darkness is your candle

First of all, I’m not in a resort, or on a tour, or even thinking about what comes tomorrow – except perhaps surfing… but I’m slowing down a bit and taking ‘pura vida’ to heart. It means “Pure Life”, and is meant as a sort of latin corollary to the more Americanized “stop and smell the roses”. Pura vida has actually become more of a marketing pitch here in Costa Rica… in fact there are quite a few signs selling various things with that slogan prominently displayed, even one of the places I’m staying at is called ‘casas pura vida’. But I can see where it came from… there’s a different attitude here in Costa Rica… something slower and more savory than in the US.

Speaking of savory, did I mention that people love chicken here? I mean they REALLY love it. Besides the fact that there are live chickens running around… it’s advertised EVERYWHERE! It’s like being in a weird chicken obsessed twilight zone where McDonalds even promotes their “chicken wings” in San Jose, and there are chicken restaurants every few miles… even in the middle of nowhere. Crazy.

I’m in Santa Teresa as I write this and I’ve been surfing a lot the last 4 days… twice a day, in the morning and at sunset. I’m sore from using muscles that I don’t normally use… and happy from lots of sunshine, ocean breezes, and gorgeous beaches. Here on the equator the sun rises at 5:30am and sets at 5:30pm every day of the year. It’s an interesting feeling to wake up early and go to sleep early so much because I tend to be a bit of a night-owl.

I’m renting two places this week, a large house with a pool and covered rooftop in Malpais… and a villa near the beach in Santa Teresa. The house is pretty secluded, set back in the jungle on 5 acres … but a short drive to town. The villa is small-ish, but right on the beach. This morning I woke up, grabbed my surfboard and went out into the surf first thing. I wanted the flexibility to surf, or chill far away from all the action in a beautiful house. It’s great except that both cities lost power for 6 hours my second night here… I suppose it was an adventure, and made me feel great about packing my headlamp. Then last night the water went out at the house. It was a good thing I had another place to go… and the owner of the house decided to give it to me for the week at ½ price as a thank you for dealing with adversity.

I’ve met so many remarkable people here, it’s kind of dizzying. But after a few days in country I feel myself going through over-stimulation withdrawl. San Francisco is either constant work, constant parties, or both depending on your line of work, your age, and your attitude. Anyway, I’ve been getting to know some amazing folks. Lena and Flo, a German couple that I hung out with outside of San Jose for a few days, have been travelling for 5+ months through the US and Central America. Flo supported their travel adventures by playing online poker while they travelled. I almost challenged him to a game of Texas Hold’em, before I came to my senses. Yes, he is apparently that good. And Lena looks exactly like an angel. Then there’s Marguerite, a tall stoic blond Canadian expat and her partner. She’s a local painter here in Santa Teresa and owns a small café called Zwart on the main drag. Her work is featured in some of the nicest houses and galleries in the area. Her partner is building an art studio in the back of their business and they seem to know everyone in this town. Felipe and his friend Carlo, a few guys I met while surfing have a grand plan to create a bad ass paintball course in the jungle. Today was their opening day, and I was supposed to go, but I ended up surfing instead. Betsy, the blond dreadlocked tattoo’d alterna-hippie with the most loving smile I’ve ever seen. She’s in her mid-20’s, from Minnesota, has been living in Costa Rica for 4 years and is the epitome of pura vida from her relaxed nature. There are a lot of expats in this town, and after staying here for a few days I can see why they wouldn’t want to leave.

In a few days I head to Montezuma, a small village on the other side of the peninsula about 7km from here. I’m staying at an incredible yoga retreat in the hills overlooking the ocean. I made a stop in Montezuma the other day, and loved the raw vegan café called Organica, the local street peddlers selling necklaces and pipes, and the mountainous terrain leading to exceptionally gorgeous beaches. I attempted to hike in the Cabo Blanca Nature Reserve about 6km south of Montezuma, but arrived too late to make the trek in. I’ll try again next week. Btw, driving in this area is fun if you like off-roading… but you need an ATV or 4×4. This country has a series of rocky dirt roads that wind through the jungle and beach communities. Paved roads simply don’t exist here on the peninsula de nicoya…

My first week in Costa Rica has been a profound adventure so far. Surfing and connecting with the ocean has been both invigorating and therapeutic. There’s something about the rhythm of the ocean, and riding it that makes me feel connected with something spiritually significant. There’s something so intense and beautiful in it that I don’t get with snowboarding, or any other sport. Plus the water is 90 degrees here, and feels so so good.

