STRUCK BY SOUND - Music record & publishing co.

The internet has connected people from every part of the globe, creating an amazing interconnected human family unlike anything seen ever before.  Individuals are now integrated within a complex web of information and data that allow for the internet to compose the global human population.  In some way though things appear as if the combination of the internet and electronics within people's lives sometimes makes certain people feel 'wired' to their cell phones, computers, & websites.  The electronic wire acting almost like a chain that doesn't let humans be completely free.  It is great to meet people from half way around the world, especially when an individual may never even set foot on that part of the globe, but is this connection perhaps separating these individuals from their current surrounding environment and reality?  Can this celebrated invention called the internet maybe be too overwhelming for some, making them feel they must check a million websites, emails, texts, and so on otherwise their day is unfulfilled?  Or is this electronic-human domain the necessary step towards a greater humanity that sees itself finally as one people that lives in mutual peace?  Time will tell.  

Blasting music is my way of life!  I can honestly say that music, and art for that matter, is my soul's passion.  I have been devoted to understanding, embracing and creating sound for over a decade of my life now.  When I'm in the process of developing a sound or music I gotta have it played at an intense level strong enough to where I can feel it!  I'm not talking about turning up the volume level full blast when audio is playing - I don't promote something that'll make anyone go deaf - I'm talking about letting music exist loud enough to where I can literally feel the vibrations, mental stimulations, and having as many people feel the same way when they hear it so they can get down to it!  With Struck in the driver seat, Struck By Sound is the company that will provide this musical atmosphere to the people of the world.  A little information on this particular image: here I'm just chillin' with the SBS cap on & looking your way, the faded trails background represents a past, a blurred and hard to see past because it was a painful one and yet its now gone; the shine in my shades is that sparkle of the living present I see, when you live and act in the current moment while planning ahead in life you advance and you can move great distances forward.  We are in a new decade and era that humanity has never encountered, we must all take our highest of skills and go forward with our best intentions to create an amazing and beneficial existence.  I'm hear to produce some of the dopest music you'll ever hear, and believe that you will hear it cuz' it'll surely be blasting!     

To be a phenomenal producer you must, I repeat, you must know engineering and more importantly mastering!  This separates a novice producer from a great producer that knows his (or her's) stuff!  In order to become that great producer you have to understand what audio engineering is all about.  You gotta get your 'feet wet', experiment and practice with audio and recording techniques.  After many hours, and I mean a ton (years, and years of practicing the altering methods of sound) you will then become acquainted with what you can do with any noise or combination of sounds.  There are many ways you can learn engineering and mastering: books, videos, cd's, dvd's, online content, school, friends, yourself, etc.  To be a skilled mastering engineer I advise to learn through as many methods as possible.  Here I am monitoring a song through some headphones, trippin' out probably because I have a grin on my face, I'm simply analyzing what I created and what is entering my ears.  This is just one part of a mastering phase, not the whole process.  To truly master a song one has to listen to the final mixdown project through studio monitors (headphones are generally not recommended for mastering because the sound vibrate's your skull and can give an added effect that can alter your interpretation of the sound from the headphones).  I'm using the headphones though to compare its particular sound reproduction to the sound disbursed from a pair of studio monitors (the sound has to be exceptional from both in order to give the ok!).  I purposely made this picture blocked, like a puzzle, because at times when I'm creating something it's like putting a puzzle of sounds together, only difference here is that not only am I putthing the pieces together I'm also making the puzzle from scratch!  And not only do my sound creations feel as if they are puzzles to me at times my life feels like a puzzle, I add new pieces to my life as the days progress, adding to my whole being.  Maybe you too are like a puzzle also.                

The concept of this artwork is based entirely on the theme of using different geometric shapes and sizes with keeping a relative distance from one another.  Yet, while I was creating this digital image it also reminded me of an arial view of an industrialized area of the world, Los Angeles, D.C., or Pittsburgh for example.  Of the two which is more correct to say what this picture is really about?  Both.  Our world is a complex multitude of geometric shapes in itself and can be a collection of labrynth lands.  With a different approach, this image also displays some of the basic features of the dominoe.  This dominoe would obviously be one from the advanced version of any dominoe game.  The mixing in of ideas to produce this image included the raw elements of a computer motherboard, such as the tiny metal pieces that connect to little black squares that are on top of a green plastic board.  So in speaking of this Struck By Sound piece of digital art this may give you a deeper look at what is here within the square and the sphere.

