Tag Archives: music

Influences and Process — The Books, Automatism, and the Infinite Everything

19 Dec
by L. Nichols

Disclaimer: I have a cold. I am feeling a little loopy and am only functioning at about 80%. Bear with me as I try to talk about things that even at 100% I am not good at talking about.

Behold the finite set of thirteen convex figures. The irrational sine versus tangent 45. – The Books, Beautiful People

With lyrics like that, I guess it might not be such a surprise that The Books are one of my favorite bands.

The Books are one of the few bands I can get completely lost in listening to. I love to put on my headphones, pick one of their albums and just go for a walk. Or I will put on their music when I am working, particularly when I am painting. For years now, this has been the case. The Books are music I live with when I am alone, when I am with my thoughts and with my work.

Every time I listen to them, I find new things. I find new sounds. I find new thoughts. With their constant presence in my life The Books have shaped my thoughts over the years.

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We Need to Place Value – Three Thoughts

9 Feb
by Kevin Czap

Fugazi Instrument Dischord Jem Cohen

Let’s talk numbers. I had taken a break from doing these influence talks inadvertently over the past several weeks. Luckily, L has been picking up the slack with her great posts. One that I particularly was excited to read was her riff on mathematics, partly because that was a topic I had thought about a lot and was gearing up to write on myself.

Of course, L and I have different backgrounds when it comes to math – I took the strictly (fine) art route and it’s been nearly a decade since I’ve taken any math courses. However, I can’t help but be fascinated by the subject, at least in terms of its application to areas that interest me more directly. I’ve been told off in the past (or at least disagreed with firmly) by a smarter CASE student when I said this before, but I see mathematics as an intricate language system that is a remarkable tool for helping human beings better understand this world. Numbers are the greatest system designed by men, a declaration supported by the fact that just about every other form of design rely on numbers and math to exist. I fascinated by how well the system works, it’s really beautiful even in its simplest applications.
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