I need to reassess how I feel about everything related to music. There are issues that are preventing me from being truly creative and inspired. The options seem quite unlimited when it comes to the directions I can take in music, but that is the very thing that I’ve become so uncertain of. When I’m finally done, I have to face whether or not my music will be rejected in the face of the industry. Besides the point of when I actually get signed is if the CD will actually sell… if anybody is actually listening. Now that I think about it, there are issues up the ass hole, but I need to solve or dismiss what the best options are.

I’m scared shit-less of getting on stage and singing.. besides playing instruments, well, I haven’t really thought about it.. I know that it’s something I want to do though and I’ve been picturing it in my head for a long time now. I was born in the wrong circumstances and everything has to be a pain in the ass for me. I just can imagine from past experience that I’ll be scared shit-less when I’m on stage, then again, maybe I wont any more, or maybe I’m just lying to myself.

Okay… let’s see. Music is something I was passionate about, and dead serious about making it. I pretty much told myself straight out that this is what I was going to do and I’m going to do it… I had Corby by my side, always supporting me. We were going to do this! Okay… but this was Techno Bass music, and making it was either getting signed to DM Records, the label I absolutely adored, so unjustly, or… opening up our own record label and doing our own music and producing a bunch of other artists who were into the same stuff as us. So, at the time, pretty much, a Cyber-Bass label.

Maybe I was in la-la land by the fact that this music was so small across the World. I thought after releasing the albums through DM, I’d have enough money to start my own label and somewhere I’d find the talent to produce. Call me young and stupid? I’m not sure. Things didn’t go quite the way I planned. I believed everything was possible, I was an optimist. The future was beaming light so bright that I was blind and that feeling was the best feeling I’d felt in my life. Call me sheltered?

I sold around 10,000 units with two albums through DM Records, I already had the third album half way done and I was so utterly excited about this big insurgence of electronic music that was starting to hit the mainstream and these huge parties happening all over the World every weekend called Raves. Holy shit, this is going to be huge!

Here I am, on another excitement trip, actually this one started slightly after the release of Transcend and Live Deeper, probably in the core of it.. Godspeed was going to be the project, and I was excited. Our label started giving us shit, we had been complaining about people not being able to find our stuff being labelled under RAP&HIP-HOP/BASS and we had asked for Live Deeper to be labelled under BASS/ELECTRONICA. It still ended up under hip-hop on record shelves. I felt like we were being misunderstood and marketed to the wrong crowd. DM wanted us to change everything about our music, including the length of the songs and asking us to change our name on the next album.

I was never so frustrated and upset. We were suppose to go to a recording studio and record to ADAT with money out of our own pockets and we hadn’t even seen a penny, I almost said dime! Out of the last how many years of work, effort and soul that was put into the music. Maybe I’d dramatic and I have the wrong motives, but I’d already chosen this as my path in life and it doesn’t seem I’ll ever even be able to support myself. Such a let-down, when you see all these people with mansions and endless things on TV. I wasn’t asking for that.

Maybe I should actually find out who is making what and how they’re doing so. At my point in life, money is becoming a factor and is a huge motivation on the route I’ll have to take and it really sucks because I hadn’t given it much thought because I had and was GOING TO MAKE IT in music, because I have to and because I have the passion to do so.

My lack of motivation and the reason why I can’t finish this album is due to the fact there is no one to give my music to, who will buy it. No label to give my music to, to market it and my own critical nature, keeping it to myself to avoid criticism. My inability to face criticism easily and my fear of people. I really want to see all my dreams come true, so I need to face this..

P.S. I freakin’ love my music.

