During rehearsals they said, Carl, can you make us a sound of like, faces melting? … and I was like, “My God I’ve been waiting for somebody to ask me that my whole life, of course I can!”
The Eighth Nerve [EN] recently had a chance to speak with self-described “lover of humanity, sonic adventurer and psychedelic enthusiast,” Carl Golembeski [CG] about life on the road, the impact of the pandemic on touring musicians, Akroasis, creativity as service, and so much more…
[EN]: If I had to describe you in three words, it would be “cheerful, professional, and upbeat.” It seems that you enjoy yourself, and are also totally professional and reliable. Is that a fair description? Do you agree with that description?
[CG]: Yeah, I guess I can say that’s a fair description. I try to enjoy existence as much as possible, and including myself in existence helps make it enjoyable [ laughs ].
As far as being professional and reliable… hmm… I like to say that I’m reliable. I like to show up in ways that people can count on, and I think it’s important and respectful to other people to be reliable.
As far as being professional, you know the only difference between a professional and an amateur is that they get paid. Sometimes I think it’s a little game: I’ll act how you expect me to act so we can work. But there’s that little part of me that grew up in the punk scene and the raves, and it likes to disrupt the system… for the greater good of course! So sometimes, you know, I bite myself in the ass when my wide world view and passion for liberation and existence get in the way of professional things sometimes.
[EN]: What’s the longest continuous stretch of time that you’ve been on a tour?
[CG]: Usually it’s about three or four months at a time. I mean I’ve been on tours that are two and a half years long, three years long, but we go around the whole world, and we take breaks for a couple weeks. Go on for two, three, four months, four months max — and then you go home for a bit and then another couple months and then home and then another couple months and then home. That can be tough sometimes. That can get a little bit repetitive you know, especially the pop shows where you’re doing the same show. Every show is the same show, and you crave a bit of variety sometimes, you know? Your attention starts to go places and stuff. Part of the job is holding your attention, making sure we stay present when it gets repetitive. It becomes muscle memory; the stuff gets programmed into you.
[EN]: Describe the rhythm of life on tour. Do you alternate between travel days and performance days or are you often in a new venue every night? When do you typically wake up? Do you have daily rehearsals? When is sound check? When do you get to eat? And what do you typically eat?
[CG]: If we’re traveling in America or Europe, we’re usually on buses and if it’s longer distances maybe we’ll fly. So we have these buses, we have these little bunks with about 10 or 12 people in the bunks together, and you have some little lounges and we travel from gig to gig.
For the bigger shows, if they’re in stadiums, you can’t do so many in a row; also the artist needs to sing and rest their voice sometimes, so we don’t work every night. Usually you do three or four shows a week. Sometimes more, sometimes less but I’d say on average about three to four shows a week.
When we’re in places like Australia and Asia, you can’t really take buses so you’ve got to take all these other modes of transportation which is sometimes fun and sometimes really cumbersome if it’s not planned out well. I’ve been in all types of different scenarios, from well planned things, to not so well-planned ones where we’re taking a bunch of gear with us after the gig, hopping on an airplane, right to the airport, into another city, right to load in, taking naps on the risers after I set up my equipment.
Sometimes it’s been pretty rough getting from place to place, but when we have a bus and you can sleep and it’s planned well it’s awesome. We either wake up at the venue or — because I’m on the audio team or part of the engineering team or back line crew that usually has to go in later — we’re kind of the last ones in, and we’re out of the show quite early… first ones out basically.
So when I wake up I can get up anytime 9 to 11 am. If I’m at a hotel, I’ll have some tea and then I go into the venue, because the venue is kind of like our little home (we have everything there). I go and set up my gear and I have my little world. We make sure everything works with a line check to make sure everything functions, that nothing broke, and everything works as expected, and then the band usually comes in and then we work with the band a little bit. Sometimes the band and the artist come in at the same time but usually the band will come in first, and then the main artist will arrive, and we’ll do everything together. If there are any concerns, if something wasn’t right at the last show, this is when we’ll figure that stuff out and make sure everybody’s comfortable.
