On a new compilation covering ten years' worth of music

“Release the Catch” (2014-24)

https://marclowe.bandcamp.com/album/release-the-catch-songs-and-early-demos-2014-24

I.

“Release the Catch” is a 44-track collection spanning a period of ten years. It traces my development as a fledgling singer-songwriter for guitar/vocal rock and alt-rock songs starting, essentially, in the summer of 2015 (though, as I will explain, the process began over a year earlier…), shortly after I had purchased my first-ever acoustic guitar, a large-bodied Yamaha that the bassist from my first band, Chattering Man, had suggested would have “better resonance” than the other guitars we had looked at in the chain music store he had brought me to in order to search for my soon-to-be new instrument on that fateful midsummer day in July 2015. 

After practicing on the guitar for a time, I rather quickly came to dislike the Yamaha’s bulky and, to me, awkward-to-cuddle-whilst-playing body so much that less than a year later I ended up purchasing a smaller-bodied Ibanez acoustic (with a “limited edition design”) that had caught my eye at another music store I was then visiting on a semi-regular basis in order to purchase new strings for the Yamaha and so on. The Ibanez would take the former’s place both for home and studio practice sessions, as well as for all of the home recordings I had started doing on a regular basis around that time; I would also use the Ibanez for performing live, at first exclusively with my band, then later solo and in other side-projects. 

It is this guitar that graces the cover of the “Release the Catch” compilation, and it is this guitar that can be heard on all of the demos included which were recorded in 2016, as well as on those tracks found on the first half recorded via Logic between 2018-2020. In 2021 I inherited a classical guitar, which can be heard on the collection via 2023’s version of “What Had You Done?,” as well as on 2024’s “One Touch." In 2022 I purchased my even smaller-bodied Guild acoustic at a small used guitar shop in Ocha-no-mizu, Tokyo, here featured on the live track “Bird,” as well as on the live-at-home session for “The Day I Cried.” A few other tracks on the collection feature primarily keyboard/piano/synth “electronica” instrumentation, rather than guitar; namely “A Face,” from around 2017 or ’18, “Shattered Man,” here in its 2021 “Redux” remix version, and, of course,“Black Nail” (Instrumental Mix). 

II.

I began composing songs in earnest just as soon as I had learned to play some basic chords on my first acoustic in the summer of 2015; simple, standard (yet also rather important) “beginner” chords such as C, D, E, G, etc., as well as their corresponing minor variations, many of which I frequently employed early on (such as E-minor, A-minor, and so on). These minor chords, more than anything — and which, in my compositions at the time I'd frequently (but subconsciously) “toggled” between their major cousins (so, for instance, E-minor/E, or A-minor/A) — lent the music I’d created during this early “songwriter” period its inherent moodiness, not to mention that moving back and forth at times between such major/minor chord pairs or progressions also created a tension between the lighter/darker elements of my songs. It wasn’t, in fact, until several years later that my (then future-)bassist and friend Joe Shotaro would point this out to me, making me consciously aware for the first time, or at least more fully aware, of what I had been doing all along in my songwriting. Interestingly, from the very beginning I’ve always considered my music all about the “light and the dark,” or, stated another way, the “Yin and (the) Yang,” a practical philosophical system I had studied both as a practitioner of Chinese Qigong (or “energy-work,” also related to the martial arts and to Tai’chi, or Taiji) and also as a graduate student engaged in Buddhist and Daoist studies at the University of Colorado when I was in my early thirties…

I started out writing songs with simple two or three-chord structures (songs such as “More” and “Never Change,” for example — these were two songs we'd arranged and performed in my band “Glass Gecko” early on in our brief time together — as well as “Want” and others) and then began expanding my compositional palette a bit as I learned not only new chords — some of which I “discovered” via the fretboard on my own just by experimenting, rather than by following a standard chord chart (despite protests from certain band members, who did not consider a chord a chord unless it was written on the official chart) — but also new techniques, such as making “power chords,” “choking/muting/tamping” the strings, performing simple barre chords (as employed througout my guitar arrangement of “Box Man” from ‘16), or, and again, after learning how to do finger-plucked arpeggios from the bassist Ryuji, with whom I’d collaborated in a short-lived trio toward the end of 2016 after the breakup of my band.

But now I’m getting ahead of myself…

The story that “Release the Catch” narrates in sound — and which it does rather well, I believe, without excessive verbiage (as here) to muck it up — actually began at least a year and a half prior to July 2015, though I started this write-up by beginning there, with the purchase of my first guitar (1). For indeed, whilst still the lead singer for my first Fukuoka band, Chattering Man (2), I had been almost obsessively composing song after song in a cappella demo versions for well over a year, accruing quite a collection of songs that were not yet songs, but rather still skeletal demos, albeit with the potential to become “future original (band) songs,” even as we (the band) rehearsed and performed the same rotating cache (repetition unintended…) of numbers over and over, both at weekly rehearsals in a rented studio room for two hours every Monday night (the studio was owned by a mutual acquaintance, the very guy who had introduced us to one another in the first place, and so had been instrumental, albeit indirectly, in the formation of CM) and also live. 

