Loneliness of the Long Distance Drummer - a conversational aside

[beginning in response to advanced word of imminent photographic evidence of a UK-based beat group, 'the hum':]

Hope the drummer ain’t obscured by no swaying mic stand or neck of bass…

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Perhaps ron searly is hiding behind a drumkit in a basement practice room somewhere.

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I wonder if the psychology of a drummer bears any similarity to that of the long distance runner? alone and steady on the road, alone and steady behind the kit - persistance, consistency and an ability to continue in the productive rhythm unfalteringly no matter how adverse the conditions. these are similarites that immediately come to mind. of course, one involves moving about a lot and one involves sitting fairly still, though i guess a runner's torso is almost stationary and all movement is propelled by the limbs - another similarity.

the question is, do drummers make good runners or do runners make good drummers, or are neither indicative of each other?

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The post-end pub rock outro final du-dum-pah crash must then be the collapse onto the ground after sailing through the tape at the finishline.

My new disguise as bassist also has me considering bassist psychology. The Quiet Man. The pulse… The low notes approaching the subliminal dialogue and instructions… Makes me think of walking blind through tall grass for some reason, playing the bass. Intuition…

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I was an ok runner...and a drummer [quality? dunno...].

not sure if it's a definite correlation. but there is a good range of examples of drummers requiring a bit of fitness...

barring mo tucker.

and she didn't look like much a runner come to think of it.

buddy rich though...he had energy.

zzzzz

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Why I ran, man, Why I ran…

Your comparison is astute. Torso ‘motionless’ – I know what you mean – straightline motion only. Like a donut in freefall. Apparent rest state.

A runner has to keep a beat, certainly. The persistence. The endurance. The heart-rate of a drummer is certainly one of the highest in any discipline. I think beyond what the figures say should be endurable. Over 100 BPM I believe, during particularly energetic fills and syncopations.

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indeed. a drummer also takes the song somewhere - from beginning to end. an intro could be described as the song's startline, the outro the finish line. the song/run is the journey in between. a drummer can also build natural rests into his rhythm if required and the 'sprint finish' is analogous to the pub rock ending. in fact, now i think about it, my half marathon training of circa 2004 probably prepared me more for my current role of drummer than 15 years of guitar playing and other musical practices ever did. left, right, left, right, breeeathe, tom fill....

[conversational aside ends]

Turbulence

Your last missive gives me the impression that things are beginning to unravel. Are you working from a new base now? A change in situation often allows things to be seen viewpoints hitherto unviewed. Maybe your move will provide you with a different view of the case.Thunder and lightning is filling the sky as I type. Low pressure. Electricity. Turbulence. eight young tomato plants are currently being rained on.

So, the beards are coming to town. It seems our guitar-slinging cowboys are will be active in the UK at a similar time to Costa's Broken Social Scene hitting the Candian road. Is this coincidence? Not if Bob Palindrome's maxim is anything to go by; 'there's no such thing as coincidences; there's only incidences, and they all go in the casefile'. He also used to say 'a casefile is like a good stew; you chuck everything in there, keep a low heat on it and see what rises to the surface'. I always took this as a good metaphor but once I got to know the man I realised that he also meant it literally.

Once I had visted his apartment I soon realised that he would destroy old closed casfiles by boiling them up in a pan of water in his kitchen. This explained the scald marks on his hands I'd previously wondered about. The man, resourceful as ever, used this method of data erasion as it provided him with the raw material for his hobby of making lifesize paper mache sculptures of his favourite birds of prey. The man had these things, hand painted, all over his house. A bald eagle hung above the main doorway, neck craned down and beak out so as to almost peck your left eye out while you waited for the door to open. A pereguin falcon, wings hunched back in a dive pose sat on his bureau acting as a mail holder, envelopes stuffed between the two raised wings. I digress...

Although the dates of BSS and the beard troupe's performance are not the same, they are only a couple of weeks apart. There is the possibility of using winds, possibly the trade winds one of our investigators mentioned earlier, to allow the sound to travel over large distances. This obviously takes time. I am consulting Dr. Epstein on this and am waiting for confirmation, but rough calculations show that it is fairly likely the soundwaves from both touring circuits will collide and interact at some point around the start of august. Perhaps there is some underlying plan for the two soundwaves to mesh in a certain area, interfering with one another in a way similiar to that you tried to achieve with the dual spin sources.

This could be another Black Cat style experiment, done in reverse fashion to the dual particle example. This time, they are starting with two sources, which are intended to meet up in one location. causing some kind of effect or outcome.Due to the butterfly effect, turbulence, it is hard to predict with certainty the when and where or even if of what may happen, but Epstein did say 'it could be possible'. Of course, I may be looking in the wrong direction and this could just be nothing. If, on the other hand, it is the case, then we are dealing with some advanced Obfuscation techniques.

