So this is it.  After almost a year in the making (but mostly in the waiting), the Zaadz Visionary Music community has finally started to walk the talk.  Our first group project, The Dream Is Valid:  A Benefit Compilation for Kiva.org, featuring sixteen awesome songs and one awesome painting by ZVM members, is now available at Omstream.com for whatever you're willing to pay.

Every cent of profit from its "name your price" sales go directly to sustainable business microloans in the developing world.  It's what I call "putting play to work":  the artists and distributor all get exposure, the audience gets beautiful music, and the poor get fed by our entertainment money.  This album is Exhibit A in the case for the perfect complimentarity of art, sustainability, and business.  While doing what we are already doing, with the resources and infrastructure we already have, we can rewire our culture to yield more for everyone.

Kiva.org's president, Premal Shah, had this to say:

“The support and generosity of this community of musicians, and everyone who purchases the album at Omstream, can make a real difference in the lives of the poor who may not otherwise have access to needed capital to build their businesses so that they can send their children to school, afford medical care, and pull themselves out of the poverty cycle.”

Needless to say, it's been incredibly satisfying to watch Zaadz Visionary Music rally together and make this happen.  Here's the ZVM press release:

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At Zaadz Visionary Music, we are motivated by our belief in the power of music to effect positive change.  Music has always been a unequaled organizer of people - over one hundred million dollars is spent on music every day in the United States.  That's an enormous pool of resources and attention that could be harnessed to make the world a better place while still enjoying ourselves.  When musicians give their creative gifts in support of loving effort, and audiences exercise their purchasing power to support that effort, all of us get to help and have fun at the same time - to "put play to work."

Our first group project is this benefit compilation for Kiva.org - an organization that arranges microloans for entrepreneurs in developing nations.  Everyone involved, including our kind hosts at Omstream, has relinquished their profit from the sales of this album so it can go directly to empowering sustainable business practices in local economies all over the planet.  Not just once, but over and over - as our microloans are repaid and album sales continue, this compilation will be the center of an ever-expanding wave of global support.

The Dream Is Valid is a reminder to not just rest in peace, but to act from it - because even if this life is an illusion, it's the only one we have.  And now, The Dream Is Valid for many more of the hardworking people in the developing world, who have a new ally in their struggle against the tide of globalism.

But as much as this is a project for the greater good, it is proof that socially-conscious music can sound awesome, too.  It's been an honor to work with the diversity of incredible talent represented on this collection - visionary musicians, every one of them.  Enjoy the tunes, and rest easy knowing that your entertainment money is making a difference.

love
Michael
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...And here's the gallery of everyone who contributed to the compilation.  Listen to their music, then buy it.  Send them friend invitations, and offer them hugs.  If you want your music on the next one, or you want to help promote this or future efforts, email me.  Because this is what it's all about.

Hopefully I don't have to do much convincing to establish with the readers of this blog that the computer is indeed a legit instrument.  In fact, by some accounts, the computer might be the first global folk instrument.  Those who still disagree probably do so because so much of contemporary electronic music is composed in sequencers and "performed" by pressing "play."  Pre-recorded accompaniment is more like a painting than a dance - pretty passé, in an age when ubiquitous recording technology has restored the novelty of a live performance (thus the boom of live painting by artists such as Kris D on stage at concerts).

But this is the exception, not the rule.  The first true electronic instrument, the theremin, requires just as much performance nuance as any other member of the orchestra - and for decades, conducters flirted with it as a worthy replacement for the first violin.  In many ways, analog synthesizers require more instrumental expertise than the piano, not less.  And today, there is a whole new generation of musical controllers that offer artists a more intimate and organic relationship with computer music software.

One such instrument is Toshio Iwai's Tenori-on, a kooky little sequencer grid that lets its user get inside the beats while they are playing (Toshio might be most renowned for designing the super-cool Nintendo Gameboy DS music game Electroplankton).  Like with so many new instruments, it's a little difficult to find the words that describe exactly how it works; but basically, the Tenori-on is a 16-track musical control and display surface...  See if this example doesn't stretch your powers of inference:

Thankfully, Toshio is gracious enough to give an in-depth explanation of its workings here (part one) and here (part two).  And here's a video of the inventor himself delivering a solo performance on his adorable new device (notice how cool it is that you can see the blinking buttons through the open backplate of the machine):


Tenori-on has six different programs, which means six different ways to relate to its 216-button grid.  Here's an artist painting sound onto the grid in "score mode," which isn't as euphemistic as it seems (although it does allow for Beavis & Butthead moves like this one):


Yeah, pretty cool.  And notice that it a free-standing device - you don't have to plug it into a computer or a wall.  Which is to say, it'd make a delightful travel companion (like the ukulele I bought on a lark in Hawaii - or the kalimba I bought after torturous delibaration in the Ozarks, of all places).  But before you rush out to buy one (and good luck, anyway:  they're currently only for sale in the UK), make sure to check out the even-handed reviews here and here.

...And consider that the Tenori-on has direct competition from (some might say, "is a rip-off of") the Monome - an earlier controller, designed by Brian Crabtree and Kelli Cain, that is superficially similar in that it is a blinky little music box, but significantly different in several important ways.  Foremost among them is that while the Tenori-on carries all of its own sounds and programming, the Monome is a total blank slate.  It is not a standalone musical device and contains no sounds or code of its own - which is bad if you don't like lugging around your laptop, but good if you like using your own sounds or exploiting open source software to do goofy stuff like run Conway's Game of Life (demo on the Monome homepage, here).  Brian and Kelli's "about us" page reads like a design manifesto:

"we aim to refine the way people consider interface.  we seek less complex, more versatile tools: accessible, yet fundamentally adaptable. we believe these parameters are most directly achieved through minimalistic design, enabling users to more quickly discover new ways to work, play, and connect. we see flexibility not as a feature, but as a foundation."