(1) The day I bought the Yamaha acoustic — July 14, 2015, to be precise — was also the very day on which I encountered, outside of my then-apartment complex, and with my first-ever (rather bulky!) guitar strapped to my back in its equally shiny-new black case, a…gecko? Or perhaps it was a silvery lizard/gizzard? To this day I am not quite sure what it was, and it no longer really matters, since it became a “gecko” in the end, either way, even if it wasn’t, in fact, actually a gecko, but instead some other type of reptilian life form.

(2) The recently-completed tribute compilation LP “Still Chattering” focuses on our songs from that time; that is, the ones that I had originally composed a cappella, as discussed above, and which our guitarist, Clay, afterwards arranged for the band to perform. That compilation of 13 tracks includes not only both live and studio versions of some of those songs from ’14 and ’15, which I remastered and added some additional vocals to (in two out of three cases) in order to improve their clarity in the mix. It also includes a number of the rearranged and rerecorded versions I’ve since done solo over the years in various arrangements. Two such songs are also included on the new compilation I am herein discussing, the second of them (“Stupid Man”) in a “drumless” mix that is a bit different from the version included on the CM tribute album “Still Chattering.”

III.

Just a bit more on this band before moving on to other topics…

The guitariist (and nominal leader) of Chattering Man had, in late 2013, arranged a few of my a cappella demos in time for us to record them early the next year as part of our first 12-track official CD release, published via his Indies label and entitled, rather simply, “Chattering.” Of course we would also now have these new songs as part of our arsenal of compositions to be performed live alongside Clay’s own original pieces in the coming months. Three formerly a cappella songs I’d written appeared on the LP in Clay’s heavy arrangements, including the short, balsy, punch-to-the-gut hard rocker “Stupid Man,” as well as the headier, but also equally “heavy,” not to mention also rather brooding and gloomy, six minute anthem “Chattering,” after which our debut (and, in the end, our only) LP was named (3). We would eventually add two more of the a cappella songs I’d presented to Clay as demos to our song rotation once he’d arranged them and we’d had time to practice them in the studio, though we never had a chance to do a proper recording of either as a band. These were “Phantom,” which was premiered late in 2014 at the livehouse Peace, followed by our version of “City of Glass” (first performed live in the winter of 2015 at CB, another livehouse, if memory serves).

(3) Note that this piece is represented on the current compilation as “Shattered Man” in its solo and demo version(s).

The band I eventually put (or better to say brought?) together myself in late 2015 — a band we’d christened “Glass Gecko,” the image inspired by the reptile I’d seen on July 14 of that year on my way home from the music store, my first guitar in tow — would start performing shows around town in 2016, including some of the songs that can be found on this compilation, songs such as “Want,” “Doppelgänger,” and “The Day I Cried” (4). As fate would have it, by late summer of that same year (and, interestingly, right around the one-year mark after purchasing my first guitar, the instrument/catalyst which had enabled me to form my own band in the first place), we (or, in other words, “the band/my band”) would no longer be four, nor would I be able to refer to the unit as “mine” any longer, though frankly I’d never felt as though it had ever been “my (own) project” to begin with. Rather, “they” (i.e. my now ex-bandmates) would thereafter be three, leaving me to my own devices while they reformed as an instrumental trio with a new name (it had gone from a reptilian name to a feline one), the guitarist installing himself as its new band leader. The three of them had in fact tried to hide this from me for a time until inevitably one day the truth slipped out of someone’s mouth and into my ear and I thereafter had to deal with the implications, not to mention the emotional trauma (for, at that time, it was rather traumatic to me) of what had transpired. My ex-band soon became, for me, a fragile (or, alternately, broken, as in the song “Black Nail”) reptile, one found in several of my songs I'd written around that time. This image also served as an emblem for me of everything I had disliked about being in a band situation in the first place. The fragile (now broken) reptile had indeed been, as my former band's name suggested, made of glass after all.

(4) This song, in particular, along with “Box Man,” also represented in two versions on the compilation, had sounded like a completely different song written by a completely different composer in the arrangement the guitarist from my band, Glass Gecko, had created for us to perform (we never recorded an LP, either in or out of any studio). The rather sordid story behind all of this, however, is better dealt with elsewhere, and in fact I previously wrote about it in two of my longer essays,“Without End or Beginning” and “Broken Reptile,” both at my writing blog (here at blogspot).

IV.

