns of your habits: from basic mental notes "ok, grab my keys, wallet, cell phone and lock the doors on my way out"; to more technical ones like driving or riding a bike or checking email and facebook, typing in passwords, scanning web pages etc): in these types of thoughts our brains are running and thinking (*putare) systematically and routinely.
Other processes, however, are heightened even further in the brain--- brain scan research shows this, where certain forms of thought, exertion, and emotion light or fire particular areas of the brain up more. When we're thinking about something critically-- when we're feeling something more deeply (like love or anger, fun or fear)-- or when we're acting or performing in a deliberate manner (like a musician or actor on a stage, an artist in the studio, an athlete on a sports field, or explorer on a expedition or spiritual person on a pilgrimage etc etc)-- when we're doing any of these things our brain is furthermore and moreover "computing"--- that is, it is performing additional functions, and interacting more deliberately with the engaged environment or situation. When we are brought to a higher state of consciousness, the mind is affected or stimulated more, and it is precisely this heightened state which in turn conducts us into the world and integrates us in its deeper subliminal energies...
The heightened or enlightened mind is like a crucible that animates and kindles the entire self, and the selves of others too. I mean this literally--- consider how you actually feel when making art, playing music, feeling chemistry with a significant other, or fully engaged with something or someone you love. Even if it's a cold night and we are still and relaxed, beyond not noticing the chill, in the heat of the moment we sweat, breathe more heavily, and actually feel our mind or soul or heart afire. When he was a young man and soldier, Socrates is fabled to have stood in the dead of winter facing a snow storm meditating while wearing nothing but a loincloth. His fellow soldiers huddled freezing near the fire, yet steam emanated from him. ((Similarly, I've always been amazed by this experience of making music or art, or from teaching: If I'm under the weather, no matter how sick I feel, that ill feeling goes completely away when in I'm in that creative or galvanic space, either for the duration of creativity or even altogether. Last week for example I had a very bad back; nothing I could do could make it better, but then we had band practice and minutes into the performance I was as mobile and flexible while performing as ever, and after a week my back has finally started healing.))
As I see and experience and explore it, this heightened awareness and creative involvement is the spark of life---- and it is here that we reach beyond ourselves into the world around us.
And so, by extension,, (by *reaching*-- in both directions, and in both senses of this word: by extending oneself and by making full, heightened, psychosomatic contact with someone or something else),, we extend beyond our own minds or consciousness to the consciousness of others and to the phenomena of the world around us. That word phenomenon connotes both of these heightened meanings: a phenomenon is most literally a "occurrence, circumstance, or fact that is observable by the senses" (American Heritage Dictionary), but it more commonly refers to something or someone remarkable, impressive, and striking in nature or the world around us-- something or someone "phenomenal" that catches and arrests our attention. Phenomena act as links between thought and experiences, or between presence and awareness, between life and love. Philosophers from Plato to Kant to the Existentialists etc, explore and explain them as vital principles and dynamics that merge and interfuse nature ("out there") and our minds ("in here"). When they hit us, phenomena engage us, in both senses of this word too: they arrest or engage our attention, and they involve or engage us in the outside world, intensively so.
We are opened in, so to speak.
The sound of a chord struck brings two discrete entities together. The musician and the audience encounter and make and experience something more than themselves in the beauty or fury or journey of the song. We reach out, to more than ourselves, in such experiences, and in the deliberate act of reaching, something meaningful outside yourself merges with yourself, and with others who share in the music. I'm speaking of music literally here of course, but I also mean it as a metaphor for any chord in nature or electricity or life that strikes us. This is why we also use that expression "a chord's been struck" to say that we've developed a good friendship or tight bond with someone, such that we affect each other on a deeper level.
To extend the metaphor, art, nature, music, exercise, good food, friends and family, love etc are all phenomena that harmonize our selves with others. ---Or maybe it's not a metaphor--- the expression "the music of the trees" seems neither literal nor metaphorical, but something more, something beyond the abstract. Many people express that they hear music in any and all of these phenomena, and often, if the mind is engaged and attuned to the resonations of the world around us, we are making our own music in our journey not just through but into that world. That could literally be the soundtrack we're sometimes hearing in our minds, or the way we live a life of awareness, engagement, and action: the soundtrack we perform or make of our lives for others to hear, and jam along with to boot.
