Editors' Blogs

Sometimes you just have to roll with it.

Sometimes it doesn't matter how much you plot and plan, how carefully you lay down your strategy of attack, how neatly you line up all your ducks in the metaphorical row — you get thrown a curve and you alter your aim and swing for the bleachers. If you're lucky, you get a good chunk of the ball and the crowd goes wild. Or something like that. When I look back over the 20 years that I've been friends with the man best known to the musical world as CASSIEL, I occasionally get the impression that our encounters have, over and over again, had some element of that on my part. Not because planning and organizing aren't a normal part of that world — they most certainly are — but that whatever planning and organizing I do always tends not to be in the right place. I get the constant feeling of having worked like a fiend getting ready for A, only to discover that B is coming up and everyone seems to have known it but me.

It's very interesting having your dearest friend in the music world be a space alien, or the nearest thing you're likely to meet in this world.

Nick Rothwell and I became friends over the Internet. Not the namby-pamby modern Internet with cloud computing and hyperlinks and web browsers and all that other baby stuff... the real Internet, the pre-Web steaming jungle of widely disconnected subnetworks that could only talk to each other if a user knew precisely which computer would have a data connection open that would allow the emails he was sending to jump the chasms between the academic world and the budding commercial networks and the Government. In the 1980s, I was working at the University of Pittsburgh or at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Nick was at the University of Edinburgh, a comparatively easy jump (compared to getting to those of our friends who were on UUnet or MILnet... but John 3 is a topic for another blog). Back in the days when you had to be a bit of a geek even to get a message from person A to person B reliably, the musicians online were a hardy bunch of something-else-firsts: scientists, programmers, or what have you. They were interested in discussing music when they weren't doing work, and the Internet slowly evolved a forum for them to do so. Back before anyone invented spambots, the USENET Newsgroups were actually mostly real content, and experimental musicians hung out on rec.music.synth (if you're not old enough to remember that name rather than the later one with an unnecessary fourth hierarchical step inserted in the middle, sorry, you can't claim geek cred). The American University in Washington, DC, had a mainframe computer cluster that hosted topical mailing lists, including EMUSIC-L. And between the two, musicians who wanted to meet and converse with likeminded souls had, through the wonders of newsreading and email, a whole universe that hadn't existed a decade before and would be largely buried under the onslaught of www.crap-for-noobs.com a decade later.

Nick and I became friends in that weird way one does when emailing someone half a world away that one is never likely to actually meet. We compared musical likes and dislikes, talked about what modern music gear did that was smart or inspiring and what it did that was less so, and we had a somewhat similar penchant for the dry and weird in our sense of humor. When I proposed the idea of a physical get-together for some of my online friends in 1990, Nick was the only one who came from overseas. He was among the first to arrive and last to leave, and we discovered that we got along famously.

He made it a point to return on a regular basis over the ensuing decades. We made a lot of music together; he watched my children grow up (including an infamous visit to London when he had our entire family take over his tiny flat for a few cramped but riotously enjoyable days); and when I launched the Different Skies festival and he attended for the first time in 2004, his statement that "I'd finally gotten it right" was some of the finest praise I'd ever received. We remain close friends and see each other as often as we can, even today.

So why is it that no matter how many times we work together, I always feel like I showed up completely unprepared, or worse yet, showed up completely prepared for the wrong party?

Nick really is a space alien. I'm convinced of this. Not a space alien like the kind you see in horror movies, a critter with fangs and tentacles that grabs the scantily clad heroine in the fourth reel; a benevolent and wise and slightly insane space alien who's so far beyond us mere humans that his attempts to rub elbows with us always go slightly awry, like The Doctor or maybe Ford Prefect. I've only felt that way once before, and that was meeting Roger Penrose, the physics genius who worked out much of the theory of black holes. (To be fair, he made Nick look as normal as the rest of us. But I digress.)

Whenever Nick starts creating music (or video or some other bit of beauty), he works from a set of rules that allow him to construct software and hardware amalgamations that then help him construct music. Much of what he does is creating things that help him create — like software that turns simple gestures into complex musical forms, for example. He works very hard and focuses very tightly on his goals, and the stuff he comes up with looks effortless and sounds like nothing anyone's ever heard before.

This state of affairs and its impenetrability to outsiders is compounded by the fact that Nick, despite having a Ph.D. in computer science, is one of those people you meet sometimes who just kills computers. He can crash programs that have been considered stable for years, blow up networks that have had thousands of hours of up-time just by logging on, and I once saw him cook a $3000 laptop just by plugging in a USB hub. Darwin Grosse calls him "the Black Finger of Death." It's quite the impressive talent, all the more so when you think about the fact that Nick makes his living working with computers, day and night.

You can read about some of Nick's projects, past and present, at the CASSIEL website. If you're curious about the last time he bothered to release an album (CDs being soo last millennium), you can find it here, and for an example of some of his more recent work you could do worse than to go here. From Istanbul to Tokyo to Dublin to San Francisco to Chicago to London to Arcosanti, Nick's constant stream of interesting projects keeps him busy and engaged and young, and keeps all his friends guessing. (And by the way, he's one of the few people I know who's actively making a living doing this stuff, so the practical-minded business types could learn a thing or two about discipline, marketing, self-promotion, networking, and public relations from him as well.)

I try to understand what he does, and how he does it, and try to figure out how best to dovetail with it... and none of my plans ever work out. I end up just having to roll with it, and I'm lucky that the results have often been really pretty, if never quite what I anticipated. I think, at some basic and important level, that we all need someone like that in our lives. It keeps us on our toes. One can't ask much more of that in a friend, aside from a sympathetic ear when things go cockeyed... and Nick's good at that, too.