This is the trailer for a new short smoking fetish film I shot yesterday afternoon and spent the bulk of today editing. I’m very, very pleased with the final film. It’s simple, very real, intriguing (even watching it now having filmed it)… it has a personal appeal.

The full version is available for download in my NSFW studio/store here. Though I’m distributing it in a very, very NSFW place, the film itself is actually entirely safe for work. There is nothing sexual within it. There is no nudity. It is simply a girl smoking a cigarette in a park. And honestly, this is one of my proudest little moments.

About five days ago, I took to my social networks to announce that I was in love. I SOOOOOO am.

Of course, it’s not with a woman. It’s that electronic gadgetry you see pictured in the photos. The synthesizer. The vocoder. The MicroKorg XL. This was my gift to myself this year. This is the first instrument in what will eventually be my very own personal studio. I feel like I should name him, to be honest, but I can’t even think of one except for “Beautiful.”

The Piano Man

I can’t tell you exactly why I started taking piano lessons as a kid. I think my parents thought it might be good for me to have something to do. So around the age of eleven or twelve, I started lessons. I enjoyed piano. Both of my older sisters played. So maybe it was just tradition that each of the children learn to play the piano. Almost as soon as I knew the basics, I started playing around, putting a chord here and there together. Putting some melody with some bass line. Sounds that pleased my ear.

It was the very early eighties. My first recital, if I remember correctly, I actually played the theme to Star Wars. Given my level, it was actually beyond my skill at the time. I was like that for a long time with piano, more advanced than I should have been. I was always the star pupil of piano teachers, the one that was their pride and joy.

Synthesis

I mention that it was the early eighties because it wasn’t long after I started taking piano lessons that New Wave music hit the scene. Synthesizers were everywhere. Musicians like Howard Jones, Thomas Dolby. Bands like Human League, Duran Duran, Naked Eyes were ruling the airwaves. Steve Winwood, with Arc of a Diver. And then Herbie Hancock’s Rocket. Who could forget that?

You had musicians like Vangelis and Jean Michel Jarre blossoming out from that strange world of experimental synthesis to appeal to mass audiences worldwide. Jarre would produce groundbreaking concerts like nothing anyone had ever seen before, using city skylines as backdrops and filling the open air all around with synthesized music. It was a time when the keyboard, the synthesizer, the drum machine, the vocoder… when electronic synthesis dominated the music scene. Even rock and roll dove in to the world of electronic music with Van Halen’s landmark 1984 album hitting the airwaves with straight-up pop synthesis.

The Arabian Gulf

It was in this environment that I grew up and developed my love for music. These were my heroes, my idols. About the time I was in eighth grade, I began looking at synthesizers. I lived in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia at the time, and sometimes on Wednesday nights or Thursdays (Thursdays/Fridays are the equivalent weekends in Saudi), my dad would drive my mom and I down to Khobar for whatever reason. Browsing. Dinner out. Shopping. It was family time. And Khobar was a third-world wonderland for shopping. There were always two stores I wanted to go in. One sold cartridges for the Atari. Another store, right behind it, had these really fancy Casio keyboards. They weren’t synthesizers, but they could make music. Crappy, cheesy music. Would they be getting any synthesizers in, I would ask. (Because this was crap. These weren’t the machines I could use to make music I wanted to hear. These were for churches.)

Things didn’t just happen overnight back then. There was no internet. There was no email. And in Saudi, things sometimes took months upon months. Even if you could mail off an order from a catalog to some company in the US, it would be quicker to wait until vacation (whenever that was) and just bring it back with you. (Or have someone else going on vacation bring it back with them.) And it became apparent very quickly that the best thing you could hope for would be that your parents take a vacation to China because you could get the latest models there and at a fraction of the cost in the States. (I had a friend that came back from one such vacation with this gorgeous 88-key keyboard from Roland. I hated him for that. No, not really.)

I would pick up the pamphlets for the keyboards anyway, take them home and look at them. When we’d travel back to the US on vacation, that was when I would strike gold. I would always somehow get my parents to take me to a music store. There, I would pick up the latest brochures on the latest keyboards that the store had in stock. For the remainder of the vacation and until the next time we’d go on vacation, I would look at those glossy pamphlets with all of their specs, eventually wearing down their stapled centers. A pepsi stain here or there.