Here is an image of myself with some multilayered text I created.  I began this image by using a photo of myself.  I chose this particular one because it looked some what unfilled, meaning too much empty background space.  Several filter processes provided for the paper effect that allowed for the hard shadow inserted here.  I enjoyed using this effect in order to exemplify the light and darkness on my face for metaphorical purposes: within our own individual lives we have a positive and bright side and on the other extreme of the spectrum we can have the negative and dark side.  Maybe this metaphor might be a little too much for one's understanding, but with comprehending life through experience and aging one learn's and see's themself always in constant change, never remaining as a single unchanged entity.  I really enjoyed designing the lettering in all of the different texts here.  Complex lettering styles are made available here by thinking in character multiplicity.  This is stating that a single letter's style appears as several letter's of different styles within one letter's construction.  It's good to use complex styles sometimes, many people fall for the simplistic approach in life but I believe that you should show your complexity or diversity in stylizing because as one matures in detail immature or simple ways become useless and unattractive.  For the general things in life simplistic approaches work, but for art's sake they sometimes don't.  I'm about getting ka-ray-zee with the style!         

Woah!  What the heck is this?!  Is it a diseased alien-rat-clown?  If you wanna think it is go right ahead.  To me its a Sicko out the wall yelling "STRUCK BY SOUND!"  This particular dude was made in March 2009 during my stay out in the East Coast.  I was thinking of drawing a Struck By Sound logo by hand.  My attempt at the lettering style came out slightly different than what I envisioned and thus I had to improvise and do something else with this work.  The first that idea came to mind was, "this ain't the letters the way I want them, might as well doodle and draw what ever on the rest of the paper".  Maybe because when ever I draw I tend to begin with the head, if it's going to be a character that is, so I drew one here.  As I started I thought to myself that the head would be a great thing to play with and that I should make it look long & skinny, like a banana!  The character's eyes would have to look as if he's mentally sick, its tongue would look equally as ill, and the skin tone would match that with what appears as the rainbow chicken pox!  Now he's gotta have those teeth that are a good distance apart from each other tooth and a weird lizard long neck.  Hmmm...to top off the strangeness of this character he'll be popping out the side of a hole in the wall - like a cartoon rat!  Lastly, the talking bubble around Struck By Sound coming from the Sicko's mouth would give it enough detail for the image to now make any sense.  Aaughh, is there ever any sense in the world these days?              

The multitude of objects from the surroundings and atmospheres in our lives can play an instrumental role in our expressive development.  We express ourselves through what is around us and that makes us who we are.  So here I had to create an SBS logo that reminded me of where I'm from.  I chose to create an SBS logo that had a street mentality look, one that shown a style representing the black top, barbwires, concrete, and light that shines in the shadows of the alleys and streets.  For those in the urban areas you all can understand this, no matter where you're from.  Integrating those ideas into a logo design was a little tricky but some how things came together once work began.  The imagery's make up, being the layers within the text, are there to serve the function of difference and conjunction.  Difference by such as how the silver outer layer resembles grey concrete sidewalks, the inner black layer simulates the blacktop streets and alleys, the thin inner silver line design mirrors the barbwires keeping locations off limits, and the strange lighting effect coming from different angles produces the street light's illumination context.  Conjunction through how all are different objects of the urban settings but are all connected within the same urban atmosphere.  In making this Iogo I thought that designs within designs could penetrate the mental surface of a viewer to produce a sick impression that triggered thoughts of your city's fashion.    

You know SBS grew from California by the colors used here.  Within this particular style of logo I chose to have a multilayer design that would give the impression that Struck By Sound represented not only itself and its music but also where its from.  Yes, Struck and Struck By Sound Publishing are both entities that were born and raised in the golden state.  Choosing to go with the black, white and grey  colors used here were highly influenced from a past I could hardly forget.  During my days as a youngster I grew up playing and watchig ice hockey.  I used to admire the Los Angeles Kings back when they had Wayne Gretzky and the old black, white and grey uniform.  Who ever designed the uniform of that era was dope because that jersey just looked awesome not only on the ice but off as well.  I myself had an old style Kings jersey with those colors, I'd  would wear the away (black) jersey anywhere and everywhere.  And yeah, the Oakland Raiders (who were once from L.A.)  have used the same color scheme for quite a while too but I can't say that this design was influenced by them only because I was hardly ever into football.  I created this one logo creation in approximately 20 minutes, which is pretty fast considering that some logos can be very thought intensive and lengthy in time to create one single project.  Symbols represent something important such as meaning and existence, and with that in mind an individual should see that one does have to be thoughtful and particular when creating a symbol that is going to be representative of an idea.  The major part of this logo's story: here I spent 20 minutes creating this SBS logo because my laptop's battery only had twenty minutes of power, I wasn't anywhere near an electrical outlet and I was in a rush to make a design to get it printed on some clothing articles.  Sometimes pressure will make you act faster and better than when you got too much time to do something.

