Once upon a time the process of creating music was a community event, grounded in our budding society's campfires, marketplaces, and natural amphitheaters. This was - mind you - well before sheet music, recording studios, MIDI and digital downloads; music was solely a group-created rhythm that entranced the strange human animal to move, bonding families and tribes under a blanket of sound on cold nights. Of course, society and its technologies grow exponentially. Creating music in this era is like taming another creature entirely: a complex, multifaceted beast wrought from analog and digital veins, given unlimited boundaries and imbued with the blessing/curse of world-wide connectivity. Today's musician, for example, can make a thousand albums without ever getting out of the bed, without ever necessarily touching an instrument. Furthermore, said musician would never have to actually see and interact with anyone who was listening to the songs. Extreme? Yes, but entirely possible.
Take, as a slightly more grounded example, me. When I started creating music, the live experience was mostly an alien thing to me. I never went to many shows as a child, so a good portion of my musical knowledge came from the recording: vinyl, tapes, CDs...music in its polished form, designed to be enjoyed in the comfort of individuality. The only true live experiences I had came in the form of my family's baila sessions, a jam that usually followed a massive dinner get-together. Someone would grab a guitar, a keyboard would manifest out of the woodwork and then the family would seamlessly transition to the baila. Of course. there was always that one hero who would reveal a glorious stash of hand percussion so everyone could participate regardless of musical talent or, in many cases, rhythm.
But as much as I enjoyed these, I was always a self-proclaimed solo musician. When I played with the family, I noodled around on instruments, never quite getting into the concept of playing with them. As I grew up, I evolved and expanded, finding my niche in hip hop – although I soaked in an healthy blend of the spectrum – and the art of production and rapping. I was a one man band who had never played for a physical audience. Interesting, considering that hip hop is a musical genre deeply rooted in the community experience. Nowadays, however, anyone can make a beat on their computer, write and record some lyrics with a microphone and post it on the internet for the world to ignore. Trust me, I've been there.
And then there were two moments of epiphany that completely evolved how I approached music. The first happened in my first cipher, that age old hip hop tradition of freestyling and battling. When I began freestyling in a cipher, it turned my notions of verbal ability entirely on end. Now I had to think on my feet, work with and off of other emcees, and entertain a crowd to boot! This was a radical change from the comfort of armchair lyricism. Still there was something so invigorating about the cipher as a musician that I couldn't stop. I freestyled everywhere I went, regardless of how good it was: in the car with friends, at parties, on the bus; anywhere we could make a beat, we ciphered. And then, one day we sat in on a friend's band rehearsal and it happened. They began to stray from their songs into the realm of freeform music and we followed. We began to freestyle and everything clicked. There is no greater live energy than that generated by talented musicians of various branches coming together in a cohesive jam session.
Sure, we weren't all cohesive at first. A good jam musician will tell you that there's a vast difference between a session where everyone is listening to each other and one where everyone is too busy stroking their egos to play well with others. A good freestyler will tell you the same. That cohesion comes with time and experience, today's new musician being able to channel the ancient communal roots of the art and work within the group. For years, I itched to throw an event that would fuse the jam session and the cipher and allow budding musicians like myself to reach that level of natural interplay and have fun doing so. Then, I found BloomBars, a space dedicated to revitalizing the art of community in this individualistic world, and so Cipherstock was born.
At Cipherstock amateur musicians of varying degrees of experience and talent begin to understand the complexities of playing with other musicians, listening and feeding off their ideas and making something wholly new out of it. Likewise for the blooming freestyler. On that stage, everyone is learning how to be a well rounded artist together; sometimes it'll sounds like a cacophonous noise and sometimes it'll click and become amazing music. Still, people don't come to Cipherstock expecting a top notch production. More often than not, the audience are community, friends, family, and random strangers who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. The pressure of performance is dulled by the intimacy of the venue and the avid participation of the crowd. The one response I've taken away from each Cipherstock is that everybody had fun. And really, that's music at the most base level.
This Thursday, we'll be throwing the 6th Cipherstock, celebrating half a year of eclectic and dynamic performances. If you've read this far, that means you're actively interested in what we're doing. I encourage you to come to Bloombars on the third Thursday of the month and actually experience what I can only describe so well in words. Bring your guitar or bring your unadulterated lyrical prowess. Maybe just come to watch. Either way, you might find yourself caught in the moment – that instant where everyone involved is moving in the same key. All of a sudden, we're back around the fireplace, making the music as one.
Navi