I can eat whenever I want. There are windows of time where lunch will be happening at catering and then there’ll be a dinner window… there’s always food around at most places I’m at, there’s always something. Sometimes we’ll get the weird one-offs or weddings or some shows and it’s hard to find something to eat. Sometimes we’re just in these weird little places, like backstage in the Spinal Tap movie — these weird little meals and plates, and I can’t possibly eat this mini cracker — those are silly things that really happen. People want to be cheap and save on items like the food. Others value it and make sure it’s taken care of.
[EN]: How would you describe your role(s) in the tour?
[CG]: When I first started out, I was a keyboard tech, programming synthesizers and doing local gigs in NYC. Then I started touring doing keyboard tech stuff. That eventually turned into me doing Pro Tools and Ableton ‘play back’ gigs around 2007. That involved synchronizing all the time code for the lighting and the video and the click tracks and the tracks that the band would play along to.
You’re kind of the centerpiece of the show really. You have a lot of responsibility. So if you fuck up, it’s a big fuck up. It happened a couple times where you press the wrong song, you forget to press stop or the rig fails. And you have to wait a minute and the whole show is kind of like waiting on you. It’s not a great moment, but it happens.
Since around 2015, I started doing vocal effects processing. I’ve put together a system that can do real-time processing in any way we want, using any plugins and any external gear mixed in. So that becomes the live version of what the artist does in the studio. The request was that Beyoncé wanted her live vocals to sound exactly like the recordings. So we came up with ways to copy what her engineer was doing in the studio. I worked with Stewart to see what his signal flow and timbre manipulations were. And then we would try to recreate that as closely as possible until everybody liked it for the live scenario. And then that turned into my job for a while.
[EN]: Have you ever used Kyma and your Pacamara in your live tour setup?
I used it for the Grammys when Beyoncé was pregnant; they had a scene where all these women appeared on a hologram behind her and then all the faces melted into each other. During rehearsals they said Carl can you make us a sound of like, faces melting? … and I was like, “My God I’ve been waiting for somebody to ask me that my whole life, of course I can!” That was a good opportunity to make a sound using her voice and morphing stuff into a gesture of melting womens’ faces.
[EN]: Typically, how much ahead of time do you get for rehearsal before a tour?
[CG]: We usually get a lot of rehearsal time, because so much goes into bringing all the departments of a show together: audio, video, dance, lighting. Part by part, it starts to come together, and then we rehearse the parts. The whole process could take anywhere from three to nine months to prepare the whole spectacle.
For example, for my last tour with Madonna 2023/24, it was 9 months of rehearsal for a world tour. That was followed by 6 months of rehearsal for a single show: Beyoncé at Coachella.
So yeah, I would say three to six months is quite average for the larger tours, but then you could do smaller ones. Like if it’s a band, they might have their stuff already rehearsed and well done. They just go out there put the lights up and boom! It’s kind of like a jam for everybody. That’s a different thing. They might not even need to rehearse. They might spend more time in sound checking and editing and rearranging ideas — rather than like a pop show where it’s so programmed.
[EN]: What tips do you have for staying healthy during a tour? Any jet lag secrets? Special foods? Other advice?
Honestly, my best advice is to negotiate a good rate, negotiate yourself good travel arrangements, so that you have the latitude to take care of whatever you need when you need to. Because honestly, it gets crazy sometimes. People start losing it, missing their families, getting agitated.
I’ve been able to hone in on my own being, to know my needs, and to simplify my needs so I’m able to take care of them myself most of the time. And then I’m fine. I don’t really have to depend on many things. Because that ends up being the hardest part. Having expectations that are not being met when you’re in another country or in some unfamiliar place. You’re expecting to have something done, and it’s not done, and the hotel’s wrong. The thing is like, “Okay, I’ll just go sort this out myself. I’ll take a taxi. I’ll get another hotel.” Whatever. Those things allow me to have peace.
But if I didn’t negotiate a good deal, I’ve also been in hell. Like when I was a keyboard tech and I also agreed to do the merch. Suddenly I’m trying to sell the merch in different countries, dealing with all these different currencies, and I can’t speak even the languages. I’m like, “Why did I say yes to this merch deal? It’s hot. I’m in a truck counting T-shirts and then I’ve got to go do the show and set up the keyboards.” I was like, “Oh man, I took one gig and now I’m doing two jobs.” So I think it’s important when negotiating, make sure to protect the things that you value and you need.
