Saturday 19th March 2011

Pretzels look like twisted hearts covered in sweet sticky syrup. Sometimes bitter when covered in salt, sometimes sweet when covered in sugar, dark and sweet when covered in chocolate but twisted nonetheless.

I’ve never been a fan of pretzels, nor twisted hearts, because I’ve only ever tasted the ones covered in salt, I’ve never had the pleasure of indulging in a sweet pretzel.

You do get used to the taste of the salted and dried pretzels but you get to a point where you stop eating. You forget about the pretzel, what it tastes like, the scent, the texture, every single part of the pretzel becomes non existent in your taste memory, you only remember holding it in your hand and seeing it covered in those mahoosive rocks of salt, which require you to drink a gallon of water after each packet to rehydrate because every single pretzel in the packet is covered in gigantic rocks of salt.

Would you prefer another packet of Pretzels, one which hasn’t been open to invasion by the atmosphere, a closed tightly sealed packet, or a different flavour perhaps…

What happens when you’re in the midst of a sweetened pretzel?

Will you test the pretzel flavour placing it on the tip of your tongue, or shove the whole pretzel into your mouth and wait for the surprise?
Will you gamble all you fear on buying that lottery ticket for the chance of having a winning ticket?

How can you differentiate a twisted bitter heart from a pretzel when there’s no comparison, didn’t you say that you forgot what a pretzel looked, tasted, felt and smelt like, surely you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference?

How on earth could you compare a pretzel to a heart, how do you even remember the word pretzel and not have any idea of its associated images?

There are so many inconsistencies in your statements.

Story of my life…

Pretzels – twisted and bittersweet: broken, repaired, recovering, shattered, tarnished, mending, healing, sweet, warm, cold, lustful, loving, nurturing, bright, heavy, light, sour, misused, heartless

Friday 25th March 2011

The sun still shines after the darkest night, even after the darkest of grey clouds obstructs its view, its there in the midst of a storm shining bright, illuminating the path of life.

The sun still shines in the clear blue sky, on the brightest of days, when my mood is contrary to the weather, the sun shines brightly whilst I remain inside.

I don’t want to smile, I want to lay here in this duvet, wrapped in my own melancholy for a while.

I don’t want to climb out of my duvet, to glance out of the window to see the sights, I wish it was night time, I can’t seem to hide from the light.

Away from the sun I prefer to hide, today I feel like I’m hollow inside.

The sky outside of my window is bright, I feel like a stranger to the light, so I squint my eyes.

I can’t stop it from happening, revelations are bright, time to get out of this duvet and open my eyes to the light.

The sun still shines.

Sunday 16th January 2023, 10:47am

Bismillah
What I say when I start my ayah
Showing praise to my creator
I’m grateful, words inspire
All praise is due to Allah
I show gratitude in my ayah
I don’t ask Allah is provider
Protector, teacher and guider
Bismillah ar-raheim ar-Rahman

Islam reflects what’s in nature
Which helps me understand creator
All praise is due to Allah
Bismillah ar-raheim ar-Rahman
The way I open my ayah
I’m grateful for my creator
Seek guidance in holy Quran
It flows so I fill up my cup.

Shortlands to Victoria station (Friday 1st March 2024, 11:12)

At the intersection of want and need
My career feels like stand still,
A process testing my patience and will
No matter how fast I run
I’m standing still…
Career on treadmill.

Interval sprints, start and stopping
Accelerating and slowing
Hanging on to what feels like an empty promise
I made to myself
I’ve just been grafting catching Ls
Setbacks and Lessons
As time goes by and I lose track of myself
I feel like I’ve failed.

Yo fam, What’s good, what’s popping?
When’s the new ting dropping?
I don’t when cah I ain’t been creating
Recording or writing
I’ve been swept away tryna get promoted
Inspiration ain’t been arriving…
As regular as I’ve wanted
Can’t say I ain’t had time,
I just ain’t been focused on creating.
I ain’t been disciplined
I haven’t been intentional with what I’ve done
Too much experimental creating whilst streaming
I went offline to align my feelings
Now I’m on this train
Journaling what’s in my brain
In the aftermath of feeling like
I’ve wasted a thousand days

(Amazing how much life can change in a year)

Monday 17th October 2022, 13:41

Life revolves around cycles.

Nature is one big cycle and being part of it, it would be unnatural to assume I am above the divine process of life’s cycle.

