Recursive blogging

I have in front of me an Emily Bezar CD called Angel’s Abacus. How I came to have this CD is a twisted story of recursive dreams, blogging, and synchronicity.

Six years ago on a summer evening, I wrote in my blog about a recursive dream I’d had. That’s a dream in which you dream that you fall asleep and are having a dream. My dream had three levels of recursion. I dreamed that I was having a dream in which I was having a dream. It made for a nice, geeky joke in my blog about mental stack overflows.

Earlier this month, independent recording artist Emily Bezar had a recursive dream and wrote about it in her myspace blog. Curious about whether anyone else had written about recursive dreams, she googled for “recursive dream” and found my blog entry. She quoted my blog in her blog (which I’m now mentioning in my blog, possibly proving that dream recursion eventually leads to blog recursion).

A few hours after Emily’s blog post, I happened to do a search on my name at Technorati, prompted by the chance discovery that there’s a baseball player who shares my rather unusual name. What I found was not a reference to baseball but Emily’s dream post. I left a comment on her blog and, perhaps impressed by my Kibo-like omnipresence when my name was mentioned, she visited my myspace page where my rather eccentric musical tastes are revealed. This prompted an email exchange regarding the improbability of two people who listen to both DEVO and John Adams, both PIL and Kronos Quartet, running into each because of the chance discovery that we’ve both had recursive dreams.

Meanwhile, I checked out her website, listening to a few MP3s of her compositions. I ordered the Angel’s Abacus CD, which showed up in the mail a few days later, unexpectedly autographed. Wow. Why doesn’t Mark Mothersbaugh ever send me autographed DEVO CDs?

She creates unusual and interesting music that’s been compared to Kate Bush. It’s an understandable comparison but Emily’s music defies such a simple classification. It’s not Jazz, not classical, not rock, not minimalism, not – well, you get the idea. It’s the sort of music you can’t find in brick-and-mortar record stores because they don’t have a pre-printed plastic divider to delineate its nature.

Emily has a musical background as diverse as my musical tastes; from classical piano at Oberlin Conservatory to Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Anyway, check it out. Promote Indie music. Buy one of her CDs.

Perhaps the most suprising thing I’ve learned from all this is that someone might actually read my blog once in a while.