As far as jet lag secrets, I think business class is the secret for jet lag because you can sleep. Otherwise, you’re trying to sit upright, and it’s tough. Any flights that are over four hours, I try to negotiate business class now. That always helps. There’s honestly no way around that stuff for me. I just have to rest when I need to rest and chill out.
Special foods? For me it’s good ginger shots with some juice and a smoothie; those things are always good. And I have my tea; me drinking tea is like a ritual. I just do it all the time and wherever I go.
[EN]: Do you work on developing new material while on the road, or is there really no time for that?
[CG]: Yeah, I have tons of time to play with new things. Honestly, I’m doing that all the time. I’m always in these discovery processes. I always bring a rig to my hotel. I always have a little system in my backpack,
carrying it with me so I can set it up at my gig, on my rig next to it, or I can set up at my hotel. So I actually do have a lot of time to do those things. Sometimes just finding inspiration.
Sometimes I’m running around so much that when I finally get a chance to sit down and be creative, I’m not feeling inspired. At those times, technical work is good — like, OK, I need to route all these things, or I need to learn this new thing. Then that’s kind of good because it’s quite dry, and I don’t have to be too inspired. Yeah, but I get a lot of time, honestly, to do both.
[EN]: Without naming names (!) describe the sound check from hell. What was the worst experience you’ve had from a technical point of view and how did you overcome the situation (or did you have to leave)?
[CG]: Oh, sound checks from hell… I mean… Artists can be insane. A lot of the artists, they’re nuts. And their demands are impossible or not realistic. And you know, sometimes we just had to get real with them and draw boundaries and they don’t like that sometimes.
But I don’t care, honestly, I’m not here to like push myself to unrealistic spaces because you don’t want to live in reality. So sometimes that could get a little difficult. But it’s a challenge and like a skill set to develop, to be able to be honest, to be truthful and to draw boundaries and to know what’s possible and what’s not. And sometimes we push those boundaries a lot. I mean, a lot of our job is based on pushing those boundaries. But yeah, I mean, usually the technical things, we have plenty of time to solve. So then you can do a good job and you can deliver it.
It’s the artists’ wants and desires and emotions that end up being the trickiest part of the technical process. If that makes any sense, you know, like that kind of thing gets in the way of the technical processes. If it was just technical processes, we would have no problems because they’re all fixable and we have plenty of time.
One time, there was an incident over me eating during a rehearsal; we hadn’t eaten all day, it’s 7 pm and we ordered food, and the artist got really upset with me. Then I got upset with them and we had a little fluff saying like okay, you know, I’m only eating so I can be here to serve you, so if you’re mad at me for eating then I don’t know what we’re gonna do about this. It ended up being the thing that made me leave the whole camp, because I realized if I’m here working for an artist who doesn’t even care if I’ve eaten or not, then what am I doing? Why am I here? So I left. It was a catalyst for me at the time cause I had been doing this work on my eating patterns with a therapist. So it was something I was focused on and working with personally. By the way, the artist and I have since resolved our differences and laugh about the incident now … and all is well.
[EN]: Do audiences have different “personalities”? Have you noticed any differences in audience feedback based on geography? (for example, can you anticipate a different response from a Chicago audience vs from one in Berlin? Or between Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo?)
[CG]: Yeah, totally they have different personalities… absolutely. You go to South America, you go to Brazil, they dance and get into everything… they’re even dancing to the music in between the bands! Then you go somewhere like Tokyo or the Budokan, you stop playing and nobody’s clapping; it’s like they’re waiting and then finally after so many songs, they start clapping and applauding. I mean, there’s just different customs in the cultures and you notice that in a group setting. There’s something similar about all people, but I think you can definitely tell when you’re in South America or when we’re in Asia or when we’re in Europe.
Even in different places across America. When you go to California, your typical audience is a crowd of people who are really used to going to concerts. But in some places in middle America, people don’t get many opportunities to go to concerts, so it’s like a life-changing experience. Sometimes, at night, they’ll hang out outside your hotel room singing songs of the artists. It’s like a real thing, this fanaticism. I think fanaticism is like a mental disorder actually where you don’t understand the distance between you and this thing that you’re fanatic about, and it’s like a possession occurs and you want to Possess and be close to it. I don’t understand fanaticism to be honest… watching it. I think like well, what am I fanatic about? I’m not sure.
