Welcome to the OFFICIAL
SMIRKY WATERS Experiment!
(The Ultimate Remote Controlled Band)
"I started The SMIRKY WATERS Band as an incubator.
A Blues, Soul-Jazz-Fusion, Prog Rock, Funk & Feelgood Social Club so to speak.
To attract musicians with no egos, lots of enthusiasm and a pioneering spirit.
Pioneering, in a sense that every musician works REMOTELY and sends me their track.
I first create a percussion track and send it to a musician, like a Bass player.
I mix it together and then we decide who the next player should be.
A guitarist, then a singer, then maybe a harmonica, a horn?
Each piece 'evolves' and takes on it's own life.
I believe a good song is poetry.
It's not about the words - it's the order you put them in!
Also, original songs are shaped by the order you put the musicians in.
I look for a variety of talents and different combinations
for each piece created. Then we improvise and innovate
and as Composers we all create some history together.
I love writing, drumming, improvising, collaborating, mixing and producing.
Music and videos, it's all my ... occupassion! ™©"
- Paul L Clark
Interested in collaborating on upcoming projects?
Email me
For those who can take a big drink of this...
I want to hear from you!
The SMIRKY WATERS approach becomes a launch pad for improvisation, turning each musical collaborator into a composer.
When a musician is able to enter into that unknown (and not all can), all of their practice takes over and the structure that held it together disappears into listening and feeling.
In that listening and feeling there is nothing but Being, and in that Being the musician melds into one consciousness to create great music.
This is the concept of emergence*.
The SMIRKY WATERS Band is, one could say, tuned into a frequency - or a possibility - in the Quantum or Unified Field**.
"No matter what type of artist you speak to, whether it’s a musician, a writer, a painter, or even an athlete, it is this state of Being that they would all agree they are trying to achieve - that moment when everything fades away and their art simply flows through them.
In the example of improvisation, in the connected field when say five musician’s minds become one, they are not stressing about hitting the right note or what they will be doing after playing.
In this state, no past, no future, and no personality exist. The music is providing instant feedback and that feedback is what opens doors to trust the next moment."
- Dr Joe Dispenza (neuroscientist)
This is what playing with the SMIRKY WATERS Band demonstrates.
The moments of coherence, where we tune our minds to be an instrument through which we download possibilities for any given composition.
When we enter into a space of open focus and charge it with emotion, we are playing our part of a song that's just waiting to be played.
And when we surrender into a state of awareness, we are moving into the improvisational unknown. This is the place from where all creation comes from - when we step outside of our familiar state of mind and trust in the unknown.
The loss of humanity in current music.
No evidence of human life!
I have this talk with every person that I invite to collaborate on with every SMIRKY WATERS BAND composition.
I ask them to pulleeze do not 'clean up' their tracks before sending them to me.
I need to hear the natural finger slides, the intake breaths and all of the other human nuances that go into their creations.
It's an opportunity for the listener to consciously and/or unconsciously know that a human produced such marvelous, wonder-us compositions.
For me it goes much deeper than simply honouring the efforts of a musician.
It's about the healing effects of sounds and frequencies combined with their connection to Being...and in turn, other human beings.
Wow, listen to me go. But hey, I also consider music my church.
From Brian Eno: "Honor your mistakes as a hidden intention." (the advice is similar to what Miles Davis gave to Herbie Hancock, "There are no mistakes, just chances to improvise.")
Brian says the net effect of correcting every perceived mistake is to, "homogenize the whole song till every bar sounds the same...until there's no evidence of human life at all in there."
*Emergence:
In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own.
These properties or behaviors emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole. ... In philosophy, theories that emphasize emergent properties have been called emergentism.
In describing collective behaviors, emergence refers to how collective properties arise from the properties of parts, how behavior at a larger scale arises from the detailed structure, behavior and relationships at a finer scale.
**Unified Field:
Hagelin argued that consciousness is a fundamental property of the natural world, and that TM practitioners can experience a state of consciousness "in which the observer, the process of observation, and the observed are unified". This, he argued, is the experience of the unified field of physics.
The SMIRKY WATERS Name
A few years back I was asked to sit in on some studio session work.
To warm up the room I took everyone on a little subliminal expedition from the Blues, jumped
into a little Jazz and frolicked into a sprinkling of Funk and Feelgood non-stop.
It was quite magical and most important to me, a lot of FUN!
Everyone said they enjoyed being taken into some pretty cool murky musical waters,
genres they always thought they didn't like. It was unanimous.
For a laugh I told them they could call me Murky Waters. Another musician noticed the smirk
on my face. Always looking to put a twinkle in someone's eye I added
that for the night they should now call me Smirky Waters...but with an 'i'.
A few weeks later when another studio called me to sit in on a session,
they insisted on talking to "Smirky Waters". The word was out.
Now THAT made ME laugh!
The Smirky Waters Experience
That day, a whole new set of musicians jokingly asked if they could play as The SMIRKY WATERS Band.
That night, a couple of them left and a few new ones joined us. Now they asked if we were still The SMIRKY WATERS Band.
It gave me the idea that no matter who I was playing with on any particular song, we would be called
ya, you got it, The Smirky Waters Band!
A really cool Musical Social Club.
Loud meant good!
As a young musician, LOUD meant GOOD. Over 40 years this blatently proved not to be the case.
I have learned that you have to actually play music to be taken seriously as a musician.
And good music creates a mood that invokes emotion. Sometimes peppy, sometimes mellow, thoughtful, playful.
That's how I look at genres - as MOODS.
In the studio I ask, what MOOD are we in and we play with that.
When a good musician or band harnesses the frequency of a particular mood you can feel it.
It's healing. And as we all know, moods change.
So sometimes we're blue, sometimes we're jazz, sometimes we're funky. Sometimes whacky, sometimes serious.
We respect and appreciate them all... you know, depending on the mood.
Oh, the Recording!
To tell a good story is poetry.
But to present it appropriately is the key. That's in the recording.
With over 35 years of award-winning experience in TV, Commercials, Film & Video,
I have seen the positive energy and frequency of sound and music.
One cool thing I have come across is Binaural Recording.
What is Binaural Recording?
In simplified terms:
Binaural Recording is a method of recording a sound
that uses two mircophones, arranged with the intent to create
a 3-D stereo sound sensation for the listener of actually
being in the room with the performers or instruments.
(or outside, depending on what's being recorded)
It isn't just stereo sound being pushed at you from two sides.
It duplicates the way sound is received by the human ears.
It has the effect of putting sound in the very centre of your head.
And our friend Michael Hoepfner is an expert at this.
Listen to our Faery Dance video (below) WITH HEADPHONES
and you will understand how powerful 'binaural' is.
To avoid being a spoiler, all I'll say is that the majority of listeners
have reported taking their headphones off mid-song to look outside.
Ya, it's that real!