In this space we transcend, beyond our selves and beyond the limits of our own minds. In the terms of the broader analogy I've been drawing of the brain's computations, if the mind is the hardware, the central nervous system is the software, the electromagnetic matrix in us which reads the resonances of the world around us, the environments and people our nervous system absorbs, reads, interacts with, and itself has an effect upon. This has been a common principle for Shores explored in other entries of this blog: we call our music electroacoustic psychosomatics because we believe that music is not only heard by physically felt and experienced. The same goes for environments, whether natural or human: we not only only sense or experience them, we cor-relate with them, and them with us. Shores are not only physical spaces, but experiences of any boundaries, and the blurring or blending of ourselves into them. Emphatically so, in a heightened state.
This will be the topic of the next blog in this series and potentially our next album after the Open-Ended LP [(oh yeah, announcement: we've been developing the Green Sound material into a full length album to be recorded later this year, more on this in a blog very soon)] , how the central nervous system reaches from the mind to the world.... and how music and the soul are the medium of this phenomenality....
So, for example, the Latin verb iacere means more simply 'to throw or toss' (like you would lob a ball to a friend or toss treat to a pet), whereas its intensified version conicere means 'to hurl, or heave' or even aim and shoot or fling or dart-- like a skilled baseball player will fire a ball to home plate, or lovers will shoot or send knowing or feeling looks to each other across a crowded room. An example of the prefix in English might be 'sequence' vs 'consequence'; the former signifies actions in a row, the latter the causes and effects between them. Or how the word 'note' means to 'observe, mark, or notice', but 'connote' means to 'suggest, intimate, or predicate', therefore implying a deeper meaning than the literal one we just make a note of happening (usually, we take a note to look into something later, when we look more closely into its connotations...).
I go into this much depth because there's an analogy in how the brain works like this too. Our brain's total action is heightened-- there's always more potentially going on. In its collective, simultaneous computations, the mind serves as kind of a mainframe running our bodies' networks like a laptop's hard drive runs all its systems. Some processes, like those of the organs or skeleton, are complex in physique but simple (or rather 'unconscious') in operation: with these, once we've learned the action, the neurons always fire in the same patterns and areas in our brains. In our typical routine actions, whether it be in the brain's sending signals to the heart processing our blood or lungs our breathing, or in those parts of our thoughts that transmit info on our daily habits (to see this, follow the basic thought patterns of your habits: from basic mental notes "ok, grab my keys, wallet, cell phone and lock the doors on my way out"; to more technical ones like driving or riding a bike or checking email and facebook, typing in passwords, scanning web pages etc): in these types of thoughts our brains are running and thinking (*putare) systematically and routinely.
Other processes, however, are heightened even further in the brain--- brain scan research shows this, where certain forms of thought, exertion, and emotion light or fire particular areas of the brain up more. When we're thinking about something critically-- when we're feeling something more deeply (like love or anger, fun or fear)-- or when we're acting or performing in a deliberate manner (like a musician or actor on a stage, an artist in the studio, an athlete on a sports field, or explorer on a expedition or spiritual person on a pilgrimage etc etc)-- when we're doing any of these things our brain is furthermore and moreover "computing"--- that is, it is performing additional functions, and interacting more deliberately with the engaged environment or situation. When we are brought to a higher state of consciousness, the mind is affected or stimulated more, and it is precisely this heightened state which in turn conducts us into the world and integrates us in its deeper subliminal energies...
The heightened or enlightened mind is like a crucible that animates and kindles the entire self, and the selves of others too. I mean this literally--- consider how you actually feel when making art, playing music, feeling chemistry with a significant other, or fully engaged with something or someone you love. Even if it's a cold night and we are still and relaxed, beyond not noticing the chill, in the heat of the moment we sweat, breathe more heavily, and actually feel our mind or soul or heart afire. When he was a young man and soldier, Socrates is fabled to have stood in the dead of winter facing a snow storm meditating while wearing nothing but a loincloth. His fellow soldiers huddled freezing near the fire, yet steam emanated from him. ((Similarly, I've always been amazed by this experience of making music or art, or from teaching: If I'm under the weather, no matter how sick I feel, that ill feeling goes completely away when in I'm in that creative or galvanic space, either for the duration of creativity or even altogether. Last week for example I had a very bad back; nothing I could do could make it better, but then we had band practice and minutes into the performance I was as mobile and flexible while performing as ever, and after a week my back has finally started healing.))
As I see and experience and explore it, this heightened awareness and creative involvement is the spark of life---- and it is here that we reach beyond ourselves into the world around us.
