Imaginaaatiiioonnnnn!

There is something gloriously profound about the world of imagination: everyone has access to it, anything can occur, it is purely uncensored (unless you choose to censor it) and it is totally and utterly free. However it can produce awful, awful pieces of tripe like this:

Yes, I drew that. I started drawing the hairline of someone who was preaching and this is what it turned into. While I question what the hell my mind was thinking there is perhaps a deeper and more meaningful idea that this drawing stands for. There is no true aesthetic judgement that can be made. WOW, I'm a freaking genius, I came up with that all by myself. No, of course many people have proposed something similar. That is after all the philosophy of the noise scene:

While some don't like one thing, others love it. Unfortunately you do find certain... snobs... who in their attempt to live out the 'no aesthetic judgement' philosophy end up succumbing to aesthetic judgement themselves. You hear it all the time in metal circles, 'Justin Bieber is crap, metal is real music!', 'That stuff in the charts isn't music, listen to classic rock, that is real music!'

Now while some of these folk are making a personal statement it can often come across as an attempt to make objective something which cannot be. I oppose certain types of music (generally the use of autotuning etc) on bases other than aesthetic which I will address in a future post. This is what is so utterly magnificent about imagination. All of these songs (well,most of them... you can always admire the computers...) are the product of either individual or corporate imagination. Sure, you often also need the technical skill, talent and soul to perform and record those musical ideas but they have first been birthed out of the mind of either one or a group of human beings. 

I refuse to decry anything which has been birthed out of the mind of another human unless it diminishes the development of other humans (which I think autotuning etc does) or unless I make it clear that my opinion is purely subjective. The human mind is an incredible thing...

So I urge you, next time you sit and listen to a piece of music to not think about how technically gifted the musicians are, not to think about what a wonderful voice the singer/artist has but rather to consider this: Everything of meaning that you are hearing on that record was first birthed, conceived, manipulated and formed by and in a human mind. It is only because of a mind that you have the privilege to experience the sounds that you are hearing. I often wondered why I loved music so much and why I refuse to be confined to any stigma, stereotype or genre; I think I have found my reason.

For now I leave you with love,

The Rambler
Follow @BenMartinBass

Beginning of the End

It is the Friday before the new students turn up to Moorlands Bible College, I have started a fresh blog, we have new housemates, I am back to playing bass and on top of all that I am now a third year student. This is the beginning of the end! 

As I sit here in my cupboard room listening to the dulcet tones of Mayhem's 'De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas' I am reminded of the day when I first arrived to the campus. At that time I was living in halls, had only visited the college once for my interview in August and really did not know what I was going in to. To be totally honest I didn't particularly know what the course I would be studying involved and wasn't nearly 100% on why I was there. 


I remember walking through the corridors with my meagre belongings thinking to myself, 'I'm really not going to find anyone here who likes metal, comic books and the bass am I. This is going to be a lonely three years...'. It turns out I found someone who liked one of the three, a couple of people are/were kind of into bass (maybe not as obsessively as I can be but you have to take what you can get in these situations) and semi-found someone who was into metal of some form. 


To be honest though, there is little that can knock your confidence in who you are more than being in a place where the individual aspect of your personality can't really thrive. Now don't get me wrong, that isn't to say that people don't want to let it thrive, just that when people are simply unable to passively (or, dare I say it, actively!) nurture a part of someone's identity the rest of the psyche can begin to question its validity. Curiously, it seems that the most important part of my identity, that which is rooted in Jesus Christ, is the one which should be thriving the most in this environment. It is, however, a constant struggle to feed that into the dying parts of who I am because the feeding line is a complex one. When something is so deeply rooted (metal for example) and it is unable to be nurtured effectively within the context of the deeper core (Christ) everything begins to suffer. 


We are a relational people, this is not a post encouraging people to attempt the nurture of personalities which they cannot effectively relate to but rather to suggest a new approach. 