In Reply

Neil Young, CSN and Bruce Springsteen will all be in the same area of the UK over the same weekend, in about a fortnight’s time. I don’t have a ticket. It should be a good focal point for various forces, with an ancient Somerset tor and a pyramid-shaped stage increasing the transmission potential of energies from the locality. Meanwhile, today for me is a day of great strangeness and great liability for changes. I met and lingered with my old Australian soulmate last night, and the air seems ripe for a thunderstorm of sorts. I hope this will not be my last transmission, although it may be my last from this station. In the wee wee hours my mind gets hazy, radio relay towers lead me to my baby, the radio’s jammed up with talk show stations, it’s just talk talk talk talk till I lose my patience.

No liquid storage in Detroit, no gasoline in Minnesota, no fleece in Duluth. Just a big hole in a ground floor window of a Minneapolis cold water flat, and a three storey sub-ground parking lot empty of cars.

My man in Somerset may have more to report in 10 days time. My insider is doing the falafel scene on the festival circuit. He may recognise other regular faces from show to show – loitering by the jester hat stand; lingering on the edge of the jazz tent; hiding in bushes when famous people walk by…

The Nebraska Connection

So many elements have recently been attached to the case that this investigator is wondering where exactly he should be focussing his energies. Should I concentrate on closed-loop systems or be looking underground? Should I be looking for leads relating to Stairs' activities in Ohio or be trying identify large areas in the Detroit region with the potential for large-scale liquid storage/absorption? Should I be looking south of the border or walking the statelines? there are so many angles to this case that a 3D rendering of it would be one of the most ambitious engineering projects ever undertaken by man; up there with the Georgia Guidestones or a planet-sized particle acceleration donut. Perhaps Searly already knows how the case will end and is building such a 3D case model in his bungalow on the outskirts of Boston?

With regard to your planet-sized nut theory, I do not know how feasible this is, or what the capabilities could be, but it strikes me now that perhaps donut law applies to Black Cat. Remember, this was an experiment with an unidentified central location - perhaps this central point is as invisible and non-physical as the centre of a donut and as such may never be found. Perhaps it is, as one investigator suggested, actually in space, and therefore 'empty' by common standards.

Last night, while listening to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska LP, I picked up on the following points in the song Highway Patrolman, which I feel echo elements of our case...

The song tells the story of two brothers from Ohio and involves a scene where the patrolman of the title chases a suspect in a Buick through Michigan, deliberately allowing it to escape over the Canadian border as it is being driven by his brother.
Hearing this sequence of events unfold in the song immediately made me think of the case: The chased Buick and activity in Michigan and Ohio having particular resonance, along with an escape over the Canadian borderline.

This brings to my mind the idea that perhaps Searly was 'allowed' to 'disappear' intentionally by at least one individual or some small splinter group within the larger operational group. This would imply different members of the group had/have different agendas. The most likely explanation for this is, as suspected, that both an independent group and the military were working in the same area of operation; either working to the same aim but with a different agenda, or working in a similar field with different aims.

I am leaning toward the idea that either the military started the operation, recruiting help from academia circles who, somewhere along the way, began to use the operation for different ends to the military's intention, or the Michigan craft club started proceedings which the military subsequently became aware of and infiltrated for their own purposes. Of course, the two groups could have had the same idea independently at the same time. Perhaps this is the case and Project31 is related to the Black Cat experiment[s] in this way.

As explained here, the Nebraska LP is actually made from the Boss' own 4-track home recordings rather than been done in a studio. Such an approach ties in with Costa's recroding methods, as heard on the mixtapes so far discovered. The song is set in the '60s but was actually written and released in the early '80s, which would have been an influential period for members of the Michigan soft-core, many of them being in the adolesence at this point. More details of the song's content can be found here. As explained here, the song was used as the basis for the film 'The Indian Runner' released in 1991, again a likely period of influence for Project 31 members.

Springsteen hails from New Jersey, which falls within the bounds of our theorised North-eastern donut of activity and is a likely candidate to have had influence on members of the Michigan group at a critical period prior to the project's beginnings. With Neil Young being from Canada and Dylan from Duluth, it would seem that we are looking in the right area, musically speaking. Even Monk hails from North Carolina, which borders on the South-eastern edge of our theorised donut of activity. I'm sure even this great jazz pianist has held a harmonica to his lips on occasion.

Note from Lone Wolf

It may be that Costa was associated with the Canadian music scene. A song "Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl appears on the album 2004-09-17: Austin City Limits, Austin, TX, USA. Broken Social Scene is a Canadian indie rock ..." group formed in 1999. (source: internet.)

However the similarity between song titles (one singular, one plural) may be a coincidence. Costa's singular version makes much more sense, for a single song. Alternatively, it may be the same song. Perhaps she ghost wrote for Broken Social Scene or was even a member of the band. I don't know how close to the great lakes scene the band was located. I feel they were either very close, or else vancouver-based.