My thoughts are frequently of my next adventure… perhaps Bali, Thailand, and Cambodia in February or March. Looking forward to connecting with AY and Cintia (a few SF friends) over there.

Ok. I need to get some sleep for surfing tomorrow morning. There are supposed to be some nice waves headed our way!

By age 6, I developed a strong fascination with capturing beauty… filling sketchbooks with drawings of faces, forms, shapes, shadows, robots, spaceships, super heroes, etc. At 13 I got my first electric guitar, which became a device of intense fascination to me. So much so that I ditched art and began to develop my skills as a musician, broadening to other instruments and eventually working in a million dollar studio in college – and for several years with one famous rapper who produced my band in college. In college I gave my credit card a serious workout and built a home studio with one of the first home Pro Tools system (the 001), a pair of Behringer Truth monitors, and was lucky enough to have access to instruments, software, and fantastic microphones like the infamous Neumann u87 and KM184′s, AKG 414, and more from my school.

I also began working in Propellerheads Reason in 2001 (a lot)… and started to develop another intense fascination with electronic music… experimenting frequently. It took some years before I had my first electronic performance at Burning Man 2008 where I used a laptop and a Tenori-on under the stage name Space Frequency, or Space Freq (see http://www.spacefrequency.com). I performed along with my friend Sebastian, an incredibly talented electronic violin player, and did it in front of a giant crashed UFO art installation that I built for Burning Man (see http://www.crashedspaceship.com). The premise of this project was partly a reaction to what I consider to be a problem with innovation in music and the resulting homogenization of creative inspiration. As humans, we naturally like everything neat and defined… as artists we like to make a mess and expand organically…  the latter is the process of magic making, but both are necessary reactions. People are often afraid to take risks with their music, with certain exceptions – I’m thinking mainly about Radiohead and their frequent forays into the digital realm. With most music I feel like I hear way too many of the same instruments over and over, making the same sounds with the same song structures (i.e. A-B-A-B-C-A-B), over and over again.

Earlier this year I started producing much more advanced electronic music using Ableton 8 and recently added Native Instruments Komplete 6 to my arsenal of soft synths and samples, and in November I started producing full-time. Often when I put my producers hat on and listen, I hear things so differently. I try to get inside the mind of the composer/producer, and the adventure that I’m being drawn into. I want to feel the intention, and soak up all the subtle elements that probably took him or her a few days or weeks to create. In general, I’m hearing things in electronic music right now that are just so compelling, creative, innovative, and somehow still mostly underground… Something big is on the horizon.

Btw, I haven’t decided how I want perform these tracks, whether it’s using my CD-J’s… a laptop with Serrato, Ableton with an APC40,  or a custom setup… I guess it all depends on the kind of electronic musician I am and I’ve clearly got some more thinking to do.

In January of 2009, I began a new chapter of my life and moved into a beautiful victorian on Liberty Hill in San Francisco at the intersection of the Mission, Noe Valley, and the Castro. It began like all other big moves I’ve made, with an innately strong feeling about a city after visiting several times, and a girl to motivate me to make the transition. This was probably the 3rd time this story had played itself out in my life. This move was unique for a number of reasons… not the least of which was the fact that within 2 weeks of moving to SF, my girlfriend of 3 years and I decided to call it quits.

I had been working at a prestigious design firm as a senior designer in Seattle and transferred to the headquarters based here in SF. I enjoyed the rigorous intellectual exercises, vigorous discussions, and increasing focus on social networking, media, and entertainment. One weekend in early April I got a phone call that changed my life forever. I was up in Sonoma with a group of friends when I received a message that my mother had suffered from a heart attack and passed away. The timing was uncanny… my father had passed away a year earlier on the very same day. I knew almost immediately that I needed to take a step back from my career, and spend some time working through the loss.