I would soak up every detail from the pamphlets on the synthesizers. Their wattages. Their oscillator settings. The pictures of how the knobs were laid out on the keyboards. The LED power light lit beside the power switch. The logo: Moog. Yamaha. Korg. Roland.

8-note polyphony. Resonance. Cutoff. Frequency. Sine Waves. Modulation. Attack. 1/4″ Jack. Back panel jacks. Pitch wheel. MIDI (new even AFTER my new-found passion). Buttons to press. Knobs to turn.

And at the end of it all, glorious sound and music would come out. Beautiful long pads. Deep chorused basses. Minor sevenths that never sounded so good!

I loved every bit of it.

So eventually, I did get a synthesizer. My first synthesizer was a Moog Opus 3. My parents had surprised me for Christmas one year with it. I say surprised, but truthfully (and Mom and Dad, I never told you this), I knew I was getting it a month before Christmas. I spotted the box one day. Hidden in the back of my parent’s closet. While probably looking for wrapped Christmas gifts. Because why else would I be there? (I don’t normally do that kind of thing, but I think I knew I was getting a synthesizer that year.)

And from that day until Christmas, everyday after school, I would go into my parent’s closet, take the box to my bedroom, lock my door so our housekeeper wouldn’t come in, carefully unpack the box, play it for as long as I could before I knew anyone would be home, pack it back in the box, and sneak it back to the exact same place in their closet. There was a Peavey amp as well; I can’t remember if I was pulling that out every day or not.

Still, it didn’t ruin Christmas. Though, if you ever wondered how I knew my way around it so quickly, Mom and Pops… there’s your answer.

About a year or so later, I saved up enough money to buy another synthesizer. A Korg Poly-800. THAT keyboard had pads that satisfied. It wasn’t overall, an aesthetically superior keyboard, but it was pretty enough for the time and it sounded great. It had that technical appeal to it. There was something just magical about the electronics of it all.

And I was hardcore about it all, too. Keyboard Magazine (I think?) used to have these little build-it-yourself projects in their magazines. This wasn’t building a picture frame. This was building your own phase-shifter. In ninth grade, I decided to build my own sequencer (which I could then use) as a project for my Physical Science class. I want to say that I built it entirely by myself, but I remember my dad having an electrical engineer friend of the family come over one afternoon to help with something or other, it seems like. Maybe I ran into a problem. I don’t recall. So I was just soldering capacitors, resistors, and god knows what other electrical nonsense was in the schematics to a little green circuitboard, all for the sake of enhancing audio capabilities. To make better music. My science teacher was amazed. I was probably just as amazed. I can’t remember, really. It’s who I was then. It was my passion.

The Development Years

By the time I was in boarding school, I had two or three syntheszers, drum machine, sequencer, cables everywhere… I don’t even recall. I was THAT kid in school. The reputation I had developed in junior high as that musical kid carried 8,000 miles across the planet to high school.

When I got to college, I studied classical piano, taking all of the general music courses, spending countless hours in the soundproof practice rooms, And once or twice a week taking lessons from my professor in his dark and damp basement office where, lining the left side of the grand piano, a row of perpetually wilting plants sat which he jokingly referred to as “death row.”

In my junior year, I met a girl, we dropped out of school, got married. Real life began to happen. I had to get real work. Do a real thing that would make money. I still played music. Spent a lot of time writing, playing. Sometimes spending hours in front of those beautiful blinking LEDs. One of my favorite things to do was to generate some really nice loop, have it running on the sequencer, turn off the lights so that it was dark or nearly dark and just improvise on top of that, letting whatever melody that could be found hit just right. Just soaking in every bit of audio goodness and everything that was electronic at that moment. Red lights pulsating off and on. The LEDs displaying the patch numbers of the program, or the tempo. White keys down. Black keys. Hold. Sustain. Blink. Blink. Blink.

