Introducing my music project Juked Micronics.
Here's a track that brings me back to my first year as a new parent.
I recorded everything on this track four years ago, almost to the day. (You can also listen on Soundcloud.) At the time, my daughter was still an infant and wasn’t able to speak any formed words yet, but she was making a lot of vocalizations as if she was trying to push herself to it. If you listen closely, you can hear that in the track.
For me, the music immediately evoked the feeling of an unseen protective presence watching over this new life, like an imaginary friend that only a child can see. At that stage in parenting, I was in the grip of a near-constant oxytocin high that was extremely powerful — almost debilitating. I would hold my baby daughter for a few hours and feel so thoroughly enveloped by euphoria that all I could do was lie down afterwards. I’ve often joked that I’ll never need to try opium after experiencing THAT because I must have some sense of what it’s like.
At the same time, I was also feeling this undercurrent of primal terror. A baby is so fragile and delicate and helpless that your brain just gets hyper-focused on making sure the child doesn’t get harmed. Babies are also oddly durable too, but there’s this innate biologically-driven program that just takes over the brain. For a few days after my daughter was born, all of the fears I expected I would have just dissolved — until they came roaring to the surface. And for about the first year of her life, those fears nagged at me with an OCD-like insistence. (And then, just like that, they receded to the background.)
But the first sensation smothered the other, like a shriek of panic muffled by a thick, super-soft comforter. It was quite intense. And I felt somewhat alone with those feelings. Even though other parents would reassure me that worrying was perfectly natural and came with the territory, the pitch and force of these sensations grabbed ahold of me in a way that I felt like I was on an island. You can’t live in a state like that permanently, and just by virtue of walking around you can tell that the energy of other parents you know has settled down and they’ve come back down to earth. So you have to kind of come to terms with this stuff on your own, in your own way. Just you and all of these deep primordial drives.
The initial sketch for “Imaginary… For Real?” captured that time, but in a way that felt like a relief from the extremity of the feelings in both directions — come to think of it, it felt like a bridge between them. Musically, I knew I was onto something, but I kind of under-estimated the idea and left it sitting there not sure there was any way to build something out of it. So I let it sit, where it was bound to just wither on the vine. Until…
A few weeks ago, an old friend I played music with over 25 years ago suggested that we start collaborating again. I started combing through my files to see if I had anything sitting around that she might be able to sing over. I mostly came up with scraps, but I scraped together just enough stuff — maybe a dozen bits and pieces — that I thought could maybe work as a starting point. But once I revisited this mix I decided to keep it for myself, ha ha. Without my friend giving me a reason to look back, though, this thing probably would’ve sat unfinished forever.
It’s been a huge surprise to see that the finished piece was kind of waiting there all along. I didn’t actually have to add anything. All I needed to do was make some adjustments to a mix that was already 85% of the way there. The adjustments were deliberate and painstaking, but in a sense the piece was already finished. It just needed some varnish, some elbow grease.
As someone once said to another musician friend of mine (who relayed it to me): sometimes your work is already done. When you’ve let things stagnate for too long, that simple phrase can be a life-saver.
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As far as where I am with parenting these days, my daughter and I are of course in a completely different place now. To be honest, I often feel like I’m just catching up with the scale of the challenges we’re facing as the dynamic gets more and more complex, but there’s some reassurance in re-connecting with what it was like early on. I also wonder if what we’re going through now will surface years later in my work, as if there’s some kind of delay in my being able to process what’s going on.
As for the sounds themselves, I’d forgotten where the main, central figure that repeats over and over came from. The entire time I was mixing I just assumed that first sound you hear was me playing chords on guitar through effects (because it sounds a lot like something I’d play). It turns out that it’s actually a heavily treated loop of my daughter banging away on an electric piano.
I’m quite fond of pitching things down and spreading them out by stacking reverbs and delays on top of one another. Once I added those effects, the loop immediately taking-on a character that sounded and felt otherworldly and benign, and it brought to mind some kind of invisible guardian-being standing sentinel at its post. The track as a whole has a spooky ambience, but in a pleasant way that I found deeply reassuring. It felt to me like it had the spatial ambience of a “place” where a child could commune with something in a realm of awareness that no adult would be able to perceive.
Years ago, someone told me a story about a couple he knew — it might’ve been his sister. If I remember correctly, the couple he knew was talking to a woman who asked if they were thinking about having a second child. They were like “Yes, what makes you ask that?” The woman asked if their young child had an imaginary friend. Again, they answered yes. She advised them not to discourage play with this imaginary friend, and said that often when kids play and start talking out loud with an imaginary friend, the kid is actually addressing the spirit of a unborn child that gets a sense that it might be born into that family and starts circling around the family in a way the already-born child can tune into. The couple was blown away.
We have no way of knowing how accurate ideas like that might be, but since we don’t have a way to measure them yet, I think dismissing them outright is foolish. In any case, I never forgot the story, and it’s always struck me that so much of our emphasis as a culture — in our stories and movies for kids — goes into encouraging children to maintain their belief in things that aren’t visible to us. As we all know, there’s a part of childhood that gets lost as we push towards adulthood, like the rational world squeezes our imagination out of us. All around us, we see expressions that kind of lament that loss.
The people who manage to keep their childlike imagination alive, for example, become the artists this culture puts on a pedestal and treats with excessive reverence. It’s a tangle of mixed signals. At the end of the day, I think we all sense that we’re swimming in a sea of elements that we don't understand. There are people who take solace in the hardline belief that there’s nothing beyond our senses, but our culture winks at kids constantly and reassures them that they know better than we do.
And when you open your mind to fact that we know very, very little about nature and our microscopic place in it, the implications are that we’re kind of helplessly floating in a vast universe we don’t understand. That’s scary. And when you’ve got a new baby, that awareness only amplifies the sense of vulnerability. To see children reach into this other realm without fear, though, is quite impressive.
Hence the title “Imaginary… For Real?”
There’s a sound in my mix that reminded me a lot of the Massive Attack instrumental “Exchange” from their album Mezzanine. I’ve always found that tune just utterly sublime since the moment I heard it back in ‘99. I mixed my track so that the sound I’m talking about is really, really subtle — almost buried on purpose — but you could say that “Imaginary… For Real?” is an homage to Massive Attack. If you haven’t checked out that album, I would highly recommend it.
<3 SRK