LYRIC BOOK

Goodbye, 2008!

I'd say good riddance but there were some very good things that happened last year as well. Not gonna list the good/bad year-in-review here, you all know what is on that list- but there is one thing from last year i really, truly wish that i could undo.

I fucked up. A mistake anyone could have made. A permanent and un-fixable one.

I have always made a point of saving my work- music, drawings, writings, etc.. For instance, in 1997, when i was house sitting for Uncle Albert during their first six-week tour of Germany/Bosnia i made use of the recording studio and archived the 4+ hours of MIDI compositions that i completed to a digital multi-track ADAT tape deck so can mix them later. Shortly after the transfer EVERY sound source in my midi suite broke... Shwew!

SIDEBAR: For the non techy reader- MIDI is not music/sound/audio. It is a programming language that allows a composer to control a variety of sound sources simultaneously. Much like a player piano- a MIDI recorder is like a piano roll puncher- when the person plays the notes on the piano, holes are punched in the roll in the order played and, when the roll is put on a "player piano" it seems to "play" itself. With MIDI you can compose for multiple "player pianos"... But, these are not the notes themselves- only commands for when/which note is played. /SIDEBAR

So a couple years ago i took all those ADAT tapes to FoJammi's studio and transferred the multi track tapes to digital sound files i can work with on my home computer. Thanks to the new home studio technologies i have pretty much everything i have ever recorded in my life preserved for "the ages"... (like anyone else is gonna care- who the fuck am i kidding, really!?!? lol)

Back in the mid '80's began putting all my writing on a word processor. As life went along and i updated computer equipment i always transferred my writings along with everything else. It was in an ever expanding file called LYRIC BOOK. Whenever i needed to refer to it- it was always there.

In March of 2008 I purchased a 500 Gigabyte hard drive so that i could file away the ever growing psychotronics recordings and solo work. I did a very thorough job- also throwing out the redundant and superfluous. The whole process took about three days. Maybe it was too thorough...

January 1st, 2009 i wanted to have my first post be a favorite poem i had written called "69"... LYRIC BOOK was nowhere to be found. I have looked in every folder on every hard drive i have and to no avail. 30 years of writing erased.

I used to pride myself in being able to say i have no regrets. Well, now i have one.