3 Organic Music Cuts Served with a Free-range Emotion Medley & a Word Salad, Infused with Young Feels and Matured Memories
Genji Siraisi offers up a juicy main course of original music and the stuff of legend
One of the most transcendant moments of my life occurred while holding hands in a seemingly unending chain, singing my heart out in the musician section of a large festival audience, front and center at the edge of the stage, with Genji and members of his band Groove Collective, on a hot summer evening in Baltimore, while Gladys Knight and the Pips sang, “Landlord” and encouraged us to join them. So much love in that moment and space that it sustains me still.
That was the 90s, when I lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and worked in indie film, which indirectly accounts for how Genji and I know each other. We’ve been friends a long time, but despite several efforts, over decades, to pull off a collaboration, this piece for FED is our first.
It’s a juicy main-course affair, and I hope you take time and space to relish the outpouring of vulnerability and access that Genji offers us via three original music pieces—the first he’s shared publicly in more than ten years—plus a first-person account of life at the center of a NYC music scene, and New York City scene, that few access directly while all of us have heard about it, movies are made, and well, it’s legend. He pairs this raw sparkle with the intimate inside of family and a life lived and living.
“Landlord” begins, You’re the landlord, and the keeper, of our love. May we all be landlords and keepers of collective love. May it fill us up with all we need to do what needs doing.
Take a big bite, y’all. Genji’s cookin’.
Big love, Ashley
I have come to realize that growing up in the 1970s and 80s in New York City has left me with a certain amount of post-traumatic stress disorder. Those were the days of wilding, blackouts, and the economic downfall that led to cuts for all public services: police, garbage collection, fire departments, and street repairs. Most of the city was deeply interconnected with systems of corruption that had been in place and evolving since the days of Tammany Hall, probably longer.
I became aware of the outside world during the ongoing and emerging battles for gay rights, civil rights, and equal rights. The soundtrack was the birth of salsa, disco, punk and hip-hop. My mother’s closest friend, a well-respected art critic who happened to be gay, was stabbed to death when he brought the wrong person home. There were still a lot of street gangs in Brooklyn, a vestige of the 50s. They were mostly turf gangs and it was always wise to be aware of who’s turf you were on when you entered any block.
When I was about eight, I watched a teenage friend on my block get brutally beaten by a gang leader with a sawed off shotgun. I was standing about two feet behind him. The gang leader was with about fifteen others armed with pipes, bats, and chains seeking retribution for a prank by another neighborhood gang. My friend was collateral damage.
My youth is peppered with stories like this. In those days, baseball bats and crowbars were in every Brooklyn car trunk just waiting to be dramatically retrieved for just about any reason. First-hand accounts in our circles included home invasions, coke deals gone wrong, murder, hidden walls filled with firearms, corrupt police officers, mob connections, and local teen girls intimately involved with grown drug dealers.
I became a punk rocker and experimented with all forms of mind-altering substances. Our band was playing the infamous Max’s Kansas City, CBGBs, Peppermint Lounge and other Manhattan dives when I was fifteen. We brought all our Brooklyn friends.
Back then anyone from a borough outside of Manhattan was considered “Bridge and Tunnel,” and everyone from Brooklyn either had a Brooklyn or foreign accent. But, we had Manhattan connections and found ourselves able to maneuver our way through a lot of spaces. I grew up code switching...it took at least six different personas to get through my childhood.
Our group of juvenile delinquents was a loose-knit collection of thirty to forty teens and young adults of varying backgrounds and ages. It included rich kids, hooligans, and street dealers. The roughest older guys, who had been to Rikers Island, would basically rob us of our drugs through unspecified intimidation. Some bragged about luring gay men into public bathrooms and beating and robbing them for kicks. These guys were not exactly friends, but you couldn’t stop them from hanging out, and you definitely didn’t want them as enemies! It was in one’s best interest that they knew and liked you.