And so, by extension,, (by *reaching*-- in both directions, and in both senses of this word: by extending oneself and by making full, heightened, psychosomatic contact with someone or something else),, we extend beyond our own minds or consciousness to the consciousness of others and to the phenomena of the world around us. That word phenomenon connotes both of these heightened meanings: a phenomenon is most literally a "occurrence, circumstance, or fact that is observable by the senses" (American Heritage Dictionary), but it more commonly refers to something or someone remarkable, impressive, and striking in nature or the world around us-- something or someone "phenomenal" that catches and arrests our attention. Phenomena act as links between thought and experiences, or between presence and awareness, between life and love. Philosophers from Plato to Kant to the Existentialists etc, explore and explain them as vital principles and dynamics that merge and interfuse nature ("out there") and our minds ("in here"). When they hit us, phenomena engage us, in both senses of this word too: they arrest or engage our attention, and they involve or engage us in the outside world, intensively so.
We are opened in, so to speak.
The sound of a chord struck brings two discrete entities together. The musician and the audience encounter and make and experience something more than themselves in the beauty or fury or journey of the song. We reach out, to more than ourselves, in such experiences, and in the deliberate act of reaching, something meaningful outside yourself merges with yourself, and with others who share in the music. I'm speaking of music literally here of course, but I also mean it as a metaphor for any chord in nature or electricity or life that strikes us. This is why we also use that expression "a chord's been struck" to say that we've developed a good friendship or tight bond with someone, such that we affect each other on a deeper level.
To extend the metaphor, art, nature, music, exercise, good food, friends and family, love etc are all phenomena that harmonize our selves with others. ---Or maybe it's not a metaphor--- the expression "the music of the trees" seems neither literal nor metaphorical, but something more, something beyond the abstract. Many people express that they hear music in any and all of these phenomena, and often, if the mind is engaged and attuned to the resonations of the world around us, we are making our own music in our journey not just through but into that world. That could literally be the soundtrack we're sometimes hearing in our minds, or the way we live a life of awareness, engagement, and action: the soundtrack we perform or make of our lives for others to hear, and jam along with to boot.
In this space we transcend, beyond our selves and beyond the limits of our own minds. In the terms of the broader analogy I've been drawing of the brain's computations, if the mind is the hardware, the central nervous system is the software, the electromagnetic matrix in us which reads the resonances of the world around us, the environments and people our nervous system absorbs, reads, interacts with, and itself has an effect upon. This has been a common principle for Shores explored in other entries of this blog: we call our music electroacoustic psychosomatics because we believe that music is not only heard by physically felt and experienced. The same goes for environments, whether natural or human: we not only only sense or experience them, we cor-relate with them, and them with us. Shores are not only physical spaces, but experiences of any boundaries, and the blurring or blending of ourselves into them. Emphatically so, in a heightened state.
This will be the topic of the next blog in this series and potentially our next album after the Open-Ended LP [(oh yeah, announcement: we've been developing the Green Sound material into a full length album to be recorded later this year, more on this in a blog very soon)] , how the central nervous system reaches from the mind to the world.... and how music and the soul are the medium of this phenomenality....
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Update update update
Hello friends,
Sorry it's been so long since we've last posted. We've been under the radar but very busy continuing to prepare for our performance at Project Soundwave's Green Sound Festival this summer.
Here are some details about the show. We'll be performing on Friday, July 17. Our show will take place in the Illuminated Forest at The Lab in San Francisco. The installment we are contributing to is titled "Ground/Shift", where (as discussed in our project proposal for Green Sound) we will be exploring the aural and visual relationship between human consciousness and natural environments via a continuing collaboration with filmmaker Jaakko Vilpponen. That evening electronic artists Jim Haynes and Lissom will also be performing.
Another couple words on the Green Sound performance. The band has been working hard on developing both the songs and Jaakko's visual documentary for Ground/Shift. We've been renovating "Reflection", which we initially wrote as an ambient track back in October, into a kind of psychedelic blues piece that more accentuates the presence of natural environments, how we correspond and interact with them, both unconsciously and as a form of naturalizing consciousness.
"Refraction" is the companion piece to "Reflection". Conceived originally as a kind of antithesis to "Reflection", in its developing form it further explores our consciousness of an environment, both in its natural state and in response to human effects of and upon that environment, whether that be through pollution or preservation. We'll be recording these pieces very soon.
