Circle Strider – Featured Musician

I’ve been jamming my butt off my whole life, but it wasn’t until I found my parents old CDs in high school that my life began to take on a new and colorful direction. That and meeting my first partner in musical crime, Zefrem. All of a sudden I was listening to Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Steely Dan, John Butler, Tool, Santana, Bonnie Raitt, the works. I remember the first time music made me cry, listening to Hendrix’s Little Wing in my room.

After that things just fell into place, music became less of an intense practice in technique and more of a natural practice in conveying emotion.

All the music I grew up learning on piano, Debussy, Brahms, Bach, Chopin, Schubert, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, it all took on another form, one of true exhilaration, or pain, or serenity, or wanderlust. In college, all shit turned loose as I began finding people I could constantly play with, bond with, experience with, and jam for days with. Zyad, a dude who is now one of my closest friends, became my go-to drummer and jam partner. Rock, funk, and psychedelia meshed with hip-hop and soul, and we made sounds that we weren’t even sure how to describe, but we knew that we were starting to grasp at something we’d never felt before.

Music, the connector. To ourselves, to others. The Everything in-between the Nothing.

Today I make music in my room (via Circle Strider) while finishing my degree in Music Therapy, which is one of the ways I’ve learned to translate my love of music, what it does, and helping others into a tangible reality and a day job. If you don’t know much about Music Therapy, do a little research…it’s out of this world. I see the most beautiful things in the hospitals, nursing homes, schools, psychiatric units, and hospices that I work in. Zyad and I still have plans to release an EP together, but for the time being, I’m on my own making music in my own little world in San Diego. Realizing more and more every day that music needs to be and simply will be the main component of my life, I’ve begun planning on creating a Wellness Center that offers music therapy services along with a wide variety of other holistic wellness medicines, practices, and therapies such as art therapy, dance therapy, yoga, reiki, massage therapy, vegan cooking classes, exercise classes, music lessons, meditation, and more, combining most of my favorite things in life into one awesome place!

Music rocks. It’s how I and a lot of good people who I know connect to the world. For some of us, it is the world, metaphorically and literally. For me, there’s just never been a feeling that’s made me feel the way I feel when I listen to and create music. Something about it goes deep, way deep into the human psyche, to our connected psyches, to the fabric of anything and everything. It’s almost like an expression of existence, in some ways. It’s the something in-between the nothing. Everything makes a sound, everything vibrates. Everything is music in a lot of ways…to me at least! 

And to think that you can take any one of the naturally occurring beautiful sounds in the universe and bend it, shape it, pair it, splice it, and duplicate it in a way that creates something that cannot be found in nature but is sublimely and innately and intensely satisfying in so many ways…it’s simply too much to put into words.

Music will make you want to stop talking, to listen, to feel yourself or the world around you, or yourself in the world around you, or maybe even the world inside yourself! To feel compassion for other humans, for other animals. When I make music, veganism, compassion, love, laughter, pain, understanding, confusion, and so many other components and feelings of my life all get shaped and molded into one energetic, warm, glowing orange ball that I feel deep, deep within my chest, that connects through my neck to my head and to my arms and legs and fingers and toes. It’s an electrical and sparkly and elating feeling, and at the same time such a grounding feeling. My mission is to practice creating and delivering that feeling to other people in sound format, through their ears, into their brain, down into their chest and arms and legs. Form a connection within them, form a connection between us, form a connection between others. So I guess that’s why I think music rocks, and why I make it.

I want to make music, and I want to help people.

I’ve found an amazing way to do that through Music Therapy, but I know I can make something bigger out of all of it, and provide many kinds of healing services to people from all kinds of backgrounds, cultures, economic statuses, and so on. Music, people, they couldn’t exist without one another, and they are each other. Making music is putting yourself into sound form and sending it into the bodies of other people to convey an emotion, a story, all of that and your authentic self. I know that people feel these connections when they participate in other connecting activities. I want to help people feel connected to others and themselves.

I want to help people who don’t normally have access or a means to help. I want to help people learn how to help themselves, and empower people through the arts, whatever form that may take on - whether it is learning a flow, or learning why vegan cooking exists and the feeling you get while cooking vegan with someone, or learning how to meditate and what it feels like to meditate with a room full of people. I want to spread love in my community. I want to help members of the community that are often forgotten about – the old, the sick, the homeless, people with disabilities, people struggling. And to do that I will be relying upon my few expertise and the expertise of a wide number of different people to form a network of like-minded individuals who are also looking to spread love, compassion, knowledge, and authentic experience as their main focus. I believe so strongly that we create meaning out of a meaningless life, that we are the meaning of life, and that we need to use our short span of existence to spread life and love to others. That is what I think I can help provide to my family, my friends, my loved ones, my community and beyond.

To hear some of Blake's favorite music, check out the playlist, Circle Strider Selections on LifeGarden Production's Spotify. 

Blake, Circle Strider, recently finished his demo solo album, A Circular Life Worth Living (cover art below).  You can listen and support his magical musical efforts on Bandcamp today!