[EN]: When people have an opportunity to join a successful tour, one that puts you on the road for months (or even years?) at a time, it seems like it could be difficult or impossible to maintain a “permanent residence” or home base. Where do you go and how do you live in between tours?
[CG]: Honestly, I’ve been traveling for about 17 years. I think it’s been now let’s see 2006 until 2024. But I’ve made the most amazing relationships with the most beautiful types of beings all over the world and I have this sense of Home in a lot of places but honestly, I don’t have a place where I can say this is specifically my home and it’s something I think I had since I was a child. My family didn’t own a home and I moved around a lot. I don’t remember this kind of thing so I kind of turned that into being able to travel easily. I got really good at saying goodbye to people that I love and and the unfortunate thing about it is that it’s hard for relationships and it’s hard to make a place permanent because you just can’t make commitments because of the nature of how things get scheduled.
[EN]: On particularly long tours, what tips or tricks do you use to keep it fresh?
[CG]: I think, for long tours, just taking care of yourself, honestly — your mental health and your well-being — is probably some of the important things that we could do. What gets to people the most is being away from the people they love, being away from their patterns.
When I was married and away from my wife, and away from my dog, I was always missing them; that affected my attitude, and I started questioning what I was doing in my life, and it can turn it to a whole crazy spiral.
But now I have such a different life. I’ve kind of organized myself over the years, so like, I don’t have a permanent house right now, I haven’t had a permanent house in like ten years, and I travel around and stay with people I love all the time. So when I do travel, I meet my friends all the time, and I am visiting people. That stuff helps me so much, because if I get into this state of longing…
Actually one of my friends, Paul, he has this organization called the Roadie Clinic, and it’s actually just for that: it’s for helping roadies and their families maintain their mental health; it’s a place where people can talk with each other and connect.
He and his wife came up the idea during Covid, because when Covid happened, a lot of roadies lost their work for a long time, and people on tour just didn’t have the ability to do anything. We didn’t have support systems built for that, and there’s nobody paying you for not being on tour. A few artists would give people money, and thank them for their efforts. Some artists put their people on retainers, but overall the whole industry was a wrap. You couldn’t gather thousands of people for years in order to go to work, so he decided to make the Roadie Clinic in order to try to have a dialogue about this kind of space, and this kind of system.
[EN]: How did the pandemic impact you and other touring professionals? Does it continue to have an impact? Have things changed in your industry when you compare pre and post pandemic? Or have you seen more of gradual evolution (that was, perhaps, accelerated by the pandemic)?
[CG]: I think there’s a few ways that it impacted us… One, as a whole industry: everybody was out of work. Two, as an identity: people who were so identified with their jobs, they really went through a lot of hard struggles… You’re traveling the world, you’re living some kind of special lifestyle, thinking you’re special, and then all of a sudden all those things get taken away, and you realize you’re just a normal person who actually can’t even even get a regular job, because you just have this one skill set. People have to take you around the world with them and pay you good money, because they need that very specific skill set, but the moment they don’t need that skill set, then they don’t need to pay you for it, and then you don’t have a job. And if your job is attached to your identity, you don’t even know who you are. And that’s a bigger problem!!
So it was actually kind of nice to exercise some of the spacious part of my life I had been cultivating. I had been navigating two worlds for so long: I had one world that was an inner world, a creative devotional curiosity, and another world that was fully engulfed in pop culture — this machine of manufacturing desire and making that machine happen.
Suddenly all of those worlds simultaneously fell apart. It’s quite a long story, but there were things that happened in India that were essentially abusive sexually and mentally, and people were suffering and I had to speak up about it. My spiritual teacher, Ram Dass (RD), had just passed away, so I felt like a loss of a moral compass a little bit, and yet also quite well prepared. The whole world was going through this transition, and we got stuck in India; all the flights were shut down and we had to get out of there. We managed to get to New York City and then, eventually after some hiccups and some difficulties and small wins, one of my friends who I was exploring contemporary devotional music with and who had also been one of RD’s former caretakers decided we should incubate on our projects and maybe try to take it to a better level technically and get a little bit bit more serious since we have all this time; we should go somewhere and work on our projects.
