Liquid Sandhi

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I grew up listening to rap music, but even before that I listened to the voices in my head that echoed noises around me and turned them to song. I hadn't the patience required to learn a musical instrument because I wanted to start at the top and be able to play them all, now. I remember my grandfather telling me a joke about a drunk who stumbled into a symphonic concert, looked at the conductor and said, "I can do that. It's the easiest job in the world." Then my grandfather would encourage me to laugh at the ignorance of that drunk. It wasn't easy, trying to laugh at myself.
      Rap music came around when I was in my teens and immediately enraptured me with its incantatory richness, and the device of "sampling" that lay at the basis of its instrumentals. I realized that I didn't have to learn to play the piano, I just needed to recycle a recorded echo of one and twist it to serve my own devious musical purposes. When computers advanced enough to be able to arrange and bend samples in infinite variations, I had my virtual orchestra close at hand. So felt thousands of others and the electronic music scene soon swelled to the near-infinity of possibility. The only boundary left in music these days is the one of one's own imagination. And I've the feeling that this one will be hard to break.

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