* * *
In other news, Sean and I recently moved into a warehouse space in the Mission district of San Francisco, together with Jaakko and film blogger and longtime friend Brian Darr. The space is a live-work artists' loft space where Shores have moved their operations, after about a year of rehearsals at Darr el Salaam (i.e. Alex's living room, which we'll miss very much!)
We are almost done conceiving material for our first studio album. It will be called "Open-Ended", or some variation on that evocative antiphrasis. In addition to Reflection and Refraction as the first movement, it will also contain two new songs titled "Emersion" and "Extension", which continues our score upon environmental experience. "Emersion" is almost written, and "Extension" is in its rudimentary stages. We are also considering a cover of Flying Saucer Attack's song "Oceans" I've been developing as a kind of interlude near the end of the album.
Finally, and this on the down low, we will be performing a private outdoor show in Big Sur at the Apple Pie Ranch, in a beautiful meadow space which offers vistas looking down on the main valley and oceanside of Big Sur. The show will be taking place on Saturday, June 5th, with camping offered between June 4th and the 6th. The ranch features a pool, 150 tree orchard, miles of surrounding hiking, and some of the most sublime private coastal views in California: we're very excited! Since it is a private show, apart from this blog entry we will not be announcing or advertising the show, but as a special offer to blog friends, if you'd to come contact us at our email address (weareshores@gmail.com).
Lots in the works, expect a profusion of new material this summer. Peace and sounds,
Jude
Sorry it's been so long since we've last posted. We've been under the radar but very busy continuing to prepare for our performance at Project Soundwave's Green Sound Festival this summer.
Here are some details about the show. We'll be performing on Friday, July 17. Our show will take place in the Illuminated Forest at The Lab in San Francisco. The installment we are contributing to is titled "Ground/Shift", where (as discussed in our project proposal for Green Sound) we will be exploring the aural and visual relationship between human consciousness and natural environments via a continuing collaboration with filmmaker Jaakko Vilpponen. That evening electronic artists Jim Haynes and Lissom will also be performing.
Another couple words on the Green Sound performance. The band has been working hard on developing both the songs and Jaakko's visual documentary for Ground/Shift. We've been renovating "Reflection", which we initially wrote as an ambient track back in October, into a kind of psychedelic blues piece that more accentuates the presence of natural environments, how we correspond and interact with them, both unconsciously and as a form of naturalizing consciousness.
"Refraction" is the companion piece to "Reflection". Conceived originally as a kind of antithesis to "Reflection", in its developing form it further explores our consciousness of an environment, both in its natural state and in response to human effects of and upon that environment, whether that be through pollution or preservation. We'll be recording these pieces very soon.
* * *
In other news, Sean and I recently moved into a warehouse space in the Mission district of San Francisco, together with Jaakko and film blogger and longtime friend Brian Darr. The space is a live-work artists' loft space where Shores have moved their operations, after about a year of rehearsals at Darr el Salaam (i.e. Alex's living room, which we'll miss very much!)
We are almost done conceiving material for our first studio album. It will be called "Open-Ended", or some variation on that evocative antiphrasis. In addition to Reflection and Refraction as the first movement, it will also contain two new songs titled "Emersion" and "Extension", which continues our score upon environmental experience. "Emersion" is almost written, and "Extension" is in its rudimentary stages. We are also considering a cover of Flying Saucer Attack's song "Oceans" I've been developing as a kind of interlude near the end of the album.
Finally, and this on the down low, we will be performing a private outdoor show in Big Sur at the Apple Pie Ranch, in a beautiful meadow space which offers vistas looking down on the main valley and oceanside of Big Sur. The show will be taking place on Saturday, June 5th, with camping offered between June 4th and the 6th. The ranch features a pool, 150 tree orchard, miles of surrounding hiking, and some of the most sublime private coastal views in California: we're very excited! Since it is a private show, apart from this blog entry we will not be announcing or advertising the show, but as a special offer to blog friends, if you'd to come contact us at our email address (weareshores@gmail.com).
Lots in the works, expect a profusion of new material this summer. Peace and sounds,
Jude
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Ritualistic Nature
Just found a fascinating blog site called Ritualistic Nature. It states as its object "to post music related with Ritual music, in traditional ethnic way or on Modern side, Ambient, Tribal, Drone, Field Recordings etc with a strong inspier in NATURE and its cycles."
Some amazing music on here, enmeshing electroacoustics and expanding consciousness in a similar key as Shores Philosophy. Will be spending good time there soon.
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