Who is that shaved head dude with the shades on lookin' like he's meditating on something crazy?!  STRUCK!  I believe that if I wasn't meditating on something in this picture I must have been studying the real sounds around me, feeling wonder and amazement of how the natural world has its own musical sound track always playing.  You know, right?  The people's talk from across the street, the birds chirps from the trees, the car's skreetching stop from down the road, the baby's cry from the parent's stroller, the dogs bark from the neighbor's yard, the cellphone's ringing tone from the unknown passing by...all of that.  Even how when ever there is silence in life it reminds me of how there is a silent spot between tracks on a album, once sound is heard again it represents a new song and a different theme.  The purpose of this design is to display sound from its source - the speaker.  I played with the idea of speakers being all around us and are near us almost at every moment.  Just as I was speaking of the natural world providing the real life musical sound track through its objects within its atmosphere, those objects can be sound producers or 'living speakers'.  These living speakers are located in different areas and at times are mobile so they move when they produce their particular sound.  So, through this image of myself with three circular objects around me, it is to my intentions that the three detatched objects represent separate and floating (living) speakers in the atmosphere I am within.  They produce a specific sound and I produce a particular sound as well.  Speakers and sounds are all around.  Struck By Sound represents the omnipresent sound!       

Uniqueness happens when you decide to ignore the outside forces of life and you become a disseminator of culture instead of a marketer's sponge.  Maybe that's too deep for some of you but for those of you that get it you too are of the same nature.  To be yourself, freely, unattached from the influences that surround us daily is a persistent task even for a free American like myself.  Here what I am displaying is a symbolic gesture of sound disspersal that is being generated and thrown across the interplanetary spaces of our solar system.  Maybe that's ahead of our time, but maybe not.  Think about this: do astronauts get bored and ever want to listen to music on a space shuttle during their long missions?  I bet they do!  Now think about how humans have also made it to the moon.  Did any of them bump some music instead of listening to just radio signals with only informational audio during their brief stay on the white moon?  That I don't know, but if they only heard that through their speakers or headphones I bet they were pissed off and bored!  For those contemporary space explorers paving the way to new and unknown lands I want to hook them up with dope ass space music to listen to!  So as we humans progress, and by that I mean stretch farther out into the Universe reaching other planets and moons, we will truly become Universal beings but we will be even more significant with a great and powerful Universal culture.  In that process I will spread my music across the Universal domains and into the virgin realms.  My music is from Earth, but it is possible to soon spread its existence into the larger galaxies and drop the seeds for the beginning of an interplanetary pop-culture era.  Struck By Sound is the audio comet flying by!     

