It's almost surreal to be able to say after many years of hard work, A Symmetry has been mastered and is available in its final form in the Music section. Currently .mp3 files are up, and I will be putting .wav files up shortly. I will also be adding information soon about ordering CDs, artwork, and all the things that generally come with an album release. I hope you enjoy.

I am happy to say that A Symmetry is being sent for mastering, and will be available in its final version very soon.

So many artists in their later works end up with the “what else can I say” message. Instead of waiting, I’m just going to go ahead and pose the question now. And while little new ground is being covered, I still think we can say a lot. We are continuing the conversation between the generations of our society. Naturally we just elaborate on what has already been said, or return to previous parts of the conversation and put pieces of information together differently. Though really, what more can we say on the level of any genre? We know the central tenets at this point. A large percentage of music is about sex, with some lesser percentage about love, love and sex together, drugs (often veiled as love or sex), getting real paid, and spirituality (love). I include heartbreak and breakups in the love category. Other topics include nationalism, food, existential confusion, revenge, claims of either social dominance or social ineptness, and anti-nationalism. While I'm sure much of my music and writing could fall into these categories, one of my goals comes from thinking about one of Andre 3K's lines from "Return of the 'G'" - "Let's talk about time travelin', rhyme javelin, something mind unravelin'." How many different ways can music continue to rephrase the axioms it is built upon? As long as the world continues to evolve, there will be something to say. And as long as there is something to say, people will speak.

On the topic of love, so much art has expressed the idea of two hearts beating as one, or two bodies coming together to form one. This takes away some of the beauty of love. When you love another person, you realize they are very different than you. They are another human being, and you may find yourself doing things for them that do not benefit you. Love is a difficult emotion because it contradicts what a lot of people consider to be our basic nature. People tend to do things for themselves, so if you think of another person as yourself, you are just serving yourself. Many people think the most accurate basic description of love is caring about someone more than yourself. But looking out for number one is considered in our basic nature. I also think it is in our basic nature to care for one another though, because civilization would have never advanced if people had not worked together. If you let your neighbor starve to death, he will not be there to help you later. Often times we will try and convince ourselves we are acting on love when we are really acting for ourselves, whether that takes the form of greed, envy, or ostensibly good intentions. In real love, when you realize that this other person is not you but you love them anyway, that is a great feeling. Besides, two people are one only as much as all people are one.

Live entertainment and art will always be necessary to provide a human connection from a communicator to an audience. Even since people have been able to possess recorded music, they have still taken time and effort out of their lives to be able to experience live music. The two have always been separate, and contain a different energy, both with their time and place. The line will soon become thinner on what constitutes a live art performance, since more and more will be done by the computers. But we will still need the human element in performance, the genuineness, the imperfection, and knowledge that the communicator of the art is a person just like us.

Ending up back in the same place always makes me wonder if there is more to be learned or done in that place, or if I am simply following a red herring.

It is time we had a social movement embodied not by its clothing or drug use but rather by the power of its ideas.

there is nothing artistic about proper nouns in lowercase letters and no punctuation

The line between laziness and efficiency is sometimes very thin, but always very real.

When people laugh, they look to see if their friends are laughing too. There’s just something about sharing the human experience that seems to make it better.

One of life’s many great ironies is that we spend our years learning from our mistakes only to view everything in retrospect and wish that we could have done things differently. Then we have children and attempt to teach them from our mistakes so that they do not have to learn the same way, but despite our efforts, everyone must learn for themselves, and so the process repeats itself.

People of our time, and I would imagine of any time, seem to glorify history, probably because they can never experience it. I find myself falling into the trap of thinking about how great it would’ve been to live during the enlightenment, or to be around when Lou Reed was hanging out with Andy Warhol in New York, or to have been around for the bepop era, or been in San Fransisco and see the earliest forms of the Dead. But when people were experiencing these times, they were not consciously thinking about what a great time to be alive it was and how they needed to relish every waking moment of it. They were simply people trying to live their lives and they just happened to be alive at those times. It is likely that (if we’re still around in some similar form) people some time from now will look back on the late 1900’s and early 2000’s as an incredible time to be alive, and I feel certain the coming decades will only get more interesting. Never before have there been so many possibilities on the doorstep of mankind. Never before could the decisions made have such a significant global impact. It is surely the most amazing time to be alive that history has yet seen, and we must not forget these things as we venture further into the present.

Music of a certain level is seemingly timeless. Beethoven that has been around hundreds of years is still deserving of tireless listening, as is more recent but still older artists like Buddy Holly or classic albums like Dark Side of the Moon or Tommy. But we hear and perceive music with ears developed listening to music mostly following the “rules” established in Western tonal music. Since the rules were established, they have been continually bended and broken, finding new mechanisms of tension and release. Music of a given time acts as a zeitgeist in response to the ear and listening development of the general audience.

After a recent conversation with a friend, I was thinking about the music-gasm. It is a feeling that I hope everyone is able to experience, but apparently not everyone is so fortunate. It is of course difficult to describe, but it is when the music causes you to feel chills all over your body, laugh hysterically, and feel invincible. Often times if it is a setting you can do so, you repeat a particular section of a song or even a whole section over and over again until you are almost physically worn out. I realized that this feeling is caused simply by the effect of communication. It is your true self being spoken to and connecting with the core of another human being in a way that words alone never could. I have experienced this feeling with all different kinds of music from different eras, and it all leads to that same feeling. It is the reassurance that others out there feel, and you are not alone in this world.

I keep thinking about our times as mankind at the turning point. Naturally I think every era views the time they live as such, but certainly now civilization and the earth have more possibilities than ever. We are all still trying to come up with the next big idea, but the world is moving too fast for any idea to be new or stay relevant. The windows of opportunity seem to be getting smaller and harder to find as far as amassing wealth, but perhaps that our house is expanding to the point there is not much outside left. The middle class and even the poor to some extent today have access to luxuries that for most of civilization were reserved for royalty. But everything stays relative, and we convince ourselves that it is not enough. Power leads to the desire for more power, and control never leads to anything but more control. Those of us without power cling on to ideas like rock and roll and sports for our fulfillment. But the changing world can be seen in every facet of all these ideas. It is impossible to make comparisons about people and aspects of these things across time. We certainly can’t look at things in terms of better or worse. One might argue that it is certainly better to be alive as far into the future as possible (at least up to this point) for a comfortable and enjoyable life, and if I was forced to make a decision on this issue, I would probably agree, but I honestly don’t know if people today are any happier than people throughout the history of civilization that have had to work harder and have less luxuries. Everyone knows that everything is relative, and the starving man’s cracker tastes far better than the rich man’s filet mignon he has every night. Well, I say everyone knows this, but much of our culture does not seem to realize it.

It is time for new beginnings. This site has existed for some time now in a state for me to get a better feel of what was going to be on it, but is just now getting in a state to be ready for the public. If this is your first time here, hopefully you've already looked at the "About" section, but in the mean time, what do you need to know? My name is Adam and I created this site to feature the release my recorded music under the band name of Dorian Green. This will begin officially with the launch of the album A Symmetry. The album is in the final mixing and mastering stages, but I have it in its most recent state here, released as a living album of sorts. All this and more will be discussed in future posts and the other sections of this site. Hopefully I'll make the written material insightful or at least worth a laugh or two. With good original music accompanying that, I don't see where we can go wrong. Thanks for visiting.
dggb