The Trickster

In the myth the trickster moves between the worlds passing knowledge to humans and taking payment for it, sometimes to annoy the gods and sometimes to test the humans.

I use and teach the cutup technique for song writing and for the uninitiated it looks like cheating but this was the technique used by the greatest songwriters in pop music from Lennon to Bowie from Bolan to Cobain.

I am interested in the idea of the trickster musicians like Bowie and Mark Bolan in fact many of the great guitar players had techniques that you could look at some form of trickery. In fact if you look at technology and what it can do creating an illusion of sound and vision that in itself is a form of trickery as it is certainly not reality.

I have pondered that we get trapped by thinking and that some form of deceit needs to happen to fool us out of that into another mode of thinking and cutup is a good example of this. We often see this as a series of phrases taken out of context from magazines and newspapers and put together in a random form which then weirdly makes sense poetically however William S Burroughs did more.

In fact any form of non-linear irrational thinking can be termed as cutup for instance going outside and recording the sounds that you hear in the street in fact snatches of conversation that are put together out of time was one of Burroughs’s techniques. Also just flipping between TV channels or radio stations, taking parts of blogs and putting them together any these techniques will be the basis of cutup.

When I was explaining this technique once at a blues camp summer school somebody actually made the remark that I had burst his bubble that the illusion of all these wonderful songs that somebody had listened to over the years have actually been some form of fraud. This is one of the elements of the trickster in myth and in reality. There is a strange phenomenon when something unusual happens that there is an element of fraud that seems to go with it even when it is not necessary because the event is weird enough in itself. An interesting case in point was that the Enfield poltergeist the event was well documented but the woman involved who lived in the house told some untruths which make the whole situation seem unreal. What is interesting about this story is that years later she tried to explain why she had actually lied about certain elements as if the strangeness of what was happening affected her mind. And this is quite common in fact there is a book written about the trickster effect which states that truth in these situations becomes very malleable.

Because of this often Fortean type events are often thought of as frauds when in actual fact the event itself was real but some other sort of fraud or economic use of the facts accompany the event.

My use of cutup has been really creative in my experience and I suggest that you try these and see what results you get. When I work with this it does seem to put you in to a dream experience of thinking and maybe because of the way that the unconscious is unlocked gives rise to these very strange effects. Whether we look at the artists who have used this technique very successfully as being frauds, cheats and tricksters or not they often lived lives that seem very unreal to us in the mundane world but I think that this is one of the true areas of artistic consciousness that we can easily obtain by using this simple technique.

Vic www.bluescampuk.co.uk be creative for three days

‘May my life be exalted

‘May my life be exalted

May my law be cherished

May my strength be increased

May my tomb not be readied

May I not die on my journey

May my return be ensured to me’

(Early Irish invocation for protection)

In myths about words and writing they come either from God or a trickster they either make the gods or demons troubled depending on the culture and the story, but they are never something humans thought up.

The idea of language being powerful and having language gives one power has been debased in the modern world, where seemingly the only ones who know its true power are politicians and people in advertising. But words do create powerful images and they change people’s minds but not by reasoned debate this is the big mistake of the logical liberal academics that have taken the intellect to such a place that is totally lost. The power lays in the emotional response, the way that words empower and raise the senses both for good and ill.

If you know this then not only can you use it you will also know it when it is being used on you. It is useful when pondering why some songs have great power and often it is the lyrics that do this. Lyrics that are full of imaginary or a call to action like the Beatles ‘All you need is love‘ where love is used as a mantra; there is no logical argument here just by repetition you have to think of love .They are not saying why do you need love? or you should love me.

Say what you want, ‘We will rock you’ ‘Wild thing you make my heart sing’ by describing the feelings not mentioning the emotions you can make people feel, ‘Walking back from your house walking on the moon’.

In Ireland and Wales the bards would not only celebrated but also feared by what they could do with words. So if that is true maybe that should be your aim as a musician to be celebrated and feared in equal measure. That was true in the 1960s maybe we should start aiming words at people who seem to rule our lives with words.

Vic Hyland

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  music summer school

‘If you can you should’

A friend of mine who is a herbalist and researcher was explaining how the physicians of old got into the technique of bleeding and surgery.

