the timboucher experience

Last night, I attended the first Baltimore meeting of Time Travel Club, a creative ensemble dedicated to free-form indigenous urban music, as I’ve been calling it. Four members, including myself, were in attendance. Instruments included a variety of effects pedals, two small amplifiers, harmonica, drum pad, acoustic guitars, bass, some hand percussion, a couple of kids toys. Each of the four of us was coming to the gathering from a very different musical and aesthetic background, but with plenty of overlap in terms of our interests in things like electronics, musical and creative performance and our goals, relating to fostering a dynamic positive group interaction with interesting sounds and artistic collaboration. Jams were free-form and varied. My favorite was probably when we started chaining together effects pedals with some hard-edged electro drum sounds. We definitely reached some really cool moments of synaesthetic unity wherein I felt like I didn’t know which sounds were coming from which instruments or which performers because we had all melded together into these sort of sonic packets.

Looking forward to getting more people involved. One member offered to have us meet up at his place next time, and I’m still actively seeking venues for regular meetings, as well as for one-offs and special projects. Another member suggested we use tactics like bringing a bunch of equipment to a public place or restaurant, plugging in and firing up until we get kicked out. There was some talk of politics in performance and music on a general and Baltimore-specific level, along with local “scene” information dumps and even a bit of tawdry gossip. Lots of discussion about how best to conduct this sort of loose knit creative social organization, how to avoid assholes, poor organization, etc etc. And lots of discussion of creative inspirations and sharing of reference points and ideas that each of us were into.

I’d say, overall, that for the first meeting of a totally ad hoc group with creative anomaly as its goal, our first meeting was a smashing success. Riding my bike home through the sleet, I got to thinking of next steps. I want to build on the momentum we’ve been developing, and spread the love to other sectors. A bunch of people who contacted me via Craigslist and local friends and musicians weren’t able to make it last night, so I was thinking of holding another Time Travel Club meet-up at either my house or someplace nearby later this week - possibly with a totally alternate crew of people involved. I really like the idea of having not just ONE central Time Travel Club, but of having multiple totally autonomous groups and chapters: both on a city-wide level, as well as in other locations. We’ve already got members in Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis and I love the notion that all these different collectives would be operating both independently and collaboratively: with revolving casts and inter-changeable line-ups from place to place, and even neighborhood to neighborhood.

I was also reminded earlier today of a fantastic quote from musician Andrew WK about how he doesn’t care why people like his music, just that they like it:

That’s one of the most important things here: that nobody is turned away and nobody is left out and nobody is judged based on how they look or what they like or what they don’t like or even why they like it. There’s no wrong reason to like my music. There’s no wrong reason to like anything. This music is freedom. It allows anyone else the freedom to do whatever they want, and it accepts that unconditionally. And it continues to just want to make you happy. All you need to know is, “Do I feel this in my stomach? Is this running through my veins? Does this go up my spine? Does this blow my mind to pieces? Does this affect me?” That is real. That is physical evidence, and you don’t need to even question it, or even understand. That’s why I would never question why someone liked this or why someone’s smiling or why someone is happy. It could be for one of a million reasons, some that people think I would think are bad or against me. Life’s just way too short for me to qualify and quantify how this can make someone feel. Music, above all, is huge and magnificent and so much bigger than me or any one person. Someone says, “What if someone thinks you’re just some kind of stupid joke?” And I say, “I don’t care. I want to make them happy. If that makes them happy, if that’s what puts a smile on their face, so be it.” It’s for everybody, for every reason.

This is very much in keeping with my goals for Time Travel Club, of which I’m trying to be more of a facilitator and connector than a leader: serving the interests of others involved, trying to create effective and engaging experiences where everybody gains something (win-win situations, non-zero sum gaming, etc) and with the idea that music is truly a universal language - something which can be shared across diverse social groups, ethnicities, cultures, regions, nationalities, even across species and systems of intelligence. Would be really cool to be able to involve non-human members in TTC at some point: singing birds, dogs barking and playing, trees and vegetables, rocks, whatever else we can rustle up.

I’m only half-joking when I write “DOWNLOAD THE FUTURE” as the title to this post. The non-linear “I can do anything” part of my brain actually kind of believes that if I tune my intentions and actions with this project and get myself out of the way of what’s happening, then we really can tap into the future, almost like its some kind of information bank waiting to be accessed, and start actively downloading into our time and our reality the types of sounds, performances, experiences and events we want to see happen and which we want to be a part of. It seems like it’s really just as simple as doing it, one foot in front of the other.

And now for a bunch of images I’ve been collecting which need to be cleaned off my plate to make room for the future:

• For you to download
• Use your computer to protect you from black magic
• Passive Browsing
• Download AVI Movie Codecs
• File Shearing