One of my friends said, “They could probably use some help in Maui. We can ask to go there for two months to help out, do some Seva (selfless service) or raise some money for the house and then incubate on our projects and kind of just have a place to stay in exchange for doing some work. So we drove across the country in May 2020, hopped in a plane in California and flew over to Maui. In the middle of Covid, like “wearing surgical gloves at the gas station” times.
It was supposed to be for two months and it ended up being three years. I just ended up living in that backyard in a tiny house.
I decided to hone in on that inner life and take advantage of things like being able to have a routine, being able to make appointments with people for weeks away and do the same thing every week. I could never do that since I started touring 17 years ago. So I learned how to make sourdough bread, and I learned how to garden, and I started studying everything about plants and how to grow plants and how soil works, and I got some worms and I learned about compost and different types of compost.
And I realized that sourdough bread, audio engineering, and gardening are really the same activity: it’s all about harnessing energy at the appropriate time to get the desired results. That’s what we’re doing in Kyma all the time; we’re just thinking about how to harness the energy of our ideas into this system so that we can have the results we like to hear in the air moving around us; it’s the same thing with sourdough bread — it’s just different forms. It’s just different forms of energy and you have to harness it and you have to listen with different parts of your body and different parts of your being, but its still this act of listening and this act of observing and taking action and it’s all happening as a process that is also recombinant if you approach it in ways that are about design.
I think the whole world has shifted. Those that made it through well are better off now. Those that had it hard, are worse off. New jobs. Lots of people left their jobs, left their careers because there was no work and now they’ve had a new career for 3-4 years and then they get called to go on a tour, and they don’t take the tour. So new people come in and there’s a whole lot of shift in the industry, but I think there’s a whole lot of shift as a whole between people who are poor and people who are not, and the gap is wider and every city I’ve gone to; I can feel it. Every city I see is different than when I was touring five years ago.
What do you do with an instrument that does everything? You can literally do anything you want with his instrument, so what do you do?
[EN]: How does Kyma fit into your studio? How have you integrated it with other software and hardware that you use?
[CG]: Honestly, for the longest time, I didn’t know how to use Kyma and it took me a long time to integrate it into my studio, but now it’s integrated into everything I do. I mostly use it for processing — honestly I like to process things.
I have to give credit to Cristian Vogel and Gustav Scholda because without their NeverEngine Labs Spectral Tools, I don’t think I would’ve arrived at the direction I am at now. Part of why NeverEngine Labs and that whole approach was so good for me is that it gave me to courage to reach out to other people and realize how open people were and how much of a community this was. A lot of the places I work, they’re not like that. People hoard their information and they don’t share their knowledge and there’s not a lot of growth because everybody’s jobs are being protected. But I like to share and I think the more we all know the better we all are. When I realized the Kyma community was like that, I was like oh my God, I can just reach out to these people they’re more into discovery and learning together than they are keeping some secret.
[EN]: How have you been using Kyma most recently?
[CG]: Lately, I’ve been making some interesting tuning systems with the lambdoma matrix concepts from Hans Kayser’s Akroasis theories and then processing Harmonics with NEL smears and stuff. Spatializing the harmonics has been a new exploration with the 4d sound environment at Monom Studios in Berlin these past few months. We can make these sound holograms, and it literally adds another dimension to the composition process where the studio is this instrument that we are inside of, and we can put sounds into particles and map very complex matrixes… its like matrix jamming with all this IO and all this space — spatial delays, spatial granular engine for grains all around you.
Adding Kyma to this has been so fun. I had Alan Jackson come by for a weekend experiment where we pulled all-nighters making environments and lots of Kyma in 4d.
My favorite patch is one that Alan Jackson helped me make when I did my first lessons with him. I have this instrument in Maui called a Mohan veena; basically it’s a Hawaiian slide guitar that has been made into a sitar by taking the Hawaiian acoustic slide guitar and adding 11 sympathetic resonating strings. I had a way to amplify just the sympathetic strings and the other group of strings has its own pickup. I wanted to design a resonating box with 11 tunable string resonators that I can process anything with so I thought this would be a great thing to make in Kyma. I can take my harmonics and I can add that into it and I could do some of them blurry and it could be really fun, so I took some lessons with Alan and we did it as a learning exercise.