Just as water evaporates, condensates and precipitates, so do we go through a cycle.

Does it depend on what or who you are that determines the type of cycle, it’s length and scale of intensity but I suspect that it’s relative to the part you play in the production of nature itself.

I know this seems abstract but looking out onto the life outside of my own, especially as the autumn leaves begin to start their descent to the soil.

I can’t help but to reflect and appreciate the cycles we go through. It makes me appreciate every little moment because each stage, each season, serves a divine purpose.

The leaves that descend from the branches to the soil get a chance to provide sustenance to it. The same nutrients feed the roots of the tree and make it stronger in time for it to go full cycle and blossom on the branches once again.

Embrace your cycle.

For me I guess I go through cycles of creative outlets. Sometimes it’s the beats, sometimes it’s the words on the beats, sometimes it’s the self reflective podcasts and then I go back to the source which is the poetry.

That’s my cycle at the moment.

I feel this need to write as we approach the season of hibernation. Reflect on the seasons previous, scribe the notebook poetry to my journal app and then get that into a manuscript and possibly record. That’s what it’s about that’s my autumn to winter motive. Compile and schedule so I got a drop per month, keep me on my toes.

It’s finally here after 10yrs of catching dust in my archives. The notebooks can breathe again. No more feelings of what if or I wish I would’ve dropped. I can release the works I’m most proud of and get to crafting some more masterpieces. Happiness is an understatement.

The weirdest thing about all of this is that I felt burnt out and in somewhat of a rut in the lead up to deciding that I was going to drop this collection of works. I somehow found myself in front of Logic on a day off from work and just made a few tweaks. The defining factor was placing a template setting to the master channel and it brought the track alive. At that point I was like I gotta make some artwork and pretty much uploaded it to DistroKid. For the remainder of the week I felt different, I felt more alive, I felt like my life had purpose again. I know it sounds dramatic but when you assume and pursue your virtue, life feels much more fulfilling and pure.

Rhythm & Prose features demos of tracks that I’ve teased across my blogs in the past but never had the courage or vision to release until now. In the coming post I’ll break down each song with some context.

Listen to Rhythm & Prose: 1012BC here

October 20 2010, 7:09 AM

Here’s a preview of a project I’m working on called The Island. 

It’s an ode which is:

A lyric poem in the form of an address to a particular subject, often elevated in style or manner and written in varied or irregular meter.

Oxford Dictionary of English

I’m really trying to push boundaries in regards to my writing style. I believe that there’s so much more to the use of language over music than just ‘spitting’ sixteen ‘bars’. I set out to paint very descriptive pictures and bring back a form of personal indulgement not seen in popular music since the times of old.

Why should I confine myself to a box like the others, why can’t I become an alternative multifaceted popstar respected for my craft rather than all the smoke and mirrors that surround it?

This is art, this is pure emotion and literary prowess. This is me challenging myself as well as sharpening my skills, whilst bringing back the ways of old in the process.

This is me taking advantage of all the tools at my disposal to convey my art in every impossible dimension, so the audience feel all perspectives in order to stimulate their senses.

Imagine if William Shakespeare lived in the 21st century, what would he do?

Peace and Love

Khalid Omari

A few nights ago I got round to recording an underrated and significant piece of poetry I wrote in 2017 after a random encounter one Wednesday morning. It would be years until I understood the phenomena or even revisited the piece to structure or make sense of it. The app I wrote it on doesn’t’t provide an audit trail annoyingly so I couldn’t see when I started to make the edits. As you’ll come to learn about me depending on how long you’ve been following what I’ve been doing is that I love an audit trail because time and date carries as much significance as the pice itself. It’s how I reflect back and know exactly how and what I was feeling at a specific date and time.

I recorded the poetry into Logic Pro X to no backing track at all and managed to narrate it from my external monitor which display it much bigger, thankfully, than the days of old when I used to do it from my actual MacBook. The great thing about nowadays is that I can split the screen between LPX and Pages to really record and narrate at one time.

At the moment of posting I haven’t taken any photos of my live stream setup but over a course of time I’ll keep you updated with how it unfolds. The way my desk is organised it definitely does make it easier however I feel like the arrival of MacOS Monterrey will likely make it easier to control the stream as for something like OBS can be pushed to my iPad Air but then again why don’t I just use Sidecar?

