THE NANO HARMONICS
OF CONSCIOUSNESS
IN THE TUBE MATRIX

A CELEBRATION OF MY BROS'

Are you ready to turn the heat up a couple of notches? This article is going to be my most challenging and painful aggravation of your orthodoxy. Because my job is to empower you to get higher, which is a very different imperative than "spend more money". My job is to suggest new fashions in thinking about your search for beauty. This is not easy because the "normal" American audio ego is flaccid, and does not have the intellectual right stuff to deal with the rich and erotic complexities of the audio arts.

LEVELS OF MUSICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

According to the January 9, 2001, New York Times article, Sonata for Humans, Birds and Humpback Whales, by Natalie Angier, the force of musical consciousness, the ability of DNA to communicate with rhythmic patterns of sound, existed hundreds of millions of years before shit-hurling over sexed apes decided to get down from the trees to make beer, play baseball, and create rock and roll.

Musical consciousness, less than one hundred years ago, decided to use male DNA, to get higher, and wider. So this force hooked up with electricity, and created the vacuum tube, and the rest is history. Every audio artisan can trace his roots back to the Triode Big Bang in 1907.

This is how musical consciousness evolves its intention through human DNA: it chooses a very small group to do its relentless escalation work…by endowing this chosen group with nano-harmonic musical consciousness…while billions of others, and, most in the audio industry, are completely clueless about this genetic impulse to ponder the nano-level of existence. How can I be so certain that this is how the process works: if you feel it, you express it. If you don't feel it, you are passive. That is the bottom line.

So how do you know you are a chosen one? Just check out what your brain is doing…and you have no control over it. Why is The Tube Matrix, the name above the door of this exclusive male club? This is the place where this rare type of music mind hangs; the mind that wrestles with the intersection of technology and music… so it can do what it must do….exercise its ontological imperative…the exploration of the nano-harmonic level of musical experience. If you are getting a slight eye twitch, let me calm you down.

You are not alone. Why do men build instruments that can detect the Big Bang, an event that occurred a gillion years ago? Why do we build electron microscopes to see the atomic structure of Kryptonite? Why is the nano-aroma, and nano-flavor, of wine, tobacco, coffee, and a million other gourmet delights so important? Why does a sculptor spend days hand polishing twelve inches of marble to achieve a nano-harmonic of luster? Why do marksmen measure the weight of their bullets to the 4th decimal point? Why does a thousandth of an inch matter in tuning a Weber carburetor? Why does a poet rack his brain over one word, for a month? Why does a painter grind his own pigments, rather than buying a tube of paint to capture the nano-harmonic of color and texture? Why do men care so much about the varnish they use on the violins they make? Why are the nano-harmonics of sartorial silk so important to Englishmen? Why do some fishermen raise their own chickens so that they can have the perfect feather to tie their dry flies? Why do pious men debate what God meant in a single line in the Bible?

Why do you care so much about how the difference one carbon or metal oxide resistor can make in your tube aural matrix? Why does the tonal difference of silver and copper cause you to loose sleep? Why are you ready to spend more for a single capacitor than on a new TV? Why are you searching the Internet for tube amps that were made before you were born? Why do you lust after 1944 NOS 6SN7s? Why do you sit at your desk at work and ponder speaker magnets instead of counting beans? Why do you debate your friends about White cathode followers? Why do you salivate when listening to obsolete recording mediums? Why must you adjust the VTA of your cartridge? Is it worth loosing sleep over the difference between C, R and E core output transformers? Is it true that grown men are ready to duel to the death about an illusion?

Or, to put this another way…Why do certain men hang out at topless bars, others at sports bars, others at the Oak Room of the Plaza, and others drink beer on a fire escape? The answer is, again: we hang out with our fellow aliens, where we are loved, appreciated, accepted, and can wrestle with our bros' mind, while expressing our genius.

Or to put this another way…what kind of mind is devoted to the meticulous nano-zone of illusion? Is it possible that The Tube Matrix is a new virtual Wholey Commune?

WHY DOES GOD COMPELL WHOLEY MEN TO CARE SO MUCH ABOUT THE DETAILS?

The often used expression "God is in the Details", should be "If you want to have a religious experience, think nano". This synchronistic truth about men's spiritual life and their love of tools, arises out of our four million-year-old males DNA that either paid attention to the nano, or got eaten. Because survival depends on these minute details, we are ready to get into a fist fight over which is the best 300B.

But step backs over the edge and considers this: We are acting out the archetype of the sorcerers: we pour our souls into, and are relentless in our search for a more refined and magical illusion. We scratch at crevices of time to uncover…ancient plate chokes, directly heated triodes our grandfather worshiped, strange metallurgy, extinct woods. No rules, no pundit, no keepers of the broo ha ha, can restrain our assault on the boundaries beaudacity.

REBELS WITH A CAUSE

Show a healthy boy a fence, and tell him not to jump over it, because he has no business on the other side, and I bet you my favorite Spider Man Pez Dispenser, that this boy does the right thing…he will jump over the fence.

I have just described the nitty gritty rebellion in the audio arts the Internet inspired…it transformed legions of men who, after decades of being obedient fence respecters, into healthy boys again… …into high jumpers…and the orthodoxy will never recover…because once you have come out of the confines of your audiophile closet, and have your first experience of your nano-harmonic genius…which is very easy to experience with tubes…. well, it is just like the first time you had sex with a sheep….there is no going back to inflatable dolls.

Can I say that another way? Tubes are the tools, which liberates and celebrates the work that the rare nano-harmonic mind must do.

WE ARE ALL CONNECTED…by the same forceful energy, and we are MAN AT HIS BEST, because our intention is to share, escalate, and educate, as we wrestle with each other on the up escalator. How high will this escalator take us? Higher than anyone can describe with words, because that is the fundamental paradox of music nano-consciousness…it is a heroic effort to redefine the inherently inarticulate edge of knowledge..

In 1943, T. S. Eliot, who only listened to tubes, wrote this poetic passage after his first experience with a Mazda PX 25 directly heated triode:

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating….

Elliot is obviously referring here, according to Ken Kessler, to the problem that every English audiomaniac had during WWII with deteriorating rectifier tubes.

Elliot was so inspired by this experience he went on to write, his most famous "epic" poem, East Coker, which I personally believe is a celebration of the audio art's paradoxes. Read it for yourself and let me know your opinion.

MY CLOSING CUNNING

An often-heard mantra is "What is wrong with the audio industry". My answer is: We need more grass roots gonzo gifted amateur audio artisan's with nano-harmonic minds doing their thing.

In every other field of male passion from fishing, cars, motorcycles, cars, woodworking, painting, firearms, cooking, computers…in every "tools of ecstasy" domain, at the center is THE INSPIRATIONAL AMATEUR, the gonzo grass roots amateur artist, who has struggled to express the genius of his nano-harmonic mind. Aren't hot rods more compelling than a Volvo station wagon? Would you rather read about a restored 1941 Woody Station wagon or new Ford? History is proof that gifted amateurs, meaning living breathing humans, are more inspirational than big black boxes. The Tube Matrix wants more of this type of vitality. Why do Japanese audio magazine celebrates the gonzo audio Samurai and his 1950s American tube gear?

As F.D.R, who only listened to tube gear, said …" The only thing we have to fear, is our fear of beauty.

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