The 9 Elitist Chaotic Musical Statements: (by Orion H) 1. Music theory is confusing and messes you up if you rely on it. We reject the claims of Blues snobs who say that all music derives from a certain scale. Look at how confusing a system musicians have invented for naming the 12 notes. The chromatic scale contains all scales and the 0 / 0 time signature contains all time signatures. 2. Training yourself to improvise in the absence of studying scales, keys, and other peoples songs, one can truly learn in time to play off the top of ones head or from the depths of ones heart. Use formulas sparingly, & understand the difference between the steps your hands do automatically that are familiar, which is important for practice, and having the sounds orginate creatively. One should consider the instrument & how it is tuned, and decide whether all the notes in the chromatic scale are equally easy to reach for your fingers, if any notes are under-preferred, and if that affects how your improvisation sounds. 3. Praise and acceptance from others is not helpful if it makes you quit trying. You have to keep practicing real improvising for a long time before it gets very good, and it is easier to just use a formula such as blues. People will praise you right off the bat, easily, but you will give up trying more easily that way. 4. If you play back a tape of your improvisation and something you did isnt good to listen to, edit it out & try not to do it again. For example, yelling out one stupid thing and then trying to make up for it by yelling it again. Another example is doing some long droning that goes on for 10 minutes instead of doing the one sound for a few seconds and leaving the listener just wishing it was longer. One mistake new people make is sort of intoning the syllable Ah, except sort of as a schwah, for one long breath after another. You should know if a part of a song is something you will want to fast forward past whenever you hear it, and just edit it out. It is better to lose about a minute of really cool unique sounds if you can't excise 10 seconds of garbage out of it, because the 10 seconds could bring down the listener so they only remember that. 5. When you convince your band to experiment with real improvising, snobs who have never done it before will usually turn up instantly and think they know everything and that they have good ideas. Generally, they will argue that everything and every bad idea has to be incorporated because it is improvisation, and for the sake of eclecticism. Often they will insist that their lame songs be added to the repertoire as a kind of side show. 6. Out of a 1 hour session it is typical to get 2-5 minutes of good material, but when playing live, the excitement of the show sometimes covers for you and the tape will be horrible even though the audience & the band liked it at the time. These good 2-5 minute clips can be pasted together on a tape as songs. 7. Getting everyone to scream randomly is a good way to break the ice. Once you get going, other people can join in cold & immediately begin producing, because of the momentum you already have going. 8. In many random chaotic audible events, the mind will perceive a kind of synchronicity, of the same kind that is produced by listening to several radios on different stations at the same time. Therefore, as long as you are bold & reckless enough, whatever you do should turn out okay if you have some good sound / hand co-ordination and dexterity. Many mistakes will turn out to be good moves, but this is not to be an excuse for doing anything whatever even if it sounds terrible. 9. The threshold of hearing is different for different people and at different times. So you can add sounds that can not quite be heard or that can barely be heard, and some people will be able to hear them, especially if they are high. INFO from Lama Kunga Gyaltsen: HI! Here is some background for you on the *S*A*M*S*A*R*A Chaos Quartet, for which Orion Hughes has recently launched a new Website, surfable at the following location: http://www.geocities.com/orionhughes FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Shoreline, Washington. At the ORION STUDIOS in Shorline, just beyond the North City of Seattle, Orion Hughes has been working arduously over the last several years to massage and re-work and write substantive computer music routines, using various pieces of software and hacking away at some of his own the original material recorded from 1994 to 1998 by the heavy metal ECETERA group called *S*A*M*S*A*R*A* which was started on June 2, 1994 by Lama Kunga Gyaltsen and Lightnin' John Daley Three Turtles. Orion has re-invented *S*A*M*S*A*R*A* to form the new group, adding the "Chaos Quartet" to the old name. According to band member, Lama Kunga Gyaltsen, or simply "Kunga," Orion has been developing a new genre of music which he, early on, called "CHAOS MUSIC." Without a doubt, especially through Orion's careful work, a significant body of work has been massaged, created, and re-created. The style has also been named "Seattle PLUNGE-rock". The original grouping of the band included a total of nine people that played in various configurations of the band. Following the successful closing at Sundown and thereafter by *S*A*M*S*A*R*A* of the "one and only" [that is the way they advertized it!] 1994 STARLIGHT MOUNTAIN FESTIVAL, in the Cascade Mountains near Snoqualmie Pass in Washington State, the band, mostly through Orion's insistence, became a FOUR-MAN BAND. In 1994, Lama Kunga Gyaltsen, a North American Yankee Doodle Lama [of Tibetan Buddhism] then in his mid-fifties, now living in Boulder, CO, NYC, New York and Kathmandu, Nepal -- he is the Landscape Bass Player; Lightnin' John, aka, Three Turtles, a Dakota-Italian, in his early fifties, now living in Colorado and the Four-Corners areas -- he is the Co-Lead Guitarist; H. Geoffrey Campbell, aka, Ghoon-see-toon, full-blooded Tlinget member of the First Peoples, now living in Anchorage, Alaska -- he is the Percussionist; and Orion O'Malley Hughes, aka, Orion, in his early twenties, still living in Shoreline and working as a Programmer and Developer for that big computer company in Redmond -- he was the other Co-Lead Guitarist ... THESE FOUR became *S*A*M*S*A*R*A* and did a fair number of concerts during the next four years. When Lightnin' and Geoffrey Campbell departed for areas of the Universe away from Seattle, the group became an ARCHIVAL HAPPENING. Orion supplied the lead. NOW, if you look at the Website, you will find the results of the groups efforts. There are now FIVE CDs ... a point of contention that is often modified by Orion. Kunga created the first CD, he said, when he submitted a CD to Orion, with careful packaging and some notes, with the CD being completely criss-crossed with a razor blade on the "play" side. There is only ONE copy of the first CD. Then there was originally "Wake Up Now," currently a collector's item and ... oh well ... check out the website. The current offerings, with all of the titles, and eventually some tracks, and some links to both SoniCabal and the Weirdville, two Avant Garde sites, as well as current email links to Kunga, Lightnin' and Orion ... are available. Orion and Kunga have cuts on the first two compilation CDs put out by Seattle's Electronic and Experimental Music Collective, SoniCabal. Orion has connect the groups music with the Weirdsville site which comes out of Massachusetts. Stay tuned ... more is yet to come! *** End of Press Release *** Interview with Orion Hughes of *S*C*Q* Me: I am interviewing Orion Hughes of Samsara Chaos Quartet, Orion, I want to ask you first of all: What's it like being an avant garde musician? Orion: I have a book out, called: "Avantathon: What it's like being an avant garde musician", I encourage the reader to check it out. Me: How did you become an avant garde musician? Orion: Because I wanted to talk about my childhood to people, and I knew that if I did some avant garde music, that I could get someone like you to interview me, and put it on a web page and pretend people read it. Me: How is your book doing? Orion: I've been sending it to alot of publishers, but so far, they are all more interested in publishing the more of the same old kinds of books that you see in the supermarket. Me: What's it like being up on stage, playing avant garde music? ... Orion Hughes cut the interview short at this point, and verbally cussed out the interviewer, then apologized for it later. He would like to apologize to everyone else he was ever a dick too, also.