Starting two summers ago, I began to pay regular visits to the recently renovated library during the early afternoons. Amazingly, the clean, well-lighted place is usually fairly devoid of bodies. Absurd as that may seem, the better the library is to provide me with a soothingly detached and urbane haven in which to ponder that thing which, though alluring, always seems so elusive to me. My illegitimate musical patriarch, Frank Vincent Zappa (five years gone next month) used to call that thing which some call music "time, and those waves."

As I walk around this old, austerely engineered campus each day, I realize that, like most things, I take it for granted. However, occasionally, I do pause and contemplate its lofty architecture. Amusingly enough, I seem to do so most either when I'm leaving for a little while, or when I return from being absent for a time. When I stand very still, as motionless as I can manage while still being considered alive, I swear that I can hear the bricks, cornices and astutely measured tensile arrangements of the buildings creating a barely audible, yet almost frighteningly captivating symphony.

Arches vaulting skyward and back down again warble quixotically, like an mind-bending etude by Hungarian composer, Gyorgy Ligeti (best known for the "Monolith Music" from Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey"). The delicate, ever-crisp stone foliage of huge Corinthian columns whisper ancient, Aristotelian secrets on the breeze. St. Paul's, Columbia's petite and acoustically arresting domed chapel, lays just North of the Avery Fine Arts and Architectural Library, where I have worked full-time for the past three years. Often, when I stroll by in the gauzy fog of Spring, or in Winter's brittle hush, I can actually hear the gentle weft of human voices in unison, emerging from its heavy, ever-open wooden doors.

From silent symphonia, I move on to think about travel, again, about the sometimes-seeming sickness that comes over me and many people I know at certain times of the year, involving time bending those waves into appealing shapes, by way of electronic instrumentation and amplification. After a while, it's hard to tell exactly what motivates magnetic motivation towards music, towards organized audial chronologies of inventive design, litanies of words and tones and rhythm which actually mounts a structure in which to temporarily reside, a virtual Sweat Lodge (in some cases) of sensation and ideas.

This past month, I was (again) charmed enough by whatever forces in charge, to be able to witness a few really great musical experiences. Some were by bands that I haven't shut up about since the summer, like The Disco Biscuits, or for years, like moe.. Others were by up-and-coming bands like Boulder's Fat Mama, Baltimore's Lake Trout, and Boston's Uncle Sammy. Yet others of these experiences were created by myself and some people I know, brave enough to not just sit around and listen, but to contribute personally to the construction of the always-expanding City of Sound. I negotiated my way to these shows and situations by way of all transports save air, but when the feet planted themselves and rose in dance, the wind stirred enough in me to simulate the flight of the most excellent of birds, metal or otherwise.

On October 21, I attended another one of those seemingly routine Wetlands shows, unassumingly unfurled into a waiting and empty Thursday night in New York City. By subterranean rail navigation, I emerged in familiar Lower Manhattan, stoic and shrill the glow of the World Trade Center's twin, square spires in the near distance. After some conversation, technical difficulties were ironed out, and it was deemed that there would be a thick-as-hell sandwich of Fat Mama, with a slather of Lake Trout in the middle. More than content with the contented with the possibilities, the music soon began, and I moved into that area inside my head reserved for contemplating a live show, as-it-happens.

By the time Lake Trout finished their middle set, I was convinced that I'd witnessed the re-invention of the wheel. Bands claiming to be part of a genre-set like "jambands," when containing vinyl-flippin' DJs and including weird, idiosyncratic guitar stylings (like rapidly toggling the pickup switch to create eerie percussive clicks and crinkles), are elevating the genre to new standards of jaw-dropping incredulity. Fat Mama were astoundingly good, picking up their pointed variety of sneering, contemplative and abstract, jazzy funk from where I last took it in (at last summer's Disco Biscuit music marathon, Camp Bisco). Upon returning home, I remarked to friends in the elemental nowhere-land of Internet mailing-list space:

"Fat Mama's DJ *deconstructed* the origins of sound last night! He took some ferociously slow and involved beat, and spun it, looped it...the band came up strong on the horns underneath it, searing, then fading...then the real drummer kicked in with an altered beat, super-alluring on the waistline for twisting and shoulder-hop-popping. The song 'YID PANTHER' is the coolest thing ever. They speak in musical chapters, these guys...kings of the slick fade and re-entry..."