God, I loved that.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder

When my oldest son was born, it was right before Christmas. We were relatively poor at the time but I really didn’t want him to go without for Christmas. Even though, WTF? It’s not like he wasn’t going to be all that cognizant of the affair. So I sold all of my musical equipment. By that point in my life, I had amassed quite a bit of equipment, each very personal to me. I remember feeling like I had sold my soul. But it was worth it, I knew. And it was the right thing to do. And I told myself then that one day… One day, I would get it all again.

Over the two decades that followed, a piano that belonged to one of my grandmothers was passed around between the grandchildren. So there was a period when I played the piano again for a while. I remember when I was working remotely for this software company up in Massachusetts, I would sometimes take breaks during the day, turn around and just decompress on the piano, working through Hanon exercises (piano books and sheet music somehow stayed preserved over the years), re-learning old pieces, learning new ones. Chopin preludes and nocturnes. Nothing could soothe me more, massage my soul into a place of peace.

The piano is now with my middle sister, I believe. A few years back, I discovered Sony’s ACID software, which is in essence a loop factory. When I took my trip across the country, I had the good fortune of hooking up with someone from Sony and in addition to them setting me up with their pro video software, Vegas, they were gracious enough to give me the pro version of ACID as well as tons and tons of audio loops.

(This was a band I was in in junior high. Clearly, the 80s. That’s me at the piano. We played two songs I wrote. After the concert, my parents thought I was a troubled teen because of the lyrics. Words have never been my strong suit. )

Since then, I’ve been using ACID to create these little audio compositions that you hear in all of my videos. (The videos are, of course, all done in Vegas.) I love ACID Pro. There’s really no limit to what you can do in terms of music creation. With the ability to splice, stretch, arrange tracks, and its wide variety of processors and filters (pitch shift/parametric equalizers/reverbs/delays/fade/pan/mute and so on), you can build each note one by one and create really anything. I think I have somewhere in the range of ten- to twenty-thousand loops on this computer or on external drives.

I enjoy using it. It’s not the same as playing a keyboard, and randomly finding just that right sound. And honestly, it’s almost overwhelming with the number of loops I have. It’s sometimes difficult to create an audio construct because the sound isn’t quite right. Or I don’t want to take the time to splice a loop to hell and back to have THAT note hit for the right syncopation.

It’s synthesis, for sure. Synthesizing loops, synthesizing rhythms, synthesizing patterns. But I’ve missed the control and the freedom. And above all, the joy of just playing.

Looking toward the future, looking at my longer term goals, looking at what I’m doing now and what I ultimately want to do, I realized that now is the time.

Today

Photography has been a lovely creative outlet. Video work has been a lovely creative outlet. I believe I continue to get better with these things. With music, I hope to do the same. And I hope that I am able to weave all three together to create art of some sort that people enjoy. To tell worthwhile stories, whether they are about a train trip to nowhere or an erotic film where someone’s come to fix the cable. (And yes, beyond using the vocoder for non-erotic work, I’m hoping to do some really different, sensual and creative stuff with female audio for the erotica that I shoot.) Yes, I’ll definitely be putting together a lot of porn music. That might be what it ALL sounds like. Porn music. For porns I shoot. But I hope to use it for everything. All the stories. And maybe stories which are only music. Who knows?

The audio constructs that I create are, and always have been, for my satisfaction only. My interest and my passion in hearing or creating sounds and music that please me has never been about anyone other than me. I don’t sit down and throw sounds together wondering if that’s the sound that others want to hear. I sit to create something that pleases my ears. Like photography and video, it’s what is is stimulating to my senses. If the music I make sits well with others, then super. Back in the day, everyone knew that I WOULD be a musician. It was what defined me then. People encouraged and supported me then the same way they do with photography today. Yeah, it would be neat if I am able to find sounds that resonate today with people the way my photography does.

I don’t hold any high hopes or beliefs that it will. All of this work that I’m doing now… this game-plan-focus over the coming months before I leave here… it matters not if I am successful at it. I am truly doing something which I enjoy and I believe I’m good at. I have a passion for what I do and I’m striving to do better at it. It is art for the sake of art for me. If I make money doing it (which I am now, finally starting to truly pursue, and finally actually making), then that’s just great.

