Micro Essays on The Lisps’ sophomore LP Are We at the Movies?

I wrote a short essays about every track on "Are We at the Movies?" for InDigest Magazine. Read the full text at Indigest...

“Wear and Tear”
I wrote this song while watching a video on Facebook of a friend of a friend, someone who I had never met. In the video these kids were all picking up their friend from the airport. It was spring break or some kind of special trip. They are all in the car driving and they are so pumped to be right at the beginning of a vacation. I recently read that time seems to go faster as you get older because you have less new experiences. The video reminded me of that. I’ve since met the girl whose video it was. She is very nice. Her name is Ruth.

“Are We at the Movies?”
I was at a “self-help” seminar of sorts, with my wife (girlfriend at the time). We were feeling very weirded out. So many people are looking for help. And we were those people in that moment. We felt like we were looking at ourselves from above feeling simultaneously in need, entranced, and escaping something. Emily wrote on a piece of paper “are we at the movies?” she passed it to me. I wrote, “Yes.” Then she wrote, “I can feel it.” I don’t know if I’ve ever told my band that.

“Diamonds”
Producing and mixing this album has been one of the most intense, difficult and confusing creative processes I’ve ever undergone. Part of the reason is that since I recorded The Lisps’ previous album I’ve spent six semesters teaching recording, studio production, and mixing at Bloomfield College in NJ. I’ve filled my students’ heads with so many ideas, rules, facts, options, and opinions that I was nearly paralyzed in the attempt to make my own album. I think actually that my standards and expectations have been so high for my students that I felt terrified at the possibility that I couldn’t live up to my own demands. I mixed this track at Bloomfield and when I came out of the studio several of my students were in the next room listening. They said, “that sounds great!” I was so relieved.

“Singularity”
Ok, I’m a trans-humanist. I am a techno-optimist. I’m an extropian. And while I think Ray Kurzweil goes overboard in a lot of his assuredness and orthodoxies, I generally believe in an analysis of technology that says: Technology is a natural extension of biological evolution that is progressing and accelerating at an exponential pace. I wrote this song after reading Accelerando by Charles Stross. Finally I could really imagine an economy not based on scarcity, what it would be like to dematerialize into pure data, or how it would feel to “fork” into a second version of yourself. I wrote this song because I think that people should start thinking even more about the ethics and ramifications of the technological explosion we are currently witnessing. I think we are in for some beautiful future shock.

Read the rest at HERE...