I’ve always been a pacifist. I’ve never even been in a real fight, but I had a drawer full of make-shift, found, gifted, and stolen weapons that I collected for self-defense. I had brass knuckles, a switchblade, nunchucks, and clubs, even a blackjack, and I remember walking around for a while with a kitchen knife the length of my forearm up my sleeve. I handled zip guns though never owned one. If you don’t know, a zip gun is a one-shot gun made of simple household items from the hardware store. When AIDS and crack entered the picture, things became even more unhinged. I lost friends and neighbors to both.
Today, we live in a completely different world, but I could never have imagined that world I knew would ever change. It’s been difficult to assimilate these past experiences, especially trying to raise kids and survive in this totally different reality. Things pop into my mind that just wouldn’t make sense to anyone who wasn’t there. It all changed gradually; so, you didn’t really notice until the stories seemed like bad dreams, but I know my fear, self-medication, and acts of self-preservation were real. And, I know I was once innocent and in my core, have always just been a scared child trying to survive, trying to understand what I’m supposed to do. What does the world require of me?
Of course, we all find ways to survive, and at that age, we even find joy no matter how bad things get. At age eleven, I was smoking cigarettes, hash, pot, and drinking alcohol, sniffing poppers (amyl nitrate), and by fifteen, had done cocaine, nitrous oxide, hallucinogens (window pane, micro dot, full moons, blue dragon, red dragon, mescaline, mushrooms, purple haze), pharmaceuticals (valium, Quaaludes, phenobarbital, various forms of speed), participated in a lot of sex, vandalizing, had had a few blackouts, and had witnessed a lot violence, accidents, petty crime, stupidity, homophobia, police corruption, misogyny, and racism, which was all on full unabashed public display with only rare moments of objection or documentation.
Somehow, I survived. I realize now, this was all just stuff, just things. They could have been anything—the joy just came from being young and alive. All those things were just the place I happened to be a kid. But, it is strange to think of those times as my fond childhood memories.
These days mortality is staring me in the face…again. But, for different reasons.
My father passed away a few years ago, and my mother, now 91, has completely lost her memory. We are not sure if she has days or months at this point, but at her rate of decline, a year seems miraculous. She was the matriarch of the family, driven by an academic career that led to many awards (including a MacArthur Fellowship, ed.), talks around the world, and books. My childhood played out to the soundtrack of an old Remington typewriter beating out a million words a minute in an abstract rhythmic counterpoint to the Thelonious Monk and Talking Heads we listened to in the living room.
My kids are both teenagers now, and it has stirred up a lot for me. Feelings about where I’m from, where I’m going, where they’ll end up, and my continuing quest for purpose and grace.
The three pieces of music I’ve included here fall into wildly different genres. One thing they have in common is they came to life with little effort over a short period, the majority and essence emerging in the first fifteen minutes or less. I’m not sure any are fully completed pieces.
I’ve plucked these from a backlog of hundreds of unreleased bits of audio in various forms that I’ve produced over the past dozen or so years. This may sound strange, but quite sometime ago, I lost interest in the industry of music and in attempting to please others, and thus, I have not publicly released any music under my name in over a decade.
That has been hard. I do want my work to bring joy to others, but I have determined it is of little use trying to figure out what other people want, and mostly just a distraction. I’ve always wanted to fit in but not sure I ever really have. An over-sensitive outsider trying to figure out what to do – in my mind I am still the four year old me, but I cannot be. It’s complicated, and these things are invariably subject to change over time.
Understanding what we really want when all outside influences are removed is very hard and, in the end, may be a fruitless and useless exercise — life encounters continue to influence our own points of view and tastes, and even how we see the past – all things that point to our own flexible reality, something we are loathe to believe but must face: Reality is in the perception of the beholder, and if even that can change over time, what is reality really?
Someday
The first piece of music I have included, “Someday”, is a very simple song that came together over an evening, just before the pandemic.
I mostly have very mundane dreams (like cleaning things), or nightmares (let’s not go there), but on occasion there are some good ones. In the case of “Someday” I dreamt I was talking to my deceased father who said we could fly, and we did. It was a good dream, just flying around the countryside with my dad.