So what we did was, we made a harmonic resonator, and then I made it tunable, and we made all these different tuning abilities using ratios or just-intonation intervals or tempered tuning. And then I feed it delays and blurs and get these amazing harmonic washes where the overtones start creating audible hallucinations.
[EN]: What was the biggest challenge you encountered when you were first learning Kyma?
[CG]: My thing was weird. I feel like I would start in the manual, and I would read it, and I would go through the basics, and then I would go away on tour, and I would come back and I would’ve forgotten everything, so I’d have to start all over again.
So I decided to take some classes with Joel Chadabe in New York City, since he was the first person who showed me the Kyma system at the demo that you guys had around 2004. Joel told me, “I always ask my students, what do you do with an instrument that does everything? You can literally do anything you want with his instrument, so what do you do?” And I was like, “That’s my exact problem I don’t know what to do!” I could do everything so I would just freeze in the world of possibilities and I don’t even know where to start.
Joel helped me think about it differently. He said I should approach it more as trying to create things that I can’t do with anything else, because if I could already do something well, then I should just use that tool and get on with it. But if there are things that I can’t do, or things that I’d really like to try or some experiments I’d like to try, then that is what Kyma is for.
That’s when I started to realize, oh wow, I can just make anything, so I should think about what I wanna make and then try to approach something.
[EN]: But it sounds like now, with Akroasis and spatialized harmonics, you DO know exactly what you want to do!
[CG]: Yes, I’m really lit up by the idea that Harmonics are about finding alignment between things and how we can feel that through Sound! It’s one of my favorite things to do. It’s never-ending. I just get so blissed out. It’s straight to God for me. It’s like all the things that I studied about devotional music, I can realize them in these tones. It’s a trip but I really feel like it’s true!! Simple harmonics get to this space where it’s just home, home, home, home — you can just let go into it. I swear I’d like to make an instrument for people to die inside of. And rooms for deep psychedelic states, DMT experiences… Spaces to really let go into. Where the sound and the space of sound hold you like a hug.
[EN]: I found this quote about you: “His passion lies in the discovery of sound itself which has led him on a universal sonic journey in pursuit of the intersection of harmony, love and truth.” How does Kyma fit into that journey?
[CG]: Kyma let me experiment and realize those things in Sound, because that’s where they all were first understood inside of my being; it was through Sound that I got to understand and have a spiritual life. It was through Sound that I got to see the world and to see perspective and would want to live better in it and see how everything’s interconnected because it was all through Sound and how Sound operates and how this is how everything functions. Everything basically functions on the same principles of simple waves from the energy exchange with somebody at the gas station to the food you eat to the entertainment we consume to the ideas we’re fed politically — all of these waves of energetic exchange that are being managed and harnessed and directed. There’s just different types of transducers.
I was traveling with these people that had the ears of the world and had nothing to say…
[EN]: What is “creativity as service”?
[CG]: Well, that came from my first visit with Ram Dass. I was in a space in my life when I was touring the world and I was married but I just wasn’t really fulfilled — I was like “I should be happy but I’m just not really connected.” And I realized I had put my spiritual life on pause for a long time while I was just trying to be a “husband” and live a normal life, whatever that meant and whatever that role was in my mind. I was trying to be this character and I just forgot about being myself. I cared about the mysteries of life and I thought about things deeply, but I was just worried about surviving all the time and how can I get money and I’m away from my dog and I miss my wife. I was just not happy, so I wrote a letter to Ram Dass in the middle of the night one time in China. I just woke up and wrote an email to him at his website.
The next morning, there was already a response waiting for me, saying “your email was so poignant and heartfelt that I read it to RD and he invites you to come to his house on your birthday when you turn 35.” I was on a Bruno Mars tour that ended in Hawaii, and Ram Dass lived in Maui, so I went there and we talked about my disconnect in my spiritual life and my life working in pop music. I was like traveling around these people that had the ears of the world and had nothing to say, and I didn’t know why I was spending my life and time being away from the things that I love to do. It was money.
He took that in, and then he shared with me some practices, particularly Loving Awareness — letting the awareness of that which is loving to completely take over us and see how far we can go into that space of loving. To where just it becomes our total awareness and there’s no separation between the love that we are and and everything happening around us that’s included in our awareness and it’s a space to practice being in. It’s a beautiful thing to practice loving everything, truly allowing yourself to love everything.
