Monthly Archives: April 2012

Waves In The Reflection — Chapter One: The Wheel Of Time

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WavesInTheReflection2 Waves In The Reflection Chapter One: The Wheel Of Time

Lis­ten: Ancient Lasers — The Wheel Of Time 

The Wheel Of Time is a song I wrote in 2009 while I was rent­ing out a stu­dio by LAX, under­neath the flight path of land­ing 747’s. The stu­dio was your stan­dard 12x10 con­crete cell that we out­fit­ted with some tacky green car­pet, a couch, and a makeshift desk for my record­ing gear. It was a great place to escape from every­thing, and sink into my music.

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The Good Ol’ Days

I soon fell into a very pro­duc­tive rou­tine. I usu­ally got to the stu­dio around 8pm to jam with my band or chat with my friend GG for a bit. His brother is Drew God­dard, writer for Lost and Cabin In The Woods — so I usu­ally nagged him about the end­ing of Lost most of the time.  But GG is also an amaz­ing pro­ducer and sound engi­neer with repli­cas of every piece of gear Pink Floyd used…ever. (He even once flew to Italy to buy the actual rotary delay David Gilmour used in Live at Pom­peii). I learned alot from GG about mix­ing — which fre­quen­cies go where, how to make the per­fect kick drum sound, why tak­ing the 500Hz fre­quency out of a gui­tar mag­i­cally makes it sound bet­ter, etc.   I owe him big time for that.

After social time was over, I would get to work — often mov­ing from instru­ment to instru­ment record­ing ideas. I usu­ally started with a pro­grammed beat and a chord pro­gres­sion and built from there.  Once the music was done, I would walk through the vacant streets brain­storm­ing lyrics, and would often record the entire song before sun­rise — to avoid the thun­der­ing sound of land­ing air­craft.  At around 10am I would lay down on the couch and drift off to sleep, lis­ten­ing to an entirely new song I had just created.

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Ancient Lasers — The Wheel Of Time (ft. Fuck You)

I should prob­a­bly take a moment to explain some­thing peo­ple have been ask­ing me about regard­ing the name change from Post Human Era to Ancient Lasers.  In April of 2010, I had just fin­ished an entire album that was to be the sec­ond chap­ter of a tril­ogy by Post Human Era.  The album was called Echo Cor­ri­dor, and I was lit­er­ally days away from releas­ing it. I had sent the sin­gle, Build­ing The Machine, to Daniel Ander­son of Idiot Pilot — one of my favorite bands of all time.  He decided to remix it, and after I heard the pos­si­bil­i­ties of what we could both do as a team, I asked if he wanted to do an entire album.  We used songs from both To Build A Fire and Echo Cor­ri­dor as start­ing points, but ended up with a much more vis­ceral sound. Together, we decided  it was too dif­fer­ent from Post Human Era to label it as such, and thus, Ancient Lasers was born.  Post Human Era, how­ever, is far from dead — I am cur­rently work­ing on some­thing that takes it into very dif­fer­ent terrain.

This song in par­tic­u­lar, The Wheel Of Time, deals with the insan­ity of reli­gion. I grew up with a mother that had started out with a Catholic fam­ily, but then con­verted to Judaism; and a Jew­ish father, so I went to both Church and Syn­a­gogue. I remem­ber dread­ing wednes­day night Hebrew school, where I prac­ticed writ­ing an ancient lan­guage that was both extremely con­fus­ing and down­right hard to learn. Yet, there was some­thing mys­ti­cal about it. When I walked into Beth Israel Syn­a­gogue in Belling­ham every Wednes­day and Sun­day, it felt like I was instantly trans­ported to some sacred, dis­tant past.   My rabbi was both a Star Trek fan and pale­on­tol­o­gist, which was pretty damn awe­some to a 10 year old boy — but hilar­i­ously ridicu­lous if you think about it. Nonethe­less, I enjoyed the early years I spent learn­ing about Israel, hav­ing Seder for Passover, and light­ing the can­dles for Hanukkah.

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TL;DR

My mother’s side of the fam­ily was pretty faith­ful about get­ting together every Easter, Christ­mas (when we got the ‘good’ presents, as opposed to a book or some­thing for Han­nukah), and Thanks­giv­ing (which I con­sider a Chris­t­ian hol­i­day). Those hol­i­days, along with the Church expe­ri­ence, felt more com­mer­cial­ized — more ‘Amer­i­can’. They were alot of fun, and I wouldn’t trade those mem­o­ries for the world.

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(Spoiler Alert) He dies in the end

Yet up until this point, I hadn’t really ques­tioned either reli­gion. Since I was learn­ing about two sep­a­rate schools of thought, I hadn’t fully sub­mit­ted myself to one par­tic­u­lar ide­ol­ogy. Every­thing was going as planned, until the moment arrived that would ulti­mately open my eyes to the world behind the world.

I was about to turn 13, and it was time for me to start prac­tic­ing for my Bar Mitz­vah. My father opened the study guide, which con­tained the Hebrew I would need to recite for the cer­e­mony. We both sat down on the couch in the liv­ing room, and started to prac­tice. After about twenty min­utes, I remem­ber look­ing up at him and ask­ing why we were doing this. Why are we mem­o­riz­ing words that were writ­ten thou­sands of years ago to recite at a cer­e­mony, just to prove that I was enter­ing adult­hood? And most impor­tantly, what if I decided I sim­ply didn’t want to?

In one life-changing sen­tence, he con­fessed: “We are doing this because my father wanted me to when I was your age.” We both real­ized that we were doing some­thing sim­ply because our ances­tors before us had. With­out ques­tion­ing why; with­out decid­ing for our­selves if it was right — what we truly believed in our hearts. He let me decide for myself, and ulti­mately I decided that I didn’t believe in what we were doing. And I am eter­nally grate­ful for his decision.