I continued making music solo and in various smaller projects after the band split in the summer of 2016 and then reformed “sans vocalist” as an autonomous trio. My first project in ‘16 was The Gecko’s Muse (TGM), a duo I had in fact formed with the drummer from my ex-band Glass Gecko prior to the break-up of the band, as a sort of side-project, and to give myself a break from the politics that existed within the unit whenever the four of us were together. As the two of us (the drummer and I) had been able to remain friends for a time even after the band split, we continued to write and to perform together for around a month afterwards; that is until, one day, I was contacted by a bass player who played for another friend’s unit (another trio), basically a friend of a friend... He had known of the breakup of my band (pretty much everyone in that community did), and offered to play bass for us, since the two of us had had no “bottom end” to our sound without either a bassist or a synth player to fill that role. After the three of us had chatted merrily online, both via Facetime and Messenger, we ended up forming House of Mirrors — or “HOM,” for short, which was the bassist’s idea (“I hate reptiles,” he had said when I suggested another name with the word “Reptile” in it) — though this project itself ended up lasting no more than a mere three weeks, culminating in an ugly, almost violent feud between the bass player and the drummer (no blows were exchanged and no one was hurt, except for my computer chair, which the bassist had flung across the room in anger before it crashed into the wall). A day or two afterwards I received a phone call from the drummer, who, he explained in a slightly tremulous voice, had decided that he had decided to give up on our duo project in order to concentrate more fully on his “main” one, i.e. the trio he had formed with my ex-bandmates…

I now consider this incident as marking the real “start line” for my solo activities. 

In 2017, I began to collaborate with “Tana” (Tomoki), an open-minded, improvisational rhythm and blues guitarist I’d met at a Fukuoka livehouse called Peace (where both Chattering Man and Glass Gecko had formerly performed) during an open mic jam session, at which time we’d been paired together and had, after I quickly ran down the basic chord progressions with him, performed my bluesy ballad “Lonely” together. I would come to refer to our unit, after a time, as “Another Room,” in order to distinguish it from when I played solo as Marc Lowe. Eventually, and somewhat cautiously at first, having had too many of my side-projects fall apart on me the previous year, I brought Joe Shotaro into the fold as well. “Joe” (as he liked to be called) had been playing in a Zeppelin covers band back when I was in Chattering Man, and we had performed together on the same stage at another local livehouse called Cavern Beat several times before again meeting at another music event held at a livehouse located in another part of the same neighborhood. We soon started up a passionate discussion about alternative and electronic music from the ‘90s, such as Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Massive Attack, Bjork, and so on, after he had watched me perform my set, which, by this time, was basically all-electronica style (by then I was using LOGIC, and my backing tracks had gotten more complex), with me playing a 49-key synthesizer, rather than the guitar. We decided we should try and collaborate on something together “sometime in the near future,” starting slowly by first going into the studio together to “jam” and to see how things went. And so, in time, we did…

I officially formed the electronica-blues trio Laughing Moon at the end of ’17, which consisted of me on electric guitar and vocals (later keyboard and vocals), Tana on lead guitar, and Joe on bass, and I ran the backing tracks with beats and, in some cases (as with “Black Nail” or “The Dial Is in the Bathroom”) some synth parts, in order to “round out” our sound. This was the first unit I’d ever formed that I felt was truly my unit. The three of us got along no problem, there were no power plays, no required meetings, no arguments about arrangements, either, and both members were 100% on board when it came to doing the music I had presented them with. They were always free to arrange their parts as they wished, and with Tana he basically improvised everything anyway, so that each performance, whether live or in the studio, was somewhat different. 

Unfortunately, the project only lasted for around a half year or so, because Tomoki, after our second show (at Peace Livehouse) in 2018, told us that he would need to take a temporary break from the project in order to focus on his work responsibilities and his family. What happened, however, was that he never ended up returning to the project (though the three of us did do a one-time “Laughing Moon Reunion” set as part of my birthday live in Fukuoka in February of 2020, after I had moved to Tokyo and had returned to visit friends and to perform at the livehouse Utero, which had become my “home” for live performances while still living in the Kiyokawa area of Fukuoka for three years: 2016-19). Despite Tana’s leaving the unit, the curse of my band and collaborative projects consecutively falling apart like dominoes had seemingly come to an end; Joe and I decided to continue together as a duo-project until Tomoki returned, booking ourselves simply as “Marc Lowe and Joe Shotaro” whenever we performed live together during 2018. We also started doing recordings of my original material in new arrangements at my apartment, which I came to refer to as “Lion Stone Studios.” Eventually, our continued collaboration throughout 2018 led to the 2019 “duo version” of my This Dark Shroud side-project, which theretofore had been a solo, basically recording-only thing I had done, and we continued doing such performances (as well as recording a trilogy of albums at my place) together as TDS (for short) all the way up until I had to leave Fukuoka for Tokyo in October of 2019 in order to find university work, as my (non-renewable) full-time teaching contract at Kyushu University had abruptly ended the previous spring.