My father was my hero and my champion. He exposed me to so much music and supported my development as a musician against all common sense. He was an artist, and understood the magic of art and people. Most of all, he understood me, and I think it probably saved my life. If I have any grace or sense of peace in this world, it comes from him. These are likely the most valuable things I have to pass on in this life.
It may be obvious listening to this piece that I am a huge John Lennon fan. I guess at this point I should say ‘was’ for multiple reasons. Actually, I’m not sure if it sounds anything like a John Lennon song, but that’s how I hear it. The Beatles were part of our family, as they were for so many. John and Yoko’s “Starting Over” was my and my high school sweetheart’s song. The news that he was shot was devastating – all he represented to me, and to the world, so senselessly destroyed. So I guess this song is really for my father and John and all those we loved who are no longer here:
“I was dreaming you were saying we could fly together and may never have to come down again. I was trying to remember what you once said – we all will be one someday, together, someday we will all be together, someday.”
SansaSong
Our second course, is made from a recipe inspired by music of many years, perhaps centuries or even millennia. I am very interested in music’s role throughout humanity as a uniting force that synchronizes our bodies and ideas. I became obsessed with the music of the Bayaka, an isolated African Pygmy tribe. Their music is communal and sounds completely natural as though born of the forest where they live. I guess it really was. You have to hear it to understand. I had no hopes of ever analyzing or learning their music, but on some visceral level I feel as though I fully understand it.
As mentioned, my father exposed me to a lot of music, and he collected many instruments. In particular I inherited all his kalimba, sansa, and mbira among others. If you’re not familiar with these, they are African “thumb pianos” of various size, shape and construction. One in particular was built using half of a large spherical gourde. The puppy I got for my ninth birthday, chewed this and many other items up. It still plays fine, just has a few teeth marks in it.
During the pandemic I recorded a long improvisation on it and found one particular part quite interesting, so I cut it into a repeating loop. I added a few other percussion instruments, but I started to realize that what I thought was just a simple melody in 6/8 time, on further analysis, was somehow inadvertently quite complex. I hope you will enjoy it as I did as a simple natural meditative musical-haiku-mantra. AND, if you want to dive into the post composition analytical deconstruction, read on!
The melody revolves over 17 cycles of three 16th notes. The last part recorded was a 16th note shaker pattern which was more difficult than expected and revealed this…
When playing a 16th note shaker pattern, typically the hand moves forward and back creating 16th notes. In a 6/8 context we accent the first forward of every six hits (or three cycles of two - back and forth). However, in this piece when it loops back to the top, the first accent falls on a backward stroke. This in and of itself is not that strange because we also tend to hear the second half of the 6/8 16th pattern accented on stroke four (a back stroke); so, alternating forward and back accent on the top of every three 16th notes (123456).
When it comes back to the top, the backstroke accent is now the ‘1’ not the ‘4’. On top of this, the phrase itself has a very subtle but confounding rhythmic tension against this. The first phrase sounds natural against the shaker. It is a bit syncopated with the 6/8 accents but when the motif repeats in the second phrase it is off by one 16th note. The second phrase without the shaker, or if no accents are present in the shaker, sounds fairly natural.
It’s a bit of an aural/rhythmic, illusion as the pickup note indicates a new ‘1’ or downbeat to the phrase. With the accents audible and present in mind, it creates a very uncomfortable tension which is then remedied leading into the third phrase whose quick pickup returns the perceived downbeat to its proper place, with the fourth and final phrase - in my mind a triumphant, relaxing and celebratory moment of fully realized 6/8 feel with complimentary accents.
I became slightly obsessed with this. Sometimes it felt so natural and simple, but when counting and thinking too hard, I was struggling to get through even two cycles! The melody was also not tuned to any scale or even to 440Hz or Western twelve tone pitches - I had just tuned it by ear to what I thought sounded good at the moment. So, when I tried to add a bass part it sounded awful. Then, I tried to just figure out the melody on the bass but without listening to it (at this point it was stuck in my head). I had something, but it wasn’t exactly right so I started the loop, and magically, this close melody in a random key fit perfectly! Maybe it’s just me, but other musician friends seemed to like it, even if they didn’t fully understand it either.