I know it sounds cheesy, or silly, believe me, I went through all the mind judgements … but it’s like the most profound thing anybody ever taught me how to do, to see people as souls, to identify AS loving awareness, not as Carl, not as like a personality, but I’m identifying AS loving awareness inwardly, while I’m doing my worldly activities … and that becomes such a trip!! It’s like anything you repeat over and over and over again, it just absorbs your mind and you become one pointed about it—like when you are focused on a Kyma sound, the same kind of thing happens… you’re just in this world, time passes… But the focus here is identifying with loving awareness… Identifying with the part of us that can access right to our heart-space.
So he showed me this practice of loving awareness and told me to practice that all the time and say it inwardly all the time. He gave me some instructions and then he was like staring behind me for a while and looked at me and said, “When you mix your spiritual life with your music… wow wow wow!” In this real old-man voice that has aphasia and can’t say words fast. There’s a profound sense of spaciousness and it feels like everything is so purpose built to come out… when the words come out of his mouth, sometimes it really freezes you in the moment and in that presence. He had this presence about him, just seeing the way he was looking beyond me.
So after a while, I thought: How am I gonna do this? How am I going to mix my spiritual life with my music? How am I gonna do this in my own way? And I thought: well I’ll just give away everything I have like all my abilities all my skills and I’ll just serve creativity. I’ll find people who need creativity served, and who need this creative force that’s moving inside of them to be cared for and be nurtured and flower.
So I experimented and found an artist who actually wanted some help and I thought here’s a great opportunity. I’m just gonna give her all my help. So my friend Raiza and I decided to work together. I ended up just going to Brazil and working on Music for like two weeks. We made a studio. She would just come over to the studio every day and we would put ideas out for a few hours and experiment and after a while we had like 13 compositions.
What I watched was a human being transformed and be expressed and be heard and get these things out of them that was so powerful, and now I see her like working a career in music and having the courage to just go out there and do her own thing and program her own stuff and explore her own talents and express them in a confident way and I realized — that’s what happens. That’s what happens when I do this. When I do this as an approach to, or with an attitude of Seva. Where I’m truly serving the creative force, I’m not doing it for my own benefit. I’m not doing it for some outcome, I’m doing it to serve this thing that’s happening inside of us… it’s just a different result. It’s a selfless intention. An offering.
[EN]: Is your attitude a choice or do you think you were just born with a basically optimistic personality?
[CG]: I think honestly the optimism that I have comes from participating in and witnessing varieties of suffering while simultaneously knowing this deep profound love then reconciling that into what is. Participating in and witnessing suffering gives you perspective that things are a spectrum of existence. I don’t like to look at things as ‘good or bad’ because that puts me in a ‘this or that’ state. And I think life is more of a gradient of experience.
Overall, like it’s safe to live and it’s safe to die. So I try to be with that and live with that. And that keeps me quite optimistic knowing that there’s not really anything good or bad. Like nothing bad ever really happened when I look back on my life. Everyone everything… it all mattered. Everything was a necessary step towards arriving here. And as long as I can keep arriving here and being with all that is, I remain quite optimistic.
We are learning to keep our heart open in hell as Ram Dass would put it. And by keeping our hearts open we soften around what is — and sometimes it’s unbearable — but you got into it… you choose to bear witness. I’ve been doing it for 300+ days right now, allowing my heart to break every day, choosing to bear witness and allow myself to know another’s pain and simultaneously living a privileged life around creativity, getting upset sometimes having to do things that were once dreams. But as we witness what is and our perspective gets wider, there’s a place in the center of it all that also stabilizes and that’s where we can live — that’s our heart — that’s the work of a lifetime or more.
[EN]: Is (or was) Ram Dass your guru? Or do you prefer to call him your teacher?
[CG]: Yeah, I think just out of respect for him not really liking to be called a GURU, I never did that, so I always just considered myself a student of Ram Dass, and the guru was the thing that was happening between all of us. It was this force that we were being guided by, through our collective inquiry, and the places that he taught us how to access inside ourselves, which was unconditional love.
[EN]: Do you remember a specific “tipping point” or moment when you recognized that he was the teacher you needed?
