Bluemaze was an effort to produce a mainly acoustic guitar oriented album. I wanted to get away from the kind of âschizoidâ nature of Velcromagnon and create something more âconventional,â or consonant. âAccessibleâ comes to mind, though not in any sell out sense. Bluemaze is a painting by an extraordinary artist named G.R. Stroup and I got his permission to use the painting for the CD design. He and I agonized over the color correcting so that the CD art would look faithful as possible to the original painting. In this CD I used more orchestration; I played bass on every song and labored to get the drums not sounding so canned. I wanted the drums to have a âliveâ sound. I also used more synth pads to give the album more texture. The tonal nature of the tunes are minor, and definitely latin influenced, with a nod to Strunz and Farah. The main exception is probably âHoedown to Hell,â a faux breakneck country song complete with my version of steel guitar (had to use lots of volume pedal for this!).
From the CD liner notes:
Prime Inspirations: John McLaughlin, Allan Holdsworth, Al DiMeola, Joe Pass, Larry Coryell, Tal Farlow, Billy Cobham, Dostoyevski, James Joyce, Ward Churchill, James P. Carse, Pierre de Teilhard Chardin, John David Garcia, Philip Larkin, Joe Frank, Phil Hendrie, Jello Biafra, Gil Scott Heron, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, R. Buckminster Fuller, Akira Kurosawa, Octavio Paz, Paoulo Freire, Omar Henriquez, Lao Tzu, Judi Bari, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, McCoy Tyner, Paco de Lucia......
At just a glance, the bluemaze appears a block of chaotic latticework, a mesh or amorphous blue and cyan, with splashes of red and oranage dripping about the peripery. As you delve deeper into the maze, however, chaos begins to take a curiously ordered shape, of intricate patterns, of ridges and curves, organic bevels and peaks and valleys; the painting seems to yield an everlasting visual journey.
The strategy of infinite players is horizonal. They do not go to meet putative enemies with power, but with poiesis and vision. they invite them to become a people in passage. Infinite players do not rise to meet arms with arms; instead, they make use of laughter, vision, and surprise to engage the state and put its boundaries back into play.
--James P. Carse, "Finite and Infinite Games."
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