Editors' Blogs

People who pay attention to my blog entries have probably noticed by now that I have mentioned Darrell Burgan a lot lately. Darrell, who's also known under the name Palancar ("Pal" for short), is another fine example of a man with too much to do to waste time contemplating whether or not he's "successful" by any conventional standard, a man too occupied with creating and sharing beauty to fret about whether it all will "get him anywhere."

Pal describes his life succinctly: "I have been described as a person who has his fingers in a lot of pies. I would say it is more accurate to say I am a person who is obsessively compelled to juggle a lot of chainsaws simultaneously." While I wouldn't call his work "juggling chainsaws", I must admit I'm very impressed with the number of musical (and other) projects Pal keeps moving forward successfully. If I tried to do half of what he did I'd go bananas, and I have half the number of kids he does!

Of particular relevance to you readers are Pal's musical projects. He runs not one but two record labels, whose featured releases reflect changes in his view of how music can or should be released to the world. One is Blue Water Records, which features small-run CD releases available for sale, and the other is Earth Mantra, a netlabel dedicated to providing high-quality ambient music for free download under the Creative Commons license. (See my blog "Free is not the same as Worthless" for more about CC.) Pal practices what he preaches about CC and paid music existing side by side and complementing one another.

In addition to the labels, Pal runs StillStream, a very successful ambient music online radio station, that provides 24/7 content by a variety of great artists. He searches the Net for new material, vets it for quality and puts it into the station's repository, encourages the efforts of his staff of ten DJs (of which I'm one), and takes a couple of hours a week to do his own radio show, complete with live improvised concerts for his audience. In addition to his Palancar solo material, he plays live on Second Life (as Professor Blackmountain), and collaborates with many other musicians on more bands and projects than I can keep track of. 

The beauty of all this is how it all dovetails together. Pal's music, his love of the genre, and his friendship with the community, all form pieces of a larger whole, a busy and productive but impeccably well-thought-out life. (With his usual modesty, Pal would argue that all he's doing is making it look easy while scrambling to stay on top of things, but those of us who know him are entitled to feel differently about it.) While you might or might not like the ambient music he performs, you can learn from this elegantly fitted musical life regardless of whether you play rock, jazz, country, punk, or Tuvan throat-singing. Make all of your efforts reasoned parts of a larger plan to push your music forward, so that everything you do brings something to your table, whether it's promotion, networking, practicing, composition, or just sitting around having fun. It can all contribute to the bigger picture.

Darrell will be writing an article or two for us in future issues, and his Spirit Canyon Audio impulse responses for convolution reverb plug-ins have been favorably mentioned by one of our reviewers recently. In the meantime, he'll keep on making music and building his community, and I'm tickled to be a part of it all.