When you recognise something within a person which you perhaps perceive as lonely, rather than either ignoring it or *shock horror* mocking it in a jovial manner think about the impact your words or lack thereof are having on that person. If you feel able, maybe ask them something about it, appear interested in something that they are rarely able to talk about or that you know they might be desperately wanting to talk to someone about (be it a gig, a new computer game, a new album, book, date, whatever). You don't need to be over-sensitive, most people can take a jibe or a stereotype, but don't let it overstay it's welcome. There is always a line to these things.


On the note of nurturing, metal and being relational there is always a chance that someone is going to show up in the new intake of first years who I can invite round to listen to metal with me. It's unlikely but you never know! It's going to be interesting next week, I think I'll post tomorrow discussing 'Moorlands Orientation Week Protocol' which could prove controversial!


For now I leave you with love,


The Rambler
Follow @BenMartinBass

(Obscura - The Anticosmic Overload)

Bass Sausage Sadness

As some of you know, I am a bass player, not by profession but by love and passion! As I have, over the last few months begun to fall in love all over again with this most magnificent of instruments I have come across a very sad fact... What were once fairly dexterous little bass sausages are now limp little carrot sticks of sadness!! My fingers, my wrists and my forearms have fallen so out of shape that I am ashamed to call myself a bass player. Where once I could slap for England, I can now barely make it through the exercises I used to frequently use. Where I used to be able to play some obscure patterns and grooves, I've just lost it!

No Surprises... Creep! (Originally posted on 18/06/11)

Those of you who are total music nerds will have instantly recognised the very subtle reference to two Radiohead songs in the title of this post. During the course of this day I have continued to attempt to get a few thousand words of my New Testament essay written and have continued to fail. I keep coming back to these two songs or rather I have kept coming back to them, especially today. Creep seems to especially describe how I have  been feeling of late; I mean, there is more but let's not go there.

Human beings rarely see themselves in a positive light, it isn't how we are and it most certainly is not our nature. Occasionally we find someone who tells us how it is, doesn't beat about the bush, exposes you for who you are even if that exposed person is the opposite of who you always thought you were. Once you are faced with a true mirror image of yourself you have a choice, do you ignore it or do you keep looking at that mirror, see yourself for who you really are?

What do you see? On that rare occasion where you've looked into the mirror at the correct angle what do you see?

But I'm a creep
I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don't belong here...

That's what I tend to see. I am going to pre-empt posts and say that I think when we all look at ourselves we see something along these lines, maybe it looks more like this...

But I'm a fool
I'm not who I thought I was
Why do I bother doing this?
When I see my true face?

Okay it doesn't rhyme and maybe I associate myself more with the first one but you get my point, we all have a Creep style chorus which defines our true reflection. How do we get around this? How do we stop this, can we change it?
Recently I have questioned the ability we have to change it, I am a creep and I am a weirdo, I will never know what I'm doing here but we can certainly try to look at ourselves in a better light, maybe get some surgery. We will all have our No Surprises moments, some of us will have more than others, but despite those moments we all have this innate desire to keep living and to keep improving on the reflection.

This is a post to say that whatever you see in that reflection, whoever you really are, however ashamed of that reflection you may be, sift through it. Find the good in who you really are. Sometimes you will find very little, but hold onto that little you have. The whole point of sifting for gold is that you get rid of an immense load of dirt but end up with a few gold nuggets which are worth more than a hundred thousand palettes of that horrible silt and mud you saw when you picked that sieve up. Sift for the gold... It will hurt your arms and you may not find a lot of it but just keep going, get rid of the dirt, expose the gold and then you'll be happy to look in the mirror.

For now, I leave you with love

The Rambler

Why I Listen to Noise (originally posted on 15/02/11)

I receive much criticism, both tongue-in-cheek and serious, for the music I listen to. I seem to have reached a stage of notoriety in some circles of peers for the extremity of certain bands and artists I choose to enjoy. I decided to dedicate this post to defending and explaining why I listen to certain types of music and, more importantly, why music is wholly subjective.