The next sun­day, instead of going to Syn­a­gogue, we went fish­ing together and expe­ri­enced real life in nature, unfil­tered by anti­quated dogma and human ide­olo­gies. It was lib­er­at­ing for our entire fam­ily, and though we haven’t really talked about it since, I think they are thank­ful I spoke up — because every­one else was afraid to.

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Pope­Mo­bile

This is why we have Holy Wars, racism, and hate. Peo­ple some­times get scared to raise their hand in class when some­thing doesn’t make sense. “Keep your head down. Do as you are told. Fol­low the leader. Mem­o­rize this. Don’t ask why.”  When some­thing doesn’t make sense, scream at the top of your lungs so every­one can hear you.  We can’t change the world if we keep our­selves planted in the sands of the past.  Refuse to believe what peo­ple tell you — until you know it to be true from your own per­sonal expe­ri­ences.  No one knows any­thing more than you do, and that will never change.

The Wheel Of Time is about the con­tin­ual habit of recur­sion we can’t seem to escape from.  But I came here to throw a wrench in its gears. And every day thou­sands of peo­ple are wak­ing up, as I did, from the peace­ful sleep of herded sheep.

Lyrics

Ancient Lasers — The Wheel Of Time

The wheel of time repeats itself, it turns you into some­one else
You’ll fight a war you’ll never win, you’ll make the same mis­takes again
And now you finally see so many rea­sons behind the great con­fu­sion
You know the voices of the dead are really voices in your head

You won­der if you’ve lost your mind, you hope you get it back this time
They tell you what you want to hear, you wish they’d all just dis­ap­pear
And now you finally see so many rea­sons behind the great con­fu­sion
You know the voices of the dead, are really voices in your head

Maybe we are doomed to repeat this, maybe we still haven’t found the way
But no mat­ter what they say, the pattern’s here to stay
And every time you think you’ve reached the end, you watch it start itself again

Every time it repeats itself, it repeats itself, it repeats itself again

How to Print a Building (The Coming Real Estate Revolution)

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contour crafting print building How to Print a Building (The Coming Real Estate Revolution)

Print­ing A Building

Imag­ine you want to build a new house or office build­ing.  In the past, you would have had to hire an archi­tect, a con­trac­tor, a con­struc­tion company…The entire process would take months — if not years — and con­struc­tion delays were the name of the game.

A man named Enrico Dini is not only about to rev­o­lu­tion­ize the way we build houses and office build­ings — his tech­nol­ogy could poten­tially cause the largest eco­nomic rev­o­lu­tion in human history.

Inspired by Gaudi’s archi­tec­ture, he became a Civil Engi­neer and, later, began build­ing machines.  Yet he soon found that his imag­i­na­tion was con­strained by the phys­i­cal lim­its of mod­ern con­struc­tion tech­niques.  Con­crete and brick build­ings require a cer­tain degree of logis­tics and man­power, and human engi­neer­ing errors are often  rampant.

Tired of these phys­i­cal con­straints, Enrico invented and patented a full-scale 3D print­ing method that uses a high-tech glue to bind sand.  Enrico’s gen­eral con­cept is fairly sim­i­lar, how­ever: The printer is installed at the con­struc­tion site, and using a 3D blue­print designed by the archi­tect, it sys­tem­at­i­cally “prints out” a building.

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Dini’s Printer

And get this: the 3D printer could soon also be able to print more 3D print­ers.  His com­pany, Shape­ways, is already plan­ning a full-scale sculp­ture in Pisa, Italy. So in other words, this is all actu­ally happening.

Enrico is only one of many emerg­ing vision­ar­ies work­ing on Earth-sculpting tech­nolo­gies.  Markus Kayser, who stud­ied 3D Fur­ni­ture and Prod­uct Design at Lon­don Met­ro­pol­i­tan Uni­ver­sity, is work­ing on another excit­ing and rev­o­lu­tion­ary tech­nol­ogy. His newest inven­tion, The Sun Cut­ter, is a solar pow­ered machine that con­verts sand into glass-like sctruc­tures. In a world increas­ingly wor­ried about energy pro­duc­tion and short­ages of raw mate­ri­als, the Sun Cut­ter could be installed in a bar­ren desert to build entire struc­tures — all by itself.  This would be hugely impor­tant for devel­op­ing nations or refugees left home­less from a nat­ural disaster.

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The Sun Cutter

Once these tech­nolo­gies are refined and begin to enter the mar­ket­place, entire eco­nomic mod­els will have to be rewrit­ten.  What will we do with mil­lions of suddenly-unemployed con­struc­tion work­ers when machines effec­tively ren­der them obso­lete? This dilemma requires our imme­di­ate atten­tion, as it stretches far beyond the worlds of con­struc­tion and real estate. As more and more human jobs are replaced by tech­nol­ogy, the unem­ployed masses and the world lead­ers gov­ern­ing them will most likely be ill-prepared for such changes. The eco­nomic fall­out could be disastrous.

But there is hope. Com­pa­nies like Organovo are already print­ing human organs, and even food-printing tech­nolo­gies are next on the hori­zon.  With these new tech­nolo­gies, the would would have enough infra­struc­ture and nat­ural resources to pro­vide bil­lions a qual­ity of life on-par with the United States. The tran­si­tion towards a post-scarcity soci­ety has begun, wether gov­ern­ments and multi-national cor­po­ra­tions like it or not.

To sum it all up, the gap between human imag­i­na­tion and the phys­i­cal world is shrink­ing. As the archi­tects become the builders, together we could build a utopia from our col­lec­tive dreams.  And as Enrico builds his mod­ern day Tower of Pisa, hope­fully we will all take a moment to remem­ber that every build­ing needs a strong foundation.