The physicians of course were men who had been trained in those skills at University or some form of tutorship, and he explained how many of the ailments could easily be treated cheaply by herbs that were available from the wise women of the village (those who had not been murdered as witches that is) but if you are paying top money for a physician then they could not be seen to do what the old wives could do they would have to do something far more complex. The history of medicine is interesting in that regard as the sort of thinking still holds sway, for instance there are many illnesses that can be cured simply often by fasting and a change of diet but we are programmed to think that we need an expert who is by extension expensive. When the reason and therefore the solution to curing scurvy was discovered one doctor at the time said that it could not be the simple.

Now there is an interesting aspect when it comes to music and learning and business opportunity if we apply the same thinking

Firstly do you need a teacher? Maybe the answer to that is yes because at least you get off to a good start and you certainly need some reference points early in learning new musical instrument. Secondly do you need to go to college? Think carefully, I would say for the contacts maybe you do but for the training I would say no. What does the qualification actually give you? If you wanted to become a teacher and a lecturer then maybe it is a good idea because the system is self-perpetuating i.e. you go to college to get the qualification to go to college to teach.

Now consider the opening quotation ‘If you can you should’. This is one of the driving thoughts that we have today. We see it everywhere, if you can afford a new phone you should, if you can go to Music College you should, if you can have the chemo therapy you should. Whereas in the past it was more a case of if you can do nothing then maybe you should, or may be better said ‘if you can you should do nothing’ let me explain. We are always taught about catching things early, in actual fact sometimes the body can deal with things and you never know there has been a problem, your body has been repairing you every moment of every day since you were born so something is going on when you are ill. Sometimes you just need a good rest but anyway that is another subject. The reason we know that these changes happened is that the words that encapsulated the idea of mañana in the English language have fallen out of the vocabulary. We had words for the ‘do something tomorrow leave it today’ and ‘have a rest’ but because of the Protestant work ethic and then the Industrial Revolution and then the media particularly television we have been driven and then indentured in order to conform.

The business opportunity here is simply going with what people expect and you see this in everything from the health industry and self-improvement whether it is an App which helps you run a marathon with Mo Farah or getting into shape with whoever and so on.

We as artists need to think subversively otherwise what the hell are we doing this for? If you really wanted to make money you should be working in the city not trying to make money playing the guitar or the drums and if you want stardom then you really need something to say or be so pretty as a man or a woman that really you are selling your art by how nice your backside is.

The idea of going to music college, Brit school, BIMM or anywhere is maybe just a case of ‘if you can you should’ but of course now you can do this online for very little money, you can even get the qualification. What you really need is to be known, but that my friend is something for another day.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk   A Rock music summer school for just three days with the tricks of the trade no qualifications needed.

Maybe we are all Jacob Marley’s ghost deep down.

Over the Christmas period I watched several versions of A Christmas Carol. My mother used to read this to me most Christmases when I was a child and therefore have a connection to it, but this year I noticed something else about the story.

Marley’s ghost carries chains forged by his greed and he warned Scrooge that his chains were longer and heavier because of Scrooges behaviour however on reflection it isn’t just about his miserliness.  I started to read into this something about the nature of the materialism, because in a strange sort of way the ghost of Christmas present and the subsequent redemption of Scrooge which leads to him becoming another person is in essence about how he deals with the money.

The ghost of Christmas present is almost some godlike figure like a Jupiter as expressed by the Romans, that of bountifulness if not over indulgence, not about having nothing, but having plenty. What Scrooge does with his money is part of his redemption.

So it is more about the material being a tool not possessing us but us possessing it. Now I realised that this is the same situation with technology in that at first we use it then it uses us and that is the dilemma and the risk for everything including A.I.

Let me explain, Hendrix could make the effects pedals do what he had in his head, after that people bought the pedals to sound like Hendrix so they were being controlled if you like by the technology instead of making it do something else, something different.

This is what happens with systems, money and ideas; they end up controlling us and in that way Scrooge was being controlled by money like it had an intelligence of its own possessing him and that is exactly what happens with ideas and technologies, they act like they have a will of their own. Very strange, but phrasing things in that way might help us deal with problems, creating something outside ourselves having agency over us but separate from us. Consciousness and reality are slippery things and sometimes we need to be more slippery than them to regain control. 