It’s 2004, time flies. This year I turn 24. Where are my goals and dreams in my life going? Last night I started listening to a bunch of old bass CDs in Mandy’s little ghettoblaster-ish stereo beside the bed. The last one I played with the lights off, as I was falling asleep, was the demo CD that Tim Brown (a.k.a. Bass Age) gave me when he came up with his girlfriend from Missouri to meet me and Corby in Des Moines, Iowa. That was on July 4th, 1999. I was 18. I remember how exciting it was to meet him, partly because of how intensely excited he was to meet us. We went out to eat together and sat and talked about how passionate we were for the music we were doing and shared everything we knew about the genre and creating the music. He showed me Techmaster PEB and DJ Magic Mike’s signatures and letters that he had received from record label submissions and just about everything collectible from DM Records. We autographed his copy of Live Deeper. I use to have a pretty nice signature.. I thought.. lol. I can hear influences from my old music in his. I was thinking if I did do the independent route for my own music, I want to release the demo he’s given me to the public and pay him money for it. Me and Tim use to stay up all night talking to each other. He seemed to be the most passionate, ambitious and inspired musical person I had known. Somehow he had been inspired a lot by what I was doing. It seems like a tragedy that he has had so much unused talent and that he had to put music on the back-burner. I really feel he can make something of himself with music and I hope he does some day.

I’m so happy to have Mandy and that she will sit and listen to me get upset and cry about how tragic things like this feel to me. Why can I feel this way, when I see it from this perspective? It’s just as fucking traffic that I’m not out there right now doing what I can and possibly in the process connecting with, inspiring, or changing just a few miserable people’s lives. Wasn’t that a big reason to have started in the first place? Is it at all wrong getting pleasure out of this? Other people’s music has inspired and changed me all my life. Some people come to respect you. I have an issue with myself that I don’t want to become egotistical, but I believe feeling secure with yourself and being egotistical about something are two entirely different things. You should know in your heart though that there are some things you can do better than other people. But, somehow, praise and admiration feels so wrong anymore. One of the reason’s I began writing was to prove everybody’s misconceptions of me wrong and show them what I am capable. Laugh in the faces of all those people that treated me like shit and maybe feel good about myself for once, but, by then, you know better..

I always had so many ideas of what I’ve wanted to do with my music. I remember driving on the highway with Corby when we were in Iowa and how passionately I talked about my new outlook on music. I constantly talked about what I wanted to achieve. I still have my ideas of what I want to do, I think I need to concentrate a little on the things that excite me a little more though. The crazy synth riffs, the funky basslines, the really neat heavy breakbeats, the rich harmony and thick vocals, the right consistencies of guitar and piano. Somehow, through this whole thing, I want to make an album that’s powerful, yet emotional at the same time. I think I feel that the stuff I’m making is too mellow, or soft. My drive is something that would be represented as something fierce, the kind of shit you can get a whole crowd of people moving and into it. The stuff that you can’t resist staying still, making you have to move, rather if it’s breakdancing, headbanging, moshing, or just nodding your head hard. We use to be after something powerful. Something on the forefront, that might confuse the fuck out of people, but would push the boundaries of music and be powerful and change the way things are perceived. I’ve been missing my studio and the ability to express myself through music, since I’ve been down in Las Vegas for so long. I was talking to Dilvie (Eric Hamilton) on the internet when we were staying at Lisa’s house. (House sitting.). He was asking if I would be interested in putting a song on a local electronic compilation. I asked him about manufacturing and distribution of the record. I’ve also been thinking a lot about UBM, the CDs we’ve already released, which are no longer in print. I want to ask DM Records for the master recording rights for Transcend and Live Deeper back. Dilvie was telling me about a pretty kule production-on-demand site that works like the MP3.com DAM CD program. He says it would be a good idea to use a program like this until the demand for the CD is higher. Then it would be more profitable to get the CDs mass produced. Anyways, this got me thinking that I should release a single or an EP and then really try to promote from there, then maybe build up the finances to release an album on my own. All I need is a way to accept credit card orders on my Audesi website. I really do need to plan and see this as a business. I can’t feel bad about one of the reasons I do and love to do music is that I can profit and make money from it. Don’t a lot of us dream and want to grow up to be “rock stars”? Well, maybe that’s what I should do. I also need to re-release The Godspeed Project, because it’s no longer purchasable from MP3.COM, because MP3.COM no longer exists.

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