Tag: silence

The Minirig 3

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

A few days ago I mentioned how some people seem to need constant music in the background and that while I enjoy music I have never had that necessity in life. I was always the person quite content with silence, it was even necessary when I needed to concentrate. Depending on your grasp of English you may have just noticed that last sentence was in the past tense. About four years ago, maybe three, I forget and life seems to blur a little as one ages, I was spending winter working a pretty gruelling job on a Christmas tree farm. I used to tell people I sold Christmas trees and they used to think it sounded thoroughly lovely which merely confirmed to me they had never spent thirty-five straight days standing around in the rain carrying trees for ten hours in the middle of the winter. But I digress. It was maybe the third year of doing it when one of my fellow masochists told me about a small portable speaker called the Minirig. They loved their drum and bass, were a regular festival goer, with knowledge, and this speaker was apparently the best you could get. Small, rechargeable, bluetooth which could connect enough together to be good enough for an actual gig. Fair enough I thought. I put it on my ‘to desire and maybe but probably not buy one day’. Well I only went and bloody bought it.

It’s an interesting purchase because I was trying to work out how I could justify it, like I said I don’t listen to music constantly and well my laptop and mobile are surprisingly loud. My justification was that it would come in handy for future travel. How much I misjudged the power of this speaker. Firstly it’s worth saying how beautiful it is, sleek black, stylish cylindrical, ideal size for my hand, aesthetically it just oozes quality. And then I started playing some songs and the moment it began I was just amazed, it was almost jaw dropping. The sound quality is just outstanding. I can not stress how good the sound quality is. Genuinely I can’t stop listening to music because the sound is just perfect. This is how music is supposed to sound. It has all sorts of technical specifications which mean nothing to me and I’m not going to bother sharing them here. Just believe me when I say it makes me smile when I look at it and realise that sound my ears can hear is coming from that little speaker. If anyone ever asks me about speakers I will only ever have one answer. There is no second option. I never thought an inanimate object could bring me such pleasure.

An Unknown Transition Into The Unknown

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I’m not someone who feels the need to play music all the time. I enjoy silence. I enjoy podcasts. I enjoy music. But a balance between them is vital, as is my mood on their regularity. I have been listening to some music for the last half hour while I was online and avoiding writing this. When I see people listening to music and being able to study, read or write, basically concentrate, I have often wished this was something I was capable of. The words coming on this page would be inspired by the sounds around me but I can’t focus and not even one word follows.

I was listening to some dub and desiring a party or a festival. These last few years have been an interesting transition in life. Everyone goes though different chapters in their lives, even if they marry at 18, never divorce, never leave their home town and keep the same job, there will still be chapters within this. Mine have been slightly more adventurous and I can recognise periods when I wanted nothing but travel and others when I felt a need to rest for example. It took about five years from my first desires for rest to get to were I am now but life is all so extreme that I’m still longing for adventure equally alongside some kind of ‘normal’ existence. ‘Normal’ is a strange and inexplicable concept, which is why I won’t even try explaining what I mean by it and I know my version of it will still be a long way from the man with many chapters in the same town above. But fuck, right now having listened to a little music and recollected a few memories, there is a part of me that wants to put down the ‘normal’ so much and pick up the alternate once more.

I have also come to appreciate this life though recently and value the people living it far more than I ever did at the height of being a prick in my more adventurous moments. I’ve come to realise there is as much value in this existence as one lived with daily excitement and variety, it’s different value but it’s still value regardless, as it too is exciting and varied regardless. That doesn’t stop me wanting to drop it all and jump on a boat heading somewhere wild and exotic though but I doubt that will ever leave me. Equally this current existence is an extreme in the other direction as I know the ideal will be somewhere in the middle. I only meant to come here for a few months to help a mate out and it’s been nearly six months. He’s taking great pleasure in reminding me a few more months and I’ll have broken my longest job record. With this pizza takeaway now being a thing and coronavirus being an even bigger thing it seems I may still be sitting in this same seat in four months trying to understand what the drink in my hand represents.

Is this now life? Well it’s the current version and I’m starting to learn enough from it that interesting things happen when we roll with whatever comes up. In a way that’s a freedom more real than any enforced search for a liberty that ultimately becomes constrictive. There are always things out of our control which make us jump between paths, enduring the grey transitional space between, but once we’re actually on it; life never really seems all that bad. Quite often the opposite. It has become clear to me recently that we’re owed nothing, their is no destiny, that desires will never happen if we wait for them to and ideas of fairness miss the harsh unknown nature of life. It is an irrational and absurd world. Nothing bad has happened but seemingly I’ve managed to understand the knowledge I previously had and it all seems to make a little more sense. This is why discipline is necessary. Why being able to focus the energy to achieve the goal is the only way we can really get things done. Why I’m curious, excited and unsure about what comes next. It’s a little unknown. But then everything always has been.

Different Shades Of Grey

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

It is interesting what methods people use to work or be creative. I remember I used to know someone who when studying preferred to be in busy noisy areas as it allowed her to concentrate; so the cafe section of the library over the quiet floor. I’ve often known people to play music while they study as it seems to help them focus and there are numerous studies backing this up. I have tried with classical music, which is usually the style of choice in these research, and found that of all types of sounds I could listen to it is probably the one that helps the most. It has something to do with the affect it has on your brain or something like that, the internet could probably inform me accurately but I am lazy to check. Certain music though I can’t study or write with and that is when I can hear words because I find them distracting as I follow along. In reality though I’m a silence man. I wonder what it is that leads one person to favour one way over another. I can only imagine it has something to do with upbringing and the environment you grew up studying in. My inability to study and use any possible excuse to be distracted probably led me to my silent necessities and I imagine someone who grew up in a noisy domestic environment but still studied around this probably searches this out.

That is the setting though but what about using certain things to assist us. I’ve met many a sophisticated wanker who loves the affect a glass of red wine has alongside a good book or while scribbling down words. He takes a sip out of his cup of red wine before continuing. Certainly though too much alcohol only hinders this process but I remember reading something a few years back that suggested the best combination was to have an alcoholic drink to relax the mind subsequently allowing it to be more creative and then a cup of coffee to give it the energy and focus required to implement the creativity. It’s not impossible to see some validity in this. I sometimes enjoy a little smoke and then attempt to write down some thoughts, but I could never study this way as the mind is all over the place. Equally if I am attempting to write something that I don’t want to be illegible nonsense despite appearing to be wisdom at the time then I really couldn’t smoke. I could though play the guitar as I just like to mess around on that and do it for the pleasure in the moment not with the intention of attempting to create anything for anyone else. I don’t though feel the desire to pick it up when sober so definitely smoking helps this.

It’s just interesting because everybody is so different and requires such different surroundings to achieve the same end result. We are also so varied in the way differing things affect us and how we manage to respond to them in regards alternate versions of output. Maybe I should have a smoke one day and try writing something on here, that could be an interesting addition, it may also be pretty obvious but also magically creative. It is just fascinating to see how different everyone is and depressing to see how we try and force everyone into boxes or group them all into either black or white. Education has a lot to do with this and it’s always very interesting to meet people who have been through alternative types of schooling because they have such different ways of resolving issues that arise. Time has many answers, hopefully we someday stumble upon the one which allows us to discover whichever shade of grey we are in between.