"We Come In Peace!" by Adam Ebel

When my father passed on, I kept working… in fact I decided to take on more to keep my mind off of it and do my first major art installation, dedicate it to him, and launch (or “crash”) it at Burning Man 2008. I had built installations before, but never on this scale and I had little experience with creating large pieces with wood. I found the process of designing professionally during the day, and working on personal art all night to be therapeutic and fulfilling… and also exhausting. The piece was called “We Come In Peace!”… it was a giant UFO crashed into the desert at an 80-degree angle. I found the idea hugely compelling and descriptive of where so many things were at during that time period… within my own life, my family, our country, etc. It was a time of things ending and others beginning… of Evolution.

So within a few weeks of my mother passing on, I decided I needed to make a few things happen… (1) take a step back from my career and focus on art, music, and life … all things that fallen lower on my priority list in years past, (2) travel and experience the world, (3) continue to produce music and perform it, and (4) design a new art installation for Burning Man 2009. The latter came together when my good friend was visiting from out of town and suggested simply that we build a “robot” as I was driving him back to the airport. For some reason that idea really stuck with me and got my imagination going.

Robot Uprising Blueprints

I spent a few weeks after that sketching and thinking about size and weight, and deciding conceptually what this piece would be about and how it was going to be distinct. I am a big fan of art that uses negative space as a means of implying greater mass than actually exists. Out in the desert, the sand is pretty much all you’ve got… so why not use it? Also, while the UFO was meant to be somewhat tragic, I wanted this new installation to be triumphant – to be about awakening, awareness, and joy. About owning your life and your fate. I decided on a large robot waking up from beneath the desert, sitting up, and pushing itself up out of the ground with half of its body submerged below the sand and a giant grin on its face. On a more abstract note, this piece was inspired by the idea that people often become robots in their lives, their work, and with their families for whatever reasons… the things that we hold close to us when we’re young. Anyway, this robot symbolically “woke up”.

5x3 ft FTIR Touchscreen

I also wanted it to be something people could interact with in a meaningful way. I had gotten into building large touchscreens using IR lasers (LLP) and wanted to build one from scratch using a technique I hadn’t tried before called FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection). I ultimately decided to build a large 5×3 ft touchscreen and place it at the center of the experience, mounting it in the chest of the robot. During the day and for the first few evenings, we replaced the touchscreen with a 5×3 metal plate that had a heart painted on it that glowed in the dark.

Robot Head

An old college friend, who is also an artist helped me with the design of the robots head. Originally, I wanted to create something much more android-like and realistic, but she convinced me that simplifying it and making it more iconic was the way to go. She suggested a crazy wide smile and spotlights for eyes that people could control which really brought the whole idea home for me. Also, I wanted to turn the smile into a spectrum analyzer so that it would visually represent audio input … whether it was a persons “robot voice” being spoken through a mic (which I used a Korg Kaoss Pad to achieve), or music being simulcast from the “robo-dome” through the robots massive sound system. I hired another artist who was skilled in soldering and we ordered a kit off of eBay, he put it all together… then wired the mouth with 256 blue LED’s. Suffice it to say, the purple spotlights and the blue LED smile were beautiful at night.

Robot Uprising (daytime)

I had the robot (which was ~20 ft tall and weighed around 3 tons) delivered to Black Rock City by a professional trucker from Oakland on a giant flatbed truck. The truck ended up blowing two tires on the way out, and was a day late as a result. There were more than a few moments where I felt the possibility of all that hard work being for nothing… but I kept a positive attitude and it finally arrived the next evening to a great deal of excitement from me and my friends.

My friend, and DJ, was in charge of organizing all the music that was performed in our dome during the week. We had both live music, performed by Sebastian and his group EQLateral, and some phenomenal DJ’s. We didn’t consistently pack the dome by any means, but there were a few very memorable performances/parties in there.

Here are a few videos from Sebastian’s performances inside our dome:

Like many great things that happen in life, one of my favorite parts of the robot experience was a last minute decision. Sebastian and I were standing in Guitar Center a few days before burning man debating whether we should buy two 100-ft audio cables and simulcast our dome performances through the robot. I was leaning no (to save some time and money), and he was leaning yes… but in the end it turned out to be one of the best parts for the interactive portion of the installation. As our DJ sets were “simulcast” through the robot, people walked up to the touchscreen and did visual interpretations of the music. It was phenomenal to see so many smiles…