I guess the reason this piece means so much to me is that I have felt and heard many others say we are just conduits for music to come through us, and this really felt like that. I did very little, just stayed in the moment and did what seemed obvious at the time, but somehow, later it was this complex gift I had to work for and that kept giving back more than I put in.
It came from trying to do something purely naturally. I have never been one to want to compose difficult music for the sake of it. Surprisingly, unlike many drummers and musicians I’ve known, I kind of hate playing in odd time signatures especially when they feel gratuitous and unnatural. In fact, many great and popular songs have odd time signatures and sections, but they all sound natural. You don’t notice they’re in odd time until you count the beats.
My favorite example is “All You Need is Love” by the Beatles. Have you ever counted that out, probably not, why would you, unless you want to play it? Follow the lyrics and you’re fine – because it feels natural and not like a math problem. My point really is that music is a communal thing, it’s a natural thing. Complexity is built into the world, and we don’t really need to make it more complex for the sake of complexity, but only to support beauty, expression, and grace. That said, beauty is definitely in the eye, or ear in this case, of the beholder.
This is another simple piece with the utilitarian title, “SansaSong”. We accept what fits into our experience at that moment, based on our past exposure and the explanations we’ve come to believe or accept. The more people who share that experience, the more real the beauty feels, but it is nonetheless an abstraction manifested in the mind. There are people who love Death Metal; they find it beautiful…I do not, but that does not matter. Their love is stronger and more important than my dislike, and I’m certain that had I lived different experiences, I might love it too.
Music is a tool of synchronization. It is one of humans’ best evolutionary hacks. It synchronizes thought and ideas through stories, and transmitted sound synchronizes emotions, physical bodies in work, battle, dance, and love. Found in all known cultures music predates reading and writing and is likely a precursor to speech. It has been coopted by the church, the military, and nationalists among others; historically, just about every power structure has felt the need to control music in some way due to its ability to unify people and action.
I’ve recently been reading about the idea of ‘sonic flux’’ – the idea of sound as a constant stream that has existed before humans and continues on, the constant din of vibrations. The avant-garde filmmaker, artist, writer and photographer, Hollis Frampton sees all art as a process of extracting from this constant flux of light, sound, etc. Music producer Rick Rubin expresses a similar idea adding that we can never step into the same stream of creativity twice as it is constantly flowing and changing. I believe through creativity we can experience a form of magic – dipping into these streams. Historically, science has explained magic as just what we can’t yet measure or understand. With our limited spectrum of senses and field of vision, it is assured there’s still plenty of magic out there!!
We create our meals in a similar way, curating and extracting edibles from our constantly changing physical world. We are all right-sizing the universe to our capacity of existence to some degree all the time, whether we realize it or not. Maybe this is part of why the Information Age has felt so daunting. We’ve been given so much so quickly; we’ve been thrown into the stream, drowning in information. It’s becoming impossible to make sense of it all. Like an all-you-can-eat buffet, it’s probably not a good idea to try to eat everything!
To Be Alive
Our final course is an opulent smorgasbord of computer driven production by comparison to the first two. It is the oldest of these pieces. I can hardly believe it, but looking back, I started this in 2013, and it was still being worked on in 2019 – comparing the six years of reworking, little audibly changed.
In this piece I envisioned a solitary voice in a dystopian future discovering the beauty and fragility of the existence of life within the awesome power of the universe. Asking the question “what does it mean to be alive?” For me, it brings to mind the final scene of, Ridley Scott’s, Blade Runner. Coming to grips with our mortality is something we all must face - our impermanence, the beautiful flashes that we experience as life. A universal experience, but each also unique and solitary. I feel art, religion, and science are all part of our quest to understand, or perhaps to create, the purpose of our existence here. We’re all just visitors here “To Be Alive”.
P.S. Be sure to check out Genji’s Shepherd’s Pie and family recipe, which drops 4/18/21. And to learn more about Genji and FED’s entire Spring 2024 all-star line-up of musicians, artists, writers, growers, gleaners, cooks, and craftspeople headed your way this season, check out Special Guests.
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