Opal Night Index~Marea Nocturna

Music has defined my life. As a child, I listened to Stravinsky's Firebird, which scared me, and I hid under a table; I was convinced a firebird was out to get me. My mother played Chopin on the piano; she played too well, like a concert pianist. All was highly suspect.

Then came the music in the real world, the pop music of the 1980s and early 1990s, so shallow, so weird. I decided the real world was not for me and longed for the deep black nights of Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninov. I found Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and the original Qawwali in Central South Asian sources. That made me decide that something was really wrong with this world; the Qawwali in Western sources sounded so thin and weak …

Until in the mid-1990s, I experienced that if I listened to Stravinsky's Firebird at maximum possible sound levels, it would put me dead to sleep. I decided that my most useful way to exist in this world was like a sleepwalker, never completely awake to the world, always awake to the subconscious.

In the months prior to 9/11, immense pockets of dissonance inside NYC convinced me that I had to be gone fast. I began writing my psychological thriller series, Escape, at that time and researched human rights in various areas of the world that I won't name. Hint: They are inside the subconscious.

In the decade following, James Brown and Caribbean music called me back to one version of reality momentarily, a version some would call “real.” But I had studied MIDI and music editing in its early days in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A basic MIDI studio at that time cost $8,000, which I hadn’t pursued, so I had no clue what to do with this newly found version of reality.