Beautiful

The MicroKorg XL, shown in my pictures here, apart from being a superb synthesizer in terms of sound, is just a beautiful machine with fantastic retro styling. I had a long inner battle in deciding between this and the original MicroKorg which had a an even more retro wood frame finish (my Opus 3 had the same finish). Ultimately, I chose the XL for it’s USB connection. My little workstation is quickly becoming wires and cables. And blinking lights.

So now? Now I look forward to the day when once again I sit alone in the dark, surrounded by a sea of blinking lights, headphones on my ears, a rich full pad flowing in my head, a deep rhythm pulsating, and one lone voice resting and singing above it all progressing it’s way down.

I’m glad you’re here, Beautiful. We’re going to be great friends.

(By the way… the video? My god, all those cables and wires… the freakin’ spatial controller(?!)… standing alone, creating that perfect sound, and having it go straight into your ears? This video is porn for me.)

Erotic films available in my studio/store on clips4sale.com here.

I’m pleased to announce that I’m now making available for download and purchase the erotic films that I produce. I will be making the films available in full-length as well as providing shorts taken from the film which will focus on specific fetishes or elements of erotica. Some of the films/videos being released will most definitely fall into the category of pornography though I am going to, as much as possible, keep it on the artistic side of things.

I am distributing all videos through my studio/store on clips4sale.com (that’s a very, very Not Safe For Work link). The first film which I have released is the morning after featuring Katie Cummings. The full-length feature and all of the shorts (10 films total) are available in full HD.

Couple of notes about the studio/store.
1) All films and clips will be available in seven different formats, ranging from smaller iPod versions to full HD.
2) The different formats for each individual clip will be released over a period of two days, with the studio/store updating three to four times a day.

I’ve received a number of requests for custom videos since opening the store already. I haven’t made any decision yet as to whether that’s something I’m going to do or not. When I decide what I want to do there, I’ll make that information publicly available.

Also, I am open to suggestions for shoot/fetish ideas. I will be shooting enough content from here on out that there shouldn’t be a day where the store is not updated with fresh new content or at least alternate versions of existing content, providing as many download options for fans/followers/viewers as possible. With that in mind, I am open to suggestions on different erotic/fetish themes.

Thanks for your continued support and I hope you like the films!

At the end of June of this year, I am leaving South Beach and South Florida and moving to South Carolina. I will continue my work with models with the goals of extending what I’m doing creatively and artistically, challenging myself, and reaching a much larger audience.

It’s been real.

So I’m right in the middle of editing this film I’m putting together which I’ve titled the morning after. There are only two characters within the film, there is no dialogue, and I very much like that.

I’ve edited the film in such a way to leave the story open entirely for interpretation by the viewer. The viewer can create whatever story in their mind they wish. I think that’s awesome. Granted, at it’s core, it’s a porn flick so you pretty much know where it’s going…

(Joe PornFan watching along…)

“Wait, what’s going on here?
Why is she doing that?
Oh hey, there it is, then… Yep. Porn.
But wow. Very, very nicely done!”

I’m pleased with it, though. It’s heavily coated in my special brand of erotica so it’s sufficiently tantalizing. I think it’s well shot and edited. Except for the really porny parts. For future shoots, I really want to shoot and edit those parts in a more erotic light while still being able to give the viewer what they came for. Or what they will be coming for. (Oh, yes I did!) Straight up porn is just so clinical.

So I have some goals in shooting all of this.

1. I would obviously like to be successful at it. I think I have some expertise in this area, or at least some skill, though I’m nowhere NEAR having the amount of skill or expertise I’d like to have.
2. I’d really like to change people’s perceptions of pornography and erotica. Hopefully, I can blur the lines between the two. Or at least muddle them a little bit. I want to change the way people think or at least get them to think. And through this, hopefully make the world a little bit better.
3. Well, it’s really a lot to go into, some of it tied into my leaving here.

In any event, here is a link to a short excerpt from the film. Needless to say, it is most certainly not safe for work. I am about two thirds of the way through editing and should be done this week but it will likely not be available in full for another month. I’m pretty pleased so far.