However, it was Lake Trout that caused the all-too familiar interior of the Wetlands to fold in upon itself that evening. And already excellent conglomeration of bands revealed itself to be truly masterful, when Lake Trout *entered* the stage; not merely donning instruments and playing "music," this band spread the maw of time open, and let something like Pure Sound come pouring out. It was during celestially crafted, hyper-rhythmic orchestrations like "Sounds From Below" that I lost the band entirely, as they disappeared into an illusory realm which, for precious, eternal moments, I knew to be the space in which The Truth really does dwell. As they concluded their set, flummoxed, I plummeted to the wooden floor of the mostly airy dance-floor, the wet murmur of a New York Thursday night continuing on, unassumingly outside the Wetlands' door.

Just when I thought that the October 21 Lake Trout show had shown me all I would ever need to know about musical transcendence, October 28 rolled around the very next week, and I was back out on the road to ingest a little more of the The Disco Biscuits' richly glutinous splendor. First, it was to Lake Trout's home base of Baltimore, and Towson University's conservatively-designed, yet acoustically breathtaking Recher Theater.

That night, the Biscuits had an unbelievable set lovingly scripted for them: a terse, hyper-mechanical romp through some of the more powerful songs of their repertoire. Responsible for the frenzy which ensued, and the heavy, dense walls of jam, hairpin-turn and elegant frenzy, was the Biscuits' multi-purpose, mohawked merchandise dude and ersatz roadie, Eric Bernstein. An ex-tour rat making good, he was visibly proud to get in on some of the action, crafting the set with in-and-out lattices of various songs, shadowy refrains and returns, and steep, firm changes of scenery, causing the traveling audience to pounce upon him and congratulate him wherever seen, for the next four days of the Fall tour-closing Northeast run.

The next night was even more glorious. All whom were present recall the show at UPenn's newly-renovated Irvine Auditorium as being semi-religious, not only due to the fact that The Disco Biscuits had finally made it back to their native Philly after scouring the hills and valleys of America to a fine shine over the last two months. The space, newly renovated after its initially faulty early 1920's design rendered it notoriously crappy across campus, opened to the Biscuits for the first performance since the acoustics had been improved. That night, I decided to opt for a little fungus-based paradigmatic shifting, knowing that somewhere beyond the heavy, yet glorious materiality of life lies that clear, crystalline Somewhere Else, the place which is not a place, but which is indeed only accessible to humans by way of gently fucking with the familiarly fleshy interface (and methods of which, there are millions upon millions).

As stone turned to liquid and the night sky to a slowly shifting, star-dappled slab of smoky onyx, I rose out of myself, and floated above the slate arranged in a stepped patio in front of the Irvine Auditorium. The edifice sits stately on the busy corner of Spruce Street, on the bustling, urban UPenn Campus. The night spoke softly to my skin, and I meshed with the sound sliding off of the silent building, more of time, and those waves. Walking around the structure, I regarded the bricks, finally not taking for granted the fine masonry and elegant, odd geometrical patterning of Irvine's high outer walls.

Moving back up front, a small yet buzzy crowd of old friends, new acquaintances, Bisco virgins and old codgers alike were gathering, huddling in a cozy, frenetically anticipatory sway. I moved from my insides out, feeling the bones turn to nonsense, and watching the city gurgling and moving on the eve-eve of Halloween, costumed freaks and party fiends turning the streets surreal, as my eyes moved over it all like so much glorious nonsense. Soon, though, after warmly realizing the crowd, comprised of students who'd walked in from home a few blocks away, to those UPenn alumni and other hardcore admirers who'd drove and flown and wandered in from amidst the many miles, I knew it was time to make my way inside.

I sucked a mouthful of air ferociously, but quietly, into my throat. I swore I heard the gasp resonate throughout the airy, austere, hundred-foot high space above me, and I tilted my head back to behold a mute chorus of silently swaying, soothingly woven acoustical sheets hanging from the high ceiling. The walls, flanked around the stage by the huge, thirty-foot-high pipes of the auditorium's old organ, soared into space decorated with elegant jewel and pastel-toned geometry, and rang with the hues of fresh paint. The atmosphere was one of hushed awe, respect and deep gratitude. Hoodied hippie-kids and older local types...everyone there was honored to be, and were, in their multivarious states of excitement, moved by the enclosure which would soon carry the music right to their souls.