Maybe I need to test it out from a response perspective to be able to check comments and viewers whilst streaming. Also I can’t benefit from MacOS updates straight away as I’ve got to wait until the manufacturers of my equipment release firmware updates that are compatible first and even then I’ve still got to be wary. This was the case after upgrading to Big Sur. My MacBook Pro still crashes randomly when loading particular Maschine files which is sometimes a major nightmare when trying to work. What you will found in this stream is that it kinda happens with LPX when loading up You Remind Me file as the Splendid riddim is access via the Akai MPC Live 2 being in controller mode with the file stored on its SSD drive that I recently installed.

I know some of the above may sound like gobberdy goop to the unfamiliar eye but its all relative to the process hence why its been documented in blog form. Anyway… without further adieu here’s You Remind Me from a collection of pieces entitled Internal Affairs that may feature on Rhythm & Prose: 1012BC. The video of the stream is also available to watch below too via the embed.

Stay up to date with future broadcasts by following me on Twitch and YouTube.

25th March 2017, 1015

You remind me of someone I once knew.

I think it’s the way your sunglasses are resting at top of your head as if they are some kind of tiara or hair band, holding your long dark hair with blond streaks running through it from covering your deep brown eyes that tell an eternity of stories.

You speak with the same linguistic flow and cadence as the person I once knew, poetic and soothing as the sound of the majestic Iguazú falls.

You remind me of her.

Similar genetic and cultural DNA, chilled and laid back sensibility, an air of having no care in the world, an island retreat and paradise.

Unlike Odysseus’ saga on Ogygia with the nymph Calypso, our stillness in time was but a moment. A grain of sand that seemed to take forever to fall through the portal from the top of the hourglass to the pile of grains at the bottom.

You remind me of someone who I dedicated verse after verse to.

Manuscripts manifested from a collection of thoughts.

Up late at night riding spiralling free writing trains of thought in a feeble attempt to descramble my brain. I ride this bus in the hope that writing it all down allows me to remove the remnants of you.

You remind me of the love I once chased as if I were the soda trying to mix with a concentrated and refined taste that burns the heart seconds after the initial sip had passed through my lips, meandering through the grooves of my tongue, flowing down the dark unchartered throatal abyss to leave a bitter taste in my mouth if left for too long between sips.

Madting.

29/09/2010

Failure is not something not to be feared nor considered, just go for whatever it is you want and achieve your goal, live your dream.

Failure is always a certainty because its the opposite of success, it’s a 50% certainty of the outcome with anything you do.

The more time, effort, energy and enthusiasm you put into something, the more chance you have of success because luck is not something that happens, you create it by doing.

In order for luck to come your way, you need to put the right energy into the universe so it can flow back to you.

Forget failure because it lies next to success in the future, put your trust into whatever it is you’re doing and consider what you do in the present as the most important.

The present is the only place you can see, touch, hear, smell and feel.

Work on a second to second basis, all else, past and future is void.

Seek your prize, put yourself into the moment and stay in your present continuously, to build.

Each second becomes a brick, lay one brick per second of your existence, each brick you lay represents a step of progression.

Build the highest, and most robust, from a very strong and stable foundation, which will evolve into a town, a city, a whole universe of endless possibility…

The present is where destiny lies so grab it, embrace it whilst u can.

It goes nowhere but it also requires you to stand up and say:

Forget failure, I’m going for mine. This moment is forever, there is neither past nor future, just right now.

Think about it this way; a creator transcends time, a creator lives in one moment because that one moment transcends all time frames because a creator is eternal, boundless.

It makes no sense to procrastinate so become boundless, infinite, and timeless as the creator, live in the moment.

A creator is successful because they live outside of the hourglass, and dictate life in the confines of the hourglass from the outside.

Live in your moment, that’s all that matters, forget failure just do, be present because it’s one of the only places you can trust yourself to make a difference.

Excerpt From: Khalid Omari. “Catharsis: Allegorically Speaking”.

Aloof to most trivial non-sense
I guess I blame wanting inner peace rather than be up a few cents.

A lot of the time I feel like I’m above all the non-sense
But find myself getting triggered for the sake of making sense.

I wish I could go in and not care about the non-sense
But they’ve brought my silence by offering a few more cents.

Why don’t you quit, won’t that make more sense?
I’ve got bills to pay so I shall continue to trade balance at my peace expense.

I can’t put a lid on feelings that I should know better
Than be silenced so I can keep my head above water in order to cash pay cheques.

Excerpt From: Khalid Omari. “Cogitation pt.2”.