The kind of minimalism that extends to refusing the decadence of capital letters, apparently, but also enables a musical revolution.  After Brian explains a bit about its history (and before Kelli talks about their cool packaging and weirdo felt-calculator-pillow-instrument) check out how he uses it to live-sample and remix a keyboard loop (!):


Here're a few demos of the Monome at work (at play):



The designers work out of their loft and can't possibly make enough of them to meet demand, so they do most of their sales through kits.  With this "you build it, you hack it" mentality, people like Sound Tribe Sector 9's David Phipps end up creating their own custom models (good story about that here), such as this one:


Cool as hell.  Too bad about the cheesy guitar riff, but otherwise a magnificent proof of principle.  Notice how he's split off a piece of the board as a meta-control region, while the rest of it remains a step sequencer.  I love blinky things.  Especially when they make music.

Again, one thing that sets the Monome apart from the Tenori-on in a good way is that it will work with whatever wacky software you design for it.  Open source being the way of the future (at least, according to the present - open source social networking platforms, open source music, and even open source biology), techno-prophet Kevin Kelly of Wired Magazine argued in his excellent book New Rules For The New Economy that it's the most flexible products that will succeed.  Which is why I so enjoy seeing cool unanticipated applications people find for the Monome like these:


(And you can simulate the Monome on your Gameboy.)

Lastly, you can ditch the fancy sequencing and play it like an "instrument," believe it or not.  Its isomorphic button field liberates musicians from what the after-market innovator in this next video calls "the comforting tyranny of the keyboard" - basically, a major shortcut to learning music theory and exploring new tonal spaces:


So there you have it.  Regardless of whether you prefer a pricey but immersive toy or a demanding but illimitable canvas, both Tenori-on and Monome deserve a place in the pantheon of visionary instruments.  Both are changing the way we think and act about composition and performance.  Both open new realms of electronic sound manipulation, and - at least for me - both provide a strong enough argument that just because something looks like a Speak and Spell (or maybe a Lite Brite) doesn't mean it isn't a legitimate substrate for groundbreaking musical expression.

If you're still not convinced (ahem), however, this might be your anthem:

So I was interviewed for the first time, legitimately, a few weeks ago, by Bryan Flournoy (host of the podcast "Making It All Click!").  Bryan is a self-proclaimed intuitive and uses said guidance to find some wonderful interviewees.  He's also an incredibly nice guy (and, though he's slow to admit it, a talented lifelong musician).  For these reasons, it was an honor and a pleasure to talk with him about the history and future of Zaadz Visionary Music in this interview:

Bryan Flournoy interviews Michael Garfield

You can read more about the interview (which focuses on The Dream Is Valid, the new Kiva.org benefit compilation we just put out) on Bryan's blog, here:

Bryan Flournoy:  Today's Thought

I spend most of the hour elaborating on my "putting play to work" manifesto - the philosophical foundation for my love's labor at ZVM and the ideological underpinnings of The Dream Is Valid.  How I think music can sneak social responsibility under the radar and make it a powerful element of commerce.  Why I believe that the business of music can be just as important an engine of global benefit as conventional forms of service - if not more so.

I rattle on about other cool stuff, too - although I'm not sure what (Admittedly, I haven't listened to the interview yet, so don't know what he edited out), so you'll just have to listen to it yourself.  Enjoy!

I'm a huge fan of weirdness.  My favorite turtle is the matamata.  My favorite dinosaur is the Carnotaurus.  I'm in love with a girl who's four inches shorter than me with legs that are two inches longer than mine (oh, the strange math of bodies).

Maybe it has to do with all that time I spent with my fingers in electrical outlets when I was a child.  Whatever the explanation, the consequence is that I am unduly fascinated by a lot of things that don't make sense, or "shouldn't" make sense. 

One such thing is the harp guitar - which is exactly the bastard child it sounds like, bass harp strings and a full acoustic guitar in a single body, sharing a throat.  Why exactly it exists, I don't know.  Or maybe I do:  the same unceasingly quest for novelty that led to such innovations as:


But people can do awesome things with it (the harp guitar, not the hairy trout), and have apparently been doing so for over two hundred years. 

Like most people, I learned about the harp guitar via late acoustic weirdo (ie, visionary) Michael Hedges.  But he made it seem so normal - almost to the point of being landscape, antique, tradition - that I promptly forgot about it.  And then I got an add request from Otha Major on myspace, and saw a video of him and Dave Powell playing a beatbox and harp guitar duet.  Now that's novelty!

But it gets better.  Because the song they were playing was "Axle F" - the theme song to Beverly Hills Cop!  Hot damn.  Here it is:


I know, right?  Actually though, I prefer this song - one of Powell's originals:

That said, however, the weirdness soon evaporated, leaving an even residue of respect.  It's this kind of non-normal collaborations that keep music fresh and interesting, even without radical redesigns and quantum leaps.  They make it work so well that I forgot I was watching a mouth-drumming and chimera-box duo tear it up on retro kitsch.  My imaginary hat goes off to Dave and Otha for being so surprisingly unweird.