The story behind the creation of "A Beautiful Dream" is one I will enjoy telling you.  It begins with me being unable to produce any music during the last months of 2008.  My computer had just died and with that I lost my most useful and used tool - my Apple Powerbook.  I laid to rest my Apple Powerbook laptop and sat in complete silence - stunned - after it gave its last run in late October.  For days I could not express myself through the noise of audio techniques when I had so much inside me to release.  No music.  No sound.  I was going crazy, or at least I felt like it temporarily.  The task of replacing the laptop was no simple one, at that moment I did not have the capital to do so.  I realized I would have to go with out a computer for an indefinite period of time until I attained the amount for the replacement.  Now for one to go without a working computer it may appear as not that bad, hey, its not like your without a house to live in and are on the streets, its just a computer.  But for me it was a dismal situation.  A 21st century artist without (electronic) tools is like a chef without a kitchen & food - there will be nothing served tonight!  How terrible is that - all will starve, even the cook!  But like a true artist I would have to dig deep within me to produce my temporal sensations and thoughts through other ways and means.  This meant I would have to do something else other than produce music.  One November day I was sitting quietly in the living room, alone and next to a mirror against the wall.  I wasn't feeling too well.  The silence was making me sick and looking at plain white walls only made the feeling worse.  How boring was all of this around me!  What makes people want their walls white?!  Why does absolute silence seem so unalive?!  I couldn't take it anymore.  The mirror next to me irritated me too.  It wasn't my own reflection that disturbed me, it was the fact that the mirror was reflecting straight boring plain ass white walls all the time!!  I flipped the mirror backwards so that I wouldn't have to see the reflection of anything.  But now this bothered me also.  Now I was looking at piece of nasty brown cardboard that made up the back cover of the mirror.  Jeez...what another great sight (in a sarcastic tone)!  After a couple of seconds of feeling disgust with my physical surroundings I figured the mirror was trash.  I had a black pen on me and decided to draw on the back of the mirror since it was going to be thrown in the garbage later on.  I thought to myself, "this don't matter, who ever looks at the back of a mirror anyways?".  I began drawing the outline of the pink faced, red nosed character around the upper middle left of the back mirror.  I left that drawing alone and moved away to another blank area to the right and started drawing the outline of the yellow tongue, red lipped, bald headed character.  This made me laugh when I stepped back and took a glance from a distance of 6ft.  After that I remember thinking, "I'm just gonna draw what ever I want on the whole back of this thing...it doesn't matter what the drawing is, just put it on there...I'm throwing this in the trash soon anyways because the edges of the frame are coming apart."  The following day I looked at the back of the mirror, again I grabbed my black pen and continued drawing the next idea that came to mind.  The large sideways eye in the middle right of the new canvas was difficult not to put there.  Lets just say that experiences of visual hallucinations from synthetic creations were very much of the influence here.  A memory of a wild trip many moons ago allowed me to capture a sight of this nature in the synthesized reality.  When the memory of that event came to me I drew what my eyes had seen back then and with the sideways eye there now drawn so was the theme: filtered and distorted reality through visual hallucinations or the way one can see their world.  I kept drawing for a good week and a half or two until I started seeing that a good portion  (maybe 50% to 60%) of the back surface was becoming full with an array of different visual images.  I started liking it.  But it was just a collection of drawings that were all in black outlines with no color and hardly any premedidated concept.  At that point I decided that the entire back was going to be filled with a collection of artworks and full color, as much color as I could put.  It took me approximately two more weeks to fill in every last bit of empty space with a unique feature, design, character or symbol.  At the month mark I would say that I had about 98% of the back surface filled in completely.  A feeling of accomplishment was barely there though.  The 2% empty space gave me the illusion that the 2% stood out more than the 98% filled space.  I didn't like that but I ran into a problem, I was out of visual ideas.  Writer's block, artist's block.  It took me literally a whole other entire month to fill in 2% empty space when it took me one month to cover 98% space the previous month!  This doesn't even make much sense to me, how can 1 month I be so highly productive and the next month I'm only a small fraction of that?  My conclusion to this question was "an artist has creative energy all the time, yet the amount of creative energy varies on any given day, and when the artist uses that creative energy it runs out and needs to regain its energy through creative rest in order to be restored, during creative rest the energy is regained and the artist can go on creating again; creative motivation is another way of supplementing or reloading the creative energy for stronger bursts but motivation is not one single thing and is difficult to keep constant".  In total this hand drawn image I made took me a total of 2 months to draw and color everything from beginning to end.  The real dimensions of this actual image are 49'' x 13'', so it may appear small through the visual monitor but it is quite bigger than that in real life.  Kind of interesting to think about how not having been able to produce music, my main enjoyment when it comes to creative activities, allowed me to do a different type of innovative project: art.  What seemed to be a problem at first was actually a great opportunity for me to do something new, different and fun. 

I was artistically inspired by the amazing athletic performance of this phenomenal group this past year so I had to create this picture on the verge of their most important battle.  This hand drawn and colored image was produced actually several days before Los Angeles' win over Boston.  I began with a concept in my mind, seeing a power player holding the winning trophy and triumphant smile in his face with a wild aura of energy surrounding him.  I also had to use the leader of the team to represent this group's major victory, his name is so well known does anyone have to be told again?  The black outline design was relatively quick compared to other images I have made, roughly about an hour and a half.  The real thinking was behind what colors to use because I had no idea which home uniform LA was going to use on their final night of play.  I then had to choose a background and lettering style that would not clash with the overall layout; I had to make it and use colors that would stand out from the rest of the image but not take enough away from the central figure and theme.  Coloring was several hours through two days; basically, coloring on and off when I felt like it or had a few minutes open in those two days.  A complete free hand style - without any digitizing or computer usage - was chosen because it was the quickest and probably most freeing way of doing this picture and not being held or confined by standard software components.  I believe there are many great characteristics to learn from this winning group of indidivuals, such as leadership, persistance, determination, integrity, honesty, stamina, speed, endurance, intelligence, confidence (not arrogance), strength, skill and unity as a team.  Overall, this is a commemoration of Los Angeles' 2010 long and hard fought championship victory over their east coast rivals!       

©2005-2010 Struck By Sound Publishing