I got into an argument with a friend of mine once about the route I liked to take when driving to upstate New York. He took the highway, the "getting there fast" being far more important than anything else. Me, I avoid highways as much as possible. After spending 20-plus years slogging through dense traffic to and from work, there is no way that I'm going to intentionally spend time on that tar torture strip of sameness.
Maybe it's the writer in me who worries about what might be missed along the way — the motel with attached plumbing business, the guns & guitars shop (complete with neon "Marshall" and "Remington" signs at opposite ends of the building), the building shaped and painted like a wheel of Swiss cheese. These sorts of oddities get dropped into the "idea basket" in my head. Hey, you just never know when they might come in handy.
All of this reminds me of sites such as Overheard in New York and Found Magazine, where bits of discarded objects and conversations provide the same sort of thought fodder as a drive past that farm stand/used jukebox company.
Poolplayers' Way Below The Surface seems at times almost like an accidental reconstruction of separately created musical thoughts. Don't take this to mean 'disjointed.' Their collective improvisations sounds anything but random. Have I contradicted myself? Accidental reconstruction... yet not random? Well, the themes of "overheard" and "found" have made their way into my thought process, so it's easy to imagine a pianist walking down the street, the melodic skeleton of "Beneath the Undercurrent" forming in his head. He passes a parked car and thoughts are interrupted by a snippet of techno filtering through the darkened glass. Ten stories above street level, an elongated trumpet tone can be heard.
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