Hello World! Aloha my ‘ohana!

Aloha my ‘ohana!

I have decided to create a bit of a musical art gallery and publicize the output from my creative endeavors into the vast uncharted waters of the Internet. So now you all get to watch me in a bubble and observe my growth, or lack thereof, over time in my life as a songwriter, musician, singer and recording engineer.

As I talk about on my “Kilika” MySpace site, my underlying theme here is on “aloha” and “mana” in the Hawaiian understanding, especially as described by Queen Lili’uokalani. If you are not familiar with these concepts, you can read more about them here: Aloha and Mana. Also, the book “The Betrayal of Liliuokalani: Last Queen of Hawaii 1838-1917” by Helena G. Allen, available on Amazon.com contains a great wealth of background information. In addition, I am taking to the airwaves, well umm, the byte waves, in the spirit of kanikapila – “Everyone can and should sing and make music!” The Hawaiian version of Folk Music….people’s music.

And of course aloha and mana resonate perfectly with my Christian faith in Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior. My faith in Christ has influenced every aspect of my life, including my music. I dedicate this site and what ever I produce on it to His glory.

I must be sure to give credit to fellow musician Jonathan Coulton for providing me the inspiration to take this step. I too, like Jon, have worked in the software and high tech industries for a number of years; I am not a certified geek-head software engineer, but rather a manufacturing and quality assurance engineer. Furthermore, I am not so bold as to quit my day job. I love my day job. This project is definitely a weekend and evenings thing!

In my project, I have more modest goals. Of course, as you might be able to guess, my main goal is to write, record, produce and publish my own music. But, I will tell you right now that I am not promising that I will attempt to record a new musical piece every week of the year like Jon Coulton. My goal will be more modest and I will only say that as the inspiration strikes me and as I find the discipline to get things recorded I will post them here. It might work out to be once a week if in this process I get so jazzed that I can’t but help put out at that rate, or it might be once a month or something else. Only time will tell.

Anyway, my objectives for this undertaking are:

1) To push my creative capabilities by writing and recording to a self-imposed (but somewhat loose) deadline.

2) To test the viability of the Internet and Creative Commons licensing concept as vehicle capable of supporting an artist financially. (Even though I have a great day job, I realize the benefit of having a supplemental income stream and a possible second career after retirement!)

To advance my objective number 2, I plan to actively support the use of my songs in student/amateur films, podcasting, and/or in remixes. Since all of my music is released under an Attribution-NonCommercial Creative Commons license this means you can download my music to your Apple iPod, Sony MP3 player or Dell laptop and perform any kind of non-commercial re-use as long as you:

a) Credit me and link to this site, and

b) Do NOT use it to make money (this does not apply to songs with material that I do not own, such as cover songs). There is no need to ask permission, you are free to go make something. If you want to know more about Creative Commons, please visit the Creative Commons site.

So…..having said ALL of THAT, it is time for me to get to it. Check back often for updates. I won’t promise what I come up with will all be brilliant or complete, I will post what I have, it might only be a clip of me pushing my lawnmower, but I’ll let the world decide.

Aloha,

Chris

(Kilika)

The Hello World! Aloha my ‘ohana! by chartzog, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.