V.

But, ah! you say (?), here again I digress… Let’s go back in time (yet again...) in order to fill in a few of the gaps that remain in this abbreviated narrative which forms the backstory for the compilation itself...

I first started learning how to use GarageBand for two essential reasons: 

1.) In order to accompany myself solo on stage with programmed backing drum tracks and/or other synth-based accompaniment (in the beginning, after the band broke up, I had been employing a cheap, used drum machine I had purchased online for this purpose, but once I started learning to program the electronic drum sounds and samples in GarageBand, and then later in Logic, I never went back to using the drum machine for accompaniment), and...

2.) To record my home demos in better sound quality and, eventually, to begin making my own self-produced, self-arranged recordings “sans band.” In other words, this application would afford me my ticket to being a truly free agent, never again having to depend on someone else to arrange all of my demos in his spare time, never needing other bandmates to play the drums or the bass for me, either.

Essentially, what I had wanted was to be able to do everything myself, but this, obviously, would not happen overnight, however impatient or motivated to learn recording and mixing techniques I may have been (and I was)… Between the two extremes of creating the most basic of recordings in GarageBand (which now can be sampled on the second half of this compilation) and producing the kinds of more complex recordings I would eventually learn to create via LOGIC, I had done a short “apprenticeship” with a self-proclaimed producer and label manager (his label, essentially, was a “one-man show” backed by an official-looking logo he’d made) who, after I broke off our verbal agreement and told him I was “taking a break” from the label (after three exceedingly stressful weeks together), citing that I needed more autonomy as well as time, in order to improve my Logic skills “on my own” (5), I once again went off alone, the future uncertain, figuring things out for myself over the coming months, the months turning into years…

(5) For details of this episode, as with the story of my bands, one can reference my long-form essay “Without End or Beginning” at this blogspot page, or, alternately, hear me reading it on my YouTube channel under the title, “Reading Series 004: On Band Days…”

To return now, once again, to the previous year, many of the very stripped-down/basic demos I had recorded in GarageBand from around the sweltering summer of 2016 through the early winter of 2017 (I had, if memory serves, bought the Korg Midi keyboard in February or March of ’17, from which point my recording-style and subsequently song style changed drastically) appear on the second half of the “Catch” compilation for the first time. The demos you will find on this collection that were recorded in 2016 were created exclusively via tweaking presets in various creative ways within the GarageBand DAW itself (since I didn’t have a keyboard with which to program or to play melodies or chords), including the first-ever GarageBand demo for the song “Black Nail,” which was recorded in December of 2016 (6).

(6) The original, unadorned demo version of “Black Nail,” which I’ve included here for the first time ever on an official release, and which was recorded in GarageBand in ’16 sans any sort of “mastering” whatsoever, neither has any guitar on it, nor any piano or programmed synth backing, for that matter… This was my first experiment with “electronica,” or at least to my mind at the time I considered it as such. This is because it was my very first time both composing and recording a brand new song without first laying down any guitar chords of any kind before singing the vocal line. But what of my earliest demos, which were a cappella, you might ask? Weren’t those done without any guitar, too? Yes, but the major difference between this and both the a cappella demos and the guitar-based demos from ‘16 is that this track, for the first time, relied solely on the electronic drum patterns and quasi-bass preset patterns that GarageBand had created for me as backing, rather than on a created guitar and/or vocal line without any synth backing, drums, or other such elements. (The following year I rerecorded “Black Nail” in Logic, this time with the Midi keyboard, programming a new bass line for it, as well as adding in drums, bits of chaotic piano, and other elements to further “flesh out” the arrangement.)

The entirety of the nearly 30 minute-long “Dreambox” EP, included at the (tail) end of the compilation, was also completed in GarageBand sans keyboard. “Dreambox” was itself an ambitious (for me, at the time) attempt at what Joe would in 2018 term my “filmic” style of music, a sort of extended soundscape including bits of my then-current songs, such as “In the Tree,” “What Had You Done?” (which I then still referred to in my mind as “Forest,” and which I had arranged here as part of the “Dreambox” suite in a kind of ambient-plus-vocals song, sans Ryuji’s guitar), and finally, coming in at the very end of this lengthy track, my song “People,” written when I was still with my band (though we never performed it together), replete with strummed acoustic guitar and a bit of overdubbed vocals.

Most of the demos found on this album were lifted from a collection of early GarageBand recordings made in 2016 I had recently discovered in my Music app on the Mac that I had apparently entitled (like the demo of the same name) “Grab the Horn.” I say “apparently” because the cover art had no title on it whatsoever, though the folder in which the files were assembled did. (The above version is the alt. jacket I created using the original photo from the Music app, adding text to the bottom righthand corner.) Ironically, the song “Grab the Horn” is the only demo on the entire collection for which there was no subsequent, rearranged/rerecorded “LOGIC version” equivalent, as I never in fact returned to this song again as a solo composition after my band broke up in the summer of 2016. 