[CG]: I’d have to say I had been turned on to Ram Dass when I was quite young, when we were taking psychedelics and I was given Be Here Now, but it was just kind of like this mystical interesting spiritual book that was kind of out there with these ideas. But it wasn’t until my mom committed suicide when I was 28 that the stuff really came alive. I had this situation and had this whole skillset to manage myself and my reality and support my family, and this whole new world, where god as a mother, as a creative force that births existence itself was this force so grand — that I was cared for and the world was safe — and I wanted to participate in all this. Because in that I serve God, my mother and the creative force that’s moving it all into existence all of the time. I learned to connect with her through that, and it’s all realized through listening and sound; it’s all connected. That’s what harmony is to me. Alignment with the divine. So I’d say that the tipping point was the death: that’s how the teachings got in, and that’s what made me write to him 7 years later to say is it possible to come say thanks?
[EN]: Can you say more about the music you made during the pandemic?
[CG]: We actually made a Kirtan band because I was trying to study devotional music and understand the instruments and what made the feelings of those sounds — the drones, the tuning the way that the tanpura and a lot of instruments have that curved bridge that makes it phasey — sitars, etc., they all have it. It helps to create that drone. There’s a feeling in there that I was so curious about and that led me to some other people who were willing to hang out with me who were also exploring that space and who were RD’s caretakers. So we decided to make a band and go on a tour, but we never rehearsed or played together. We just kind of hung out and jammed on acid one night after a retreat in Ohio. And we thought we should do this more; let’s make a band. I was putting effects and stuff on them and processing them with Kyma and they would sing devotional songs and chant. And it just sounded so good and everything was so pleasing so then we decided to go and do some gigs in yoga studios and prisons.
We went to San Quentin and we went to Oregon State and we were singing devotional songs with the prisoners, and then we would go to yoga studios in between … older people who were fans of Ram Dass would show up and watch us do these chants — sometimes people would complain about the drones I had going — and it was it was definitely different environment for me.
We were all doing this as a really pure act out of our heart and trying to bring things to people who are in prison in an unfair incarceration system and take on some of Ram Dass’s earlier activism that he was doing in the prisons. We wanted to carry that on in his name and his legacy so we tried to do that through Music.
[EN]: Who would you like to acknowledge as someone who helped you on your path?
[CG]: There’s so many beings who have been involved in who I am, so many beings that I have encountered, all of them have this little part of me or these little nuggets that they shared that help shape my ways to see the world, Freddy Nyathala of South African, Roadies Academy, and Seth Mazibuko in South Africa, Carlinhos Brown in Brazil, Alan Thompson gave me my first gig on the road, the homeless community in Maui. My spiritual community, my musical community… you… my aunt for letting me be so wild as a kid. I mean, just literally every being I swear I come across. There’s something in me that’s of them — that’s the most poignant part of it all.
[EN]: What’s on the horizon for you right now? What would you most like to learn in the next year? (musically, and also extra-musically)
[CG]: I’m trying to develop a small foundation to steward a curriculum of Akroasis: The Theory of World Harmonics. I want to bring Akroasis philosophy to the world — how it touches upon us and how we listen and how we reevaluate value and measure as psychic principles and not just material principles which allow us to look at things like dialectic materialism, and how we interact with the world and how Sound plays its role in helping us realize those things and how Harmonics are about finding alignment between things and how we can feel that. Sharing these ideas with the world is something I’m really lit up by.
There’s also the Brave Earth community in Costa Rica that I want to be more directly involved with and spending more time there. It’s time for us to bring creative artistic support to that community.
[EN]: Do you think that you will have a chance to visit the moon or another planet some day?
[CG]: Probably not, but who knows? It’s not really something I think about often. I like Spacey sounds and the idea of space and the use of it, but I don’t get so far out there… like I’m not into sci-fi or movies at all really. Joseph Campbell used to have this concept: He’d talk about inner-outer space and I think that feels more accessible. I don’t know if we need to go way out there; for now, I feel really galactic right in here.
EN: Carl, thank you for sharing your experiences and discoveries with us! Where can people hear more of your music?
CG: Thanks so much Carla, this was a great exercise for me too. Here are a few links to some of my more experimental work with Kyma:
Water Prayer Catcher — inspired by sacred Shipibo songs and prayers