Maybe it is just a series of ideas that are running us but ideas with their own agency and consciousness. This is something that seems plausible in certain lines of scientific enquiry at the moment.

So the question is what do you need to redeem yourself from? Do you sabotage your own success for instance and what ideas do you want to take root to make you change and become successful?

I will be organising some podcasts to look at how people make a success of what they do, I have a number of musicians that are recorded already and  I will be expanding that to artists and entrepreneurs. The aim is for you to achieve something either by using the podcasts or being more involved with a premium membership which I am currently working on so I can teach you material like NLP that I have found very useful to the creative process.

So here is to the Unchained Melody ……….

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  Rock school with a difference  

Is there a change a coming?

Teaching a musical instrument goes through many twists and turns over the years, instruments can go in and out of fashion and the numbers of pupils can go up and down.

The competition has always been there and that also changes form as well. At the moment the iPhone, various gaming and the general influence of online sharing are the main areas of completion.

Sometimes these become an ally as in the case of something like Guitar Hero or film music that is retro or instrument based such as School of Rock or The Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack that helps to give a boost to the number of pupils that want to have lessons. I sense a change however with the ability of many to concentrate for long enough to learn an instrument. Maybe it has always been like this and only now I am seeing it but this has been noticed by others as well.

Every problem in business is an opportunity so focusing on the possibility of children developing their ability to concentrate could be a good business angle. I have a friend who uses djembe drumming at big corporate events to get people off their mobile phones. When they turn up there is a big drum sitting in their chair and the first hour they are involved in teambuilding workshop and by the time it is completed the phones stay in their pockets for the rest of the day.

I am not entirely convinced about the future of teaching within certain schools especially in the grammar school system in Kent where the pressure is on for them to achieve high marks in their academic exams. The pupils and parents are fearful of not doing enough revision and therefore the instrumental lessons often take a back seat when really they could be helping them to relax in-between periods of exam revision.

There was an article recently in the Washington post talking about the slow death of the electric guitar saying that sales have plummeted over the last few years. Now there may be an element of ‘The reports of my death have been grossly exaggerated ‘ to this and we do not really know whether people are just playing more acoustic guitars or whether they are becoming more savvy about buying second-hand guitars  for instance. What I will say is that the general flow of new pupils seems to be changing although the guitar still outperforms most other instruments, certainly within independent schools, and its main rival now seems to be the drums and not the piano.

The form of teenage rebellion which was always included the guitar maybe just now is taking a back seat to video blogging or even podcasting; could this be the natural development in the cult of the individual?

But how does that influence us as musicians either as performers or teachers? Could playing a musical instrument for many people be just too much like bloody hard work and because we are in a culture of nihilism with a materialist aspect of thought now means there is just nothing worth thinking about as nothing is of any relevance? People do not need to find themselves because there isn’t anything there from that viewpoint and that was certainly something that music offered me was to discover something about myself through playing.

I do not think this has completely disappeared but the tide of opinion and the way that the media works seems to point in that direction and maybe instead of running a rear-guard action on this we should be fighting a guerrilla war, a bit like the women who go out doing guerrilla knitting. Instead of surrounding street furniture with crocheted colourful fluffy bits of artwork, we should write a song certainly this happened in the 60s with the protest movement and we certainly have things to protest about at the moment if we just look up from the iPhone.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of playing in a band

Hustle, magic, music and create.

Is the only way to find yourself as a musician now is to throw caution to the wind and do what musicians did in the past and get out there and hustle or do magic?

This is a little bit of a thought experiment where we look at the prospect of the media control gradually killing music. We thought it was the record companies that were controlling us but actually it was bigger than that it was social.

When I started in music I was told that it was a ridiculous idea to think that one could make money as a musician but now we have courses on it as if there is a career path, no, it does not have a career path; it is more like the entrepreneur or gambler, the risk taker, the chancer. How do you teach that in college? Here is how you write a hit song! Rubbish, you might be able to analyse the hit song and do something like that but what about the anomalies of which there are many in music and art they not only break the rules but they are so frequent that they are the rule.

So let us look at this another way for a change; look at the trader the person looking for the idea the trade that will make the money. For this we will look into the world of chaos magic, the strange world of the crazy, the impossible (in scientific terms) but the growing realm of the magician.