The demos from this unofficial “release” all follow a similar pattern: I am playing my acoustic (Ibanez) guitar over a GarageBand-generated drum beat and singing, with some minimal overdubs and effectors applied to the voice and/or acoustic, making it sound, alternately, like an electric guitar, a flanged-out guitar, or just a “regular acoustic.” The aforementioned “Black Nail” was, as I said in a footnote, my first experiment in creating an “electronica” track sans guitar in GarageBand, but what I seemed to be doing with the demos of “Chaos” and “Bird,” also from the same time period, was to combine acoustic and electronic sounds, a pattern I would repeat in various and increasingly complex ways in Logic the following year with my “Guitronica” LP (the companion to that album was an all-acoustic “cousin” LP I’d entitled “Acoustica”), to cite just one other “early example” of my having played with combined acoustic and electronic elements.

The demo version of “Forest” that Ryuji and I rehearsed for the first time ever in my room — and it came quite literally minutes after we’d completed its composition and had only run through it piecemeal a handful of times — was recorded on my iPhone (not computer mic) “last minute” after I'd grabbed the phone, flipped open the case, and pressed record on the built-in “Voice Memo” app. In fact, at the very beginning of the track, and in response, apparently, to my having done so, Ryuji can be heard saying to me (in Japanese), “No need to record this today, is there?” This comes off as a rather ironic comment to me now, since this recording is literally the earliest-ever version we had ever attempted, and that after this there would not have been another opportunity to do a proper recording of it (7). In any case, had I listened to him and not pressed the record button, there would not have been any demo to share on this release, eight years later, nor any documentation of what the song had sounded like for me to have referred to in ’21, as I did when I one day decided to rearrange the song "solo" for acoustic guitar and voice, an arrangement I have frequently been playing live and/or at home/in-studio ever since.

(7) As an aside, I do still have one or two mediocre-quality recordings of the song from live shows we had done, but either R.’s guitar playing is a bit rushed and sloppy and/or I am oversinging or otherwise butchering the lyrics, which I could hardly have been expected to memorize in such a short time — in fact, that very night we performed it live, with Ryuji insisting I sing it “from memory.” I did, but the result was not altogether satisfactory.

And so, well, if a butterfly flaps its wings in Tunisia…

VI.

An alternate (or reinterpretated) title for this 44 track collection might as well be “Release the Cache” or, if one wanted to be much more tongue-in-cheek and sardonic, “Release the Cash” (because, well, I have not seen any of it in my ten years of making this or any other music, including things in any of the other multiple and varied genres in which I have worked and continue to work or experiment with, many of which I cannot even come up with a proper name/label for…) 

In short, this somewhat odd or awkward or varied or unique or “unpindownable” collection of tracks is to-date the most comprehensive “song lexicon” of my early singer-songwriter material I have ever compiled or published anywhere. Too, however, it is not an “all-encompassing” compilation, not even in terms of the so-called “early songs” I had written and/or recorded between ’14-’16 during my time in bands and/or early in my “going rogue/solo” period. For instance, there is no “My Friend” here, no “Coda,” no “More,” nor any “Phantom,” either... Instead, as the observant observer will soon realize, this collection focuses exclusively on songs for which I also had/have extant demo versions on hand to share.

So, what the compilation isn’t, then, is (i.e. is not) every song from A-Z composed between those dates (though I did decide on an alphabetical, lexicon-like running order for the songs I’ve included), and what it is, or perhaps what it “might be," perhaps, is a sort of alternate “Versions” type LP. (For reference, I used to make collections of my songs that featured two different arrangements side-by-side, such as, for instance, “Want” acoustic backed with “Want” electric, or my piano arrangement of “I’ll Take You Home” beside my acoustic arrangement, etc. These collections I always termed "Versions," and I produced several of them in 2018 and '19, including different material each time.) The major difference here, however, is that the "versions" being compared come from drastically different sources: some older, others older still (i.e. early demos), and then there are just a few newer recordings, too, as I will explain below.

The second half of the collection (the "demos" half) is a kind of (reverse, or would that be a "reverse-reverse"?) mirror-image of the first half, except in placenta-like form, while the first half might be considered the second half’s “all grown up” (mirror) image, rearranged and then recorded (or rerecorded) in Logic from 2018 onward. Most are “solo recordings,” but two of the versions I’ve chosen for this compilation also feature my collaborations with Joe Shotaro on bass (“Box Man” and “This Love”), and a further two tracks (“Want” and “Lonely”) also feature the bluesy, improvised guitar of “Tana,” or Tomoki, with whom Joe and I had collaborated on the Laughing Moon project of late 2017 to early 2018.

As for those versions from more recent years, they tend to fall into one of three categories. 