And that's not to say anything of the show. But I won't go into massive detail. Everyone who was there remembers, and for those who weren't, let's just say, at one point during mid-set two, I felt my arms raising back behind me, like a ski-jumper wedging at a taut angle through the frosty gales, piercing the wind toward The Goal. I opened my eyes, unafraid, and felt the sound like a breeze hit me, hot and true and fierce, and all language left me.

In retrospect, as the lights like grace hit my eyes, I felt that the music, and perhaps all music, was just my wavelength, and with the right kind of attention, I realized more often than I could calculate how much I am affected by the movement of the winds across my dark face, and through the thick bones I inherited from my long-dead, West Indian paternal grandmother. Although transplanted now, the thirst for rhythm and chordal arrangement lives in my structure as well as my fallings-apart. It has a voice in stoic concrete slabs of the Modern West, the New York City skyline which has captivated me since riding through space in the baby car-seat of old. It also murmurs in from the more esoteric and ungraspable workings of man and Creation alike, from the massive and rocky Himalayas of the East, and back to the vernacular themes of factories, covered bridges and kitschy roadside diners and crappy bars of New World America.

Finally, for the past two months, myself and a few other kids I've met in the non-spatial Internet conglomerate of Disco Biscuit-loving fans and freaks, DiscussBiscuits, have been getting together in small, somewhat worn and dingy rooms 200 feet below New York City's hustling outdoors. We all decided one day that it would be a good thing to not only worship the tunes of others, but to try to make some noise ourselves, which is probably the first line of every musical success story ever told, dating back to the Stone Age.

The maiden jam voyage was held, problematically enough, in the 9' x 12', audio-equipment-crammed bedroom of one of the guitar-slingers who lives in New Jersey. Having moved to a bigger location has had it's disadvantages. The equipment is often bad in this particular pay-by-the-hour studio, which has seven practice rooms of varying size, and little or no artistic inventiveness. Purely mounted for utility, the rooms are part of the studio's banal charm, its claim to fame being that its originally intended use was as a weighted bomb shelter, deep in a sub-basement under an old auction house.

Nearly every week for the past month, the six or eight or more of us have gotten together from various near locales, to merely get together and see what we can manage with our individual talents. Some people don't even play anything, and just come to cheer us on and watch, wince, and laugh, and then go home and resume their lives, perhaps a little more inspired by the closeness they have gained to the musical process. This week, we're having some dilemmas as to whether or not we should start introducing structure into the jams, and what we're goning to do about having THREE keyboard players on hand, who all want to have some fun jamming.

Looking back, though, for all the lopsidedness and logistical frenzy involved with getting a handful of people together every week, the jam sessions have, at least symbolically, proven to be some of the most exciting moments I've spent in a while. Deeply daring, it is thrilling for the same reasons that the pen and notebook of the main character of George Orwell's "1984" were scandalous. Not just standing by and listening to the wind move through and around existing buildings, we've chosen to move on to new sites and draw out new plans, taking the materials we have, and erecting new monuments to the Spirit of Sound...just for the hell of it.

Do we take the Frank Lloyd Wright route, building new space while referencing the existing landscape (i.e. playing covers)? Do we emulate the Bedouins of Arabia, elegantly wandering nomads who traverse the desert, using what they need and building sturdy, yet impermanent habitats wherever they may find themselves (i.e. freejam into deep space using whatever we hear, when we hear it)? Or do we make like a Winnebago and do a little of both...aspiring towards a home of sound, but realizing that it's all just water under the bridge?

The answers to these questions, as a wise sage once said, is blowing in the wind. And as always, I'm keeping the window open, in case the imaginary wings which every so often sprout from my shoulder blades signal me that it's once again time to fly. And from above, I will regard the marvelous architecture which comes from dreams, inner vibrations of hope, and so generously return to silence, giving us all spaces in which to ever begin the process anew.