The West accounts for about let us say 6% of the world population and in this part of the world who apparently believe in the rational, logical modern way of seeing things and then there is the rest of the world where the majority of the population believe in the other world whether that is the mystical, spiritual or magical. 

Now the view point in that non-western world is the reality of this world can be changed radically by some form of intervention that bends or breaks the way the world works. So for our thought experiment let us say that the majority of the world actually thinks like this and it is us who are out of step.

Now let us ask a simple question, are we as artists limited by rational thinking? I would say that we are. It is in the word ration after all we do not say let us think abundantly. I would also ask, are people practical and functional people in other countries? And the answer to that is yes whether you agree or not with their beliefs. So why do they believe in something that does not work? 

I would suggest that it does, whether it is real or not. What holds us in the west is what believe is possible. If we believe it is not we are casting a spell on ourselves? If we believe it is true then the possibility and probability changes if that is the case and that is why we need to hustle because we want to nudge probability in our direction and that is one of the ideas of chaos magic that you want to look for the small victories that encourage strange synchronicities like the call that you sensed was coming, the person that you meet by chance, this may be the real things of ‘magical thinking’ instead of what we normally think of which is winning the lottery. 

We as artists need those breaks just like the gambler and the entrepreneur so think radically look for opportunity do something strange that courts that possibility, try something that you believe in or something that you could believe in, for instance if you have a favourite artist living or dead ask them in a ritualistic way to help. You can even try someone that is a character in a song like Ziggy Stardust, it worked for Bowie!  if you do not believe that Bowie was into magic then think again, if you like the Vikings call on their deities maybe use runes to draw an intention make a weird symbol that implies a meaning similar to the symbols that Led Zeppelin used on the fourth album or the one that Prince used you know the one that he had as a guitar.

If you want to go deeper have a look at the Sergeant Pepper album and check out the people in the collage, find the mystics and magicians in there and read up on them

Ladies and gentlemen I give you the circus of the unreal, let us leave the desert of the real behind and let us create by changing our minds………….

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  three days of playing in a band

When Bach climbed out of bed..

‘There is a story of a student who once asked Bach how he created so many wonderful melodies. The question seemed to fox Bach. He is supposed to have replied that he did not know. He simply stepped on them when he climbed out of bed.’

The story about JS Bach is a recurring theme which you can find whenever you speak to a great artist and musician about how they do what they do. The recurring refrain is one of, ‘I don’t know’ or ‘That’s easy I just do whatever comes into my head’. There seems to be a detachment from the intellectual process that we assume they have been using to a more instinctive process.

It was also true that JS Bach did not compose from the keyboard but from his head, the idea that a sound could be fully formed in your mind seems impossible to those who cannot do it, however the point that many of the musical greats had this ability to just know something without having to find it is also common.

I think that the map that we are using is created by the way that we learn and it is not the same as the map that people with this type of ability use. The unconscious ability to create is something rarely discussed in the education system and in many cases as in maths it is actively discouraged by saying that the correct answer is still invalid if your workings are not shown. However one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century Srinivasa Ramanujan did not know how he achieved his answers believing them to come from a goddess so the workings are more to do with the evidence of the journey than of the arrival, the arts need more of the medieval aspect of revelation where a piece of work can arrive fully formed.

There is a way to develop a skill of listening, ok it may not produce a work like the St Matthew Passion but it will bring out the creativity that one has. You can just start by listening in your mind to a tune that you already know and then have it appear with a different instrument playing that melody. For instance imagine hearing Happy Birthday, first of all being sung and then hear it again being played by trumpet. The next step is to make up a melody as a variation of something that you know, because those things are already in your head from what you have already experienced and you mind will present sounds that conform to various protocols otherwise it will not sound musical. So change Happy Birthday developing the tune in different ways in your mind.

I encourage pupils to be led by what they hear and not just by muscle memory or by what they regurgitate. I think this is very important because the unconscious responds much quicker and more efficiently to hearing and feeling than it does by seeing. So sing ideas, play with the ideas, be crazy with them, be playful and imagine yourself into the space that melodies come free and you are an open vessel to musical ideas that are already there one just needs to let them out.

Vic Hyland

www.bluescampuk.co.uk rock summer school