The first is “remixes” done at least a few years on from when the original versions on which they are based were recorded, as with the “Redux” mixes of “Black Nail” (here in its instrumental version, as I wanted something slightly “different” for this compilation) and “Shattered Man,” both from 2021, or the “Reconstruction Mix” I did of “Fragile Reptile” last year (’23), culling both acoustic and electric (as in "with electric guitar") mixes I’d recorded back in 2018 via Logic, rearranging them in a sort of self-referential “mash up” and then adding some crunchy “bit distortion” toward the end of the track, so that the “reptile” of the song can be heard to metaphorically “break up.”

("Sorry, Sam, I can’t hear you… The signal is breaking up…"). 

The second category consists of what I would call “live” versions that I myself recorded, generally via an iPhone placed on a stationary stand — first as videos and then mastering the audio and extracting it — either solo on an acoustic or classical acoustic in my room (e.g. “The Day I Cried,””One Touch”), at an outdoor park (such as with “What Had You Done?” from fall, ’22), or during a live performance with a live audience in attendance (as with track 2, “Bird,” which I began to play spontaneously during a live solo acoustic performance earlier this year at the venue Borders in Tokyo... This is a shorter-than-usual version, but I like the vibe here). 

The third category or type is represented here by a lone track: “People.” This version was recorded late last year in LOGIC, though I did not release it until earlier this year on the LP “Shadowlife,” an LP consisting of outtakes from the more ambitious double-length experimental LP “Angels of Chaos,” also released this year (not to be confused with “Angels of Time" — 2024 has been, you might say, a "year of angels" for me, at least as far as album titles go).

And so, I will end the present mini-essay/introductory write-up here, allowing you, the listener, to decide the rest for yourself! Hope you will enjoy the ride as much as I have these past ten (!?!) or so years…

Marc Lowe

December 17-19, 2024

Tokyo, Japan

Little by little

I will reassemble my room

Little by little

I will reassemble my life

It is just this

Life is process

It has no beginning

It has no end

Birth and death

Too, are phases

In a much larger cycle

That goes on for eternity

These trifles, stupid things

We get so emotional

We do not see the forest

We do not see the trees 

Little by little

Piece by piece

Breath by breath

Step by step

Peace begins with me

Peace begins with you

It has no nationality

It has no agenda

It just is

Inhale, exhale

Open your eyes

Then close them

Life goes on

Life tests us

and tests us

and tests us

and tests us again

This is life

Laugh at the ridiculous nature

of these challenges

We all die one day, right?

So, let's live now

Even if it isn't always easy

The Universe knows why

The Universe is a great trickster sometimes

Let the karma flow

Don't attach

Don't react

Observe

The White Room 

by Marc Lowe

Part I: Introduction to The White Room

He sits in a straight-backed chair in the center of the room, his arms resting on a round, three-legged wood table covered with a white tablecloth. He wears a white suit with a white cravat, starched white shirt, and pleated white pants. His white shoes are polished to perfection, his white hair and mustache contrasting with his dark skin. His top-hat, too, is white. There is some white wine in a flute-stemmed glass on the table beside his neatly folded hands, the palms of which are lighter than the exterior of the fingers. Behind him, a mirror reflecting his image in the mirror in front of him; in front of him, a mirror reflecting his image in the mirror behind, and so on in succession. To his left and right, white- tiled walls, while below and above him a white floor and ceiling to match. There is a white urinal on the wall to his left, the letters “M.D.” painted on its side in red, a white toilet next to it, and on the wall to his right a torn poster with some sort of political slogan on it, written in a foreign language. The door, also painted white, is shut. Locked. The man himself has locked it from the inside, as instructed.

In the rear corner of the room a camera watches, a little red light blinking at its corner. The man’s brow is furrowed, his bushy white eyebrows following the trajectory of the brow; his azure blue eyes, the pupils of which are speckled with white, gaze at something only the man is able to perceive within his blindness, some phantom shape, we may imagine. One hand now crawls toward the stem of the champagne flute to first touch and then lift the glass to his chapped, pink lips. In one determined motion the diaphanous fluid has disappeared down the man’s throat. A slight trace of a smile appears on his face and then is gone. The man suddenly opens his mouth, though no sound emerges. Now he stands up and walks over to the urinal (he does not need a “shooter stick” [white cane] to get around the room, for he has memorized its limited landscape and could navigate his way around it even without a head!). Unzipping his fly, he loosens his belt, lowers his pants and then his trunks (which are black), and extracts his penis, which is lighter than the skin of his face but darker than the palms of his hands, and very long and thin. He relieves himself, moaning slightly, and then reverses the process, pulling his trunks up again, then his pants and belt, and finally zipping up his zipper. Afterwards, he returns to the round table upon which the now empty flute glass rests and sits down, the mirrors once again reflecting their respective images of him in endless succession.

Part II: How The Man Named Gustav Came to Be in The White Room

His name, they say, was Gustav. He was an immigrant from Rennes, in France (though born in Algeria), who had come to live in the United States because, as a blind man, he had been discriminated against in his home country, where unemployment for people such as himself was, he had read in a Braille newspaper, statistically at least three-times higher than for those without, despite the laws requiring companies to keep 6% of jobs in reserve for people with disabilities. What he found, however, upon arriving in this country in the mid- ‘90s, was that the job he had been promised by his blind Asian-American pen-pal before leaving his country—working as a clerk in a store selling men’s clothing, especially suits and tuxedos—had disappeared; the shop had gone bust. His pen pal, too, had mysteriously disappeared, it would seem, though fortunately for Gustav his work visa had already been taken care of. He was distraught, but he did not give up, for he had no choice but to find work, and fast. He searched for another clothing shop that would hire him, as he had experience with sales: he had worked for his father’s store as a teenager before going blind (his medical records state that, on a dare, the young Gustav had stared at the sun for a full hour and thirty minutes, resulting in irreversible damage to his eyesight, though he himself claims that he had always been blind).

The details of what happened next are not delineated in any detail in the report that has come down to us; ours is the edited version, approved by the authorities. But, we digress.... Gustav eventually found a temporary job through a man he met on the street—a clown, by profession, though Gustav never realized this—selling hot roasted peanuts on the grounds of a carnival. This was not a high paying job, of course, but it was better than nothing. One evening, a voice asked Gustav for three servings of peanuts, to which Gustav replied, in his slightly broken English, Yes, of course, sir. When he held out the first of the three boxes filled with nuts, however, no one’s hand reached out to claim it. Sir? Gustav queried, wondering what had happened, but there was no response. Suddenly, and with force, the unwitting Gustav was grabbed by a number of hands, how many he was not sure: it happened so quickly he scarce had time to think, or to cry out for help. The carnival had gone quite silent, and all he could see, as ever, were amorphous, dark shapes inside his head. He fumbled, fell backwards, and when he awoke he was seated in a (...)

Part III: Gustav, The White Room, and Two Visitors

straight-backed chair in the center of the room, his arms resting on a round, three-legged wood table covered with a white tablecloth. He wears a white suit with a white cravat, starched white shirt, and pleated white pants, etc. There are two empty chairs across from him, and, accordingly, two flute-stemmed glasses filled with wine upon the table: rouge and rosé, respectively. There is a centerpiece in the center of the table; it is a metal crown shaped like a phoenix, with a lit candle protruding from it. Behind him, a mirror reflecting his image in the mirror in front of him, etc.

There is a knock at the door. Gustav walks over to it (he has memorized the layout of the room; he knows it like the back of his hand...), unlatches the lock, and returns to his straight-backed chair. Two men enter the room, both wearing black from head to toe. One man’s face is painted like a clown; the other man’s face wears a blank expression. The two men take their places at the round table across from Gustav. They lift their glasses in unison and then drain them. Gustav does not move. He does not have a glass from which to drink. He is not thirsty anyway. He sits in his straight-backed chair and stares blankly. The visitors shake hands with one another. They stand up. They dance around the table, kicking up their heels. They kiss each other’s cheeks. They mime. They unzip their flies and take turns urinating in the urinal. Then they return to their seats.

“Sir, do you know why you are here?” 

“No sir, I do not.”
“Sir, do you know how you got here?” 

“No sir, I do not.”
“Sir, do you wish to leave?” “——.”
“Please lock the door after we exit.” 

“Yes sir.”

The two men in black clothing stand up. They whisper some words in one another’s ears. They look back at the blind man, and then turn around to leave. Gustav follows, locks the door, and returns to his seat. The men have taken their empty flute-stemmed glasses away and have replaced them with a single glass, filled with vin blanc. The candle has been extinguished, or perhaps has gone out. It is dark in the white room. Gustav closes his eyes, sleeps. He dreams.

Part IV: Gustav’s Dream (The Unofficial Report)

I am not who the “report” says I am. My name is not Gustav. I am not French, and I wasn’t born in Algeria. But none of this matters. They say that my skin is dark, but to me everyone and everything is dark. Everything begins and ends in darkness. Where now? Who now? When now? Why do they call me Gustav? Why do they say that I am a Frenchman? I am not any of these things. I am not who they think I am. I am not.

Part V: The Man Who Was Not Gustav

He sits in a straight-backed chair in the center of the room, his arms resting on a round, three-legged wood table covered with a white tablecloth. The sound of music can be heard from outside, drifting in through the crack below the door. The music is funereal, languid. A flute-stemmed glass sits on the table, empty. The strains of the dirge make the glass vibrate; it emits a sound like soft moaning. The man wears a white suit with a white cravat, etc. He is sitting in the white room, the strains of funerary music echoing dully. He sits, listening. Or is he just sitting? Now he stands. Having no need of a shooter stick, he walks over to the urinal, unzips his fly. He urinates and then returns to his seat at the table. The walls are white. The floor is white. The ceiling is white. The man’s skin is dark, sweaty. He is sweating in the white room, the sounds of a funerary dirge in his ears. He opens his mouth, sticks out his too-pink tongue. An insect the color of sand crawls out, drops to the table on a strand of the man’s saliva. The insect climbs the side of the flute-stemmed glass, falls into its concave center. The man places the light palm of his dark hand atop the glass, sealing the insect’s fate. He waits, breathes: inhale, exhale, inhale, etc. He waits in the white room, waits for the men to come again. The men do not come. The music continues to play. The man continues to wait. In the white room. He waits. The insect has stopped moving inside the glass. The man lifts the glass to his lips.

He wakes. He is at a carnival, selling peanuts. He cannot see the man who speaks to him, but he can hear his voice. Yes sir, he replies, holding out the peanuts, three boxes of them. But no one takes the peanuts from his outstretched hand. Being blind from birth (the sun had nothing to do with it, he insists), there is no way that he can resist his unseen assailants. Why are they blindfolding him? Don’t they realize that he doesn’t see? He awakes in the white room, (still) blind, sitting at a table with three legs. Why three? A flute-stemmed glass of wine sits on the table opposite the man, whose name, they say, was Gustav; who, they say, was a Frenchman of Algerian descent. The camera zooms in, zooms out.

Part VI: Witness’s Confession (Death of the Man Some Called Gustav)

I don’t know where he was from, tell the truth, the man they called Gustav. To me he was just the “man in the white room,” will always be the man in the white room. I watched over him on the monitor for days; he hardly ever moved, except to urinate once in a while. He never ate more than the crumbs of bread that were brought him, though he did drink up all of the wine. Strangest job I ever had, monitoring that man. He never once tried to escape. But then one day he killed himself. Just like that. Smashed the flute-stemmed glass on the round edge of the table and cut his own neck after swallowing a mouthful of shards. Without warning. He did it suddenly, fell to the floor like a sack of grain. The man in the white room, a dark bubbling stream of blood running from his neck: I’ll never forget the image. It’s all on the video you’ve seen, no?

I never asked any questions, never got any answers. Why they had brought him to the white room, dressed him up in white. Why he hadn’t tried to leave. So, I’m afraid I have no explanations to offer you, officer. Perhaps it’d be best if you ask them, the others, the same questions you’ve been asking me. What others? The two men I’ve been talking about all along! Haven’t you interrogated them yet? Yes, of course there were others. I wasn’t the one running the show. No, I don’t know their names; they never told me. I was too afraid to ask—they always had that threatening look in their eyes, and I didn’t want to make trouble for myself or for my humble-but-happy family of three. Yes, of course. Of course I’m telling you the truth. You haven’t seen the video? It’s disappeared? That’s...but how? I’m telling you everything I know. I am not...

Part VII: The White Room (Conclusion)

You sit in a straight-backed chair in the center of the white room, your arms resting on a round, three-legged wood table covered with a white tablecloth, waiting. A flute-stemmed glass filled with sparkling white wine rests atop the table. Your mouth waters. The moment you reach out a hand to pick up the glass two men in black enter the room, one of them with a face painted like a clown. Their images, like your own, are multiplied in the mirrors both before and behind you.

“Do you know why you are here?” one of the men suddenly asks, the one with the clown-face. Grinning ghoulishly, he squirts dark water from a silicone flower on his lapel. You open your mouth to speak, but find that no words emerge. A camera watches you from the rear corner of the room (see the red light blinking there?). There is a picture of a dark-skinned man dressed from head to toe in white on the opposite wall who looks uncannily familiar. You lift the glass, the wine disappears down your throat. You stand, move toward the door, which, oddly you think, has been left unlocked. The two men are now taking turns urinating into the urinal. You consider your options, glancing at the door for a moment before returning to the chair at the center of the room.

When you sit down the first man repeats his question:
“Do you know why you are here?”
You answer:
“No, sir, I do not.”
“Please lock the door after we exit.”

You nod your head, which suddenly feels as heavy as a sack of grain, and try to remember how you got here, but the wine has made you inordinately drowsy and you can no longer think straight. Your eyes close. You are in the white room, dreaming white dreams. When you awake, you find yourself at a carnival, three boxes of peanuts in your lap. Suddenly, an old lady begins to point at you, then another person and another, until a crowd has gathered around. You look down at the three boxes of peanuts with blurred vision (fading, fading...) to see that they are drenched in dark blood. The next thing you recall is waking up in a white-walled room, surrounded by people wearing white. Then, after that: darkness.

—2008/9