Audio / Music

During the 2010s and up to just a bit before the pandemic hit, an interesting opportunity came up for me. The friend Joe that I had mentioned, who's related to Pan Productions, which I now call Pan's Chaos, linked me to a Facebook page for a company called BASSBOSS. I was looking through their website, and outside of getting kind of a feeling that there was something different about the technology itself and the quality of the equipment they were putting up on offer, what really attracted me to them was a philosophy that I'd never seen anywhere else in the audio industry, either hi-fi or pro audio.

I don't remember the exact details, but I remember at some point I somewhat casually mentioned to my dad how awesome these speakers were seeming to be. He was aware of the fact that I had been running sound production for The Firehouse Gallery and performance space for many years, and that I had a community of people available to me. And so, because of an example he had seen from another peer of his, where their family had helped thier son start a new business, he decided that it might make sense to throw me what you might call an early chunk of inheritance.

I didn't know exactly what this would look like initially, but since I was then in a position to contact the company as an actual potential customer, I began a relationship with them regarding getting a fully built-out system from them. It just so happened that this was exactly at a point where the designer, David Lee from BASSBOSS, was putting together a new subwoofer with the capacity to go as low as their flagship double 18 sub could go with a single 18. Since he understood how much it is that I have always loved low bass, because as I explained to him, I had been years in the past a big fan of creating my own subwoofers, he suggested that I wait for him to finish development on this new one. It was called the 'ZV18'.

Along with this, as a part of who I am and how I like to have something about what it is I'm trying to represent also connected to something like a company's products, and because I had seen that they offered custom faceplates on their ‘DiaMon' tops, which were squares turned sideways. I inquired about putting together my own faceplate. That's when I developed what is in effect the very first completely original version of a Chaos symbol that I came up with. The constraints, of course, were that it had to work with a sound system and be able to allow the sound from the drivers to pass through it. There was very little actual development time regarding the tops, as David Lee felt that what I had come up with was actually entirely adequate as far as he could tell, and he would be able to tune the system to work with that without any issue.

So over a couple of months' time, that was all put together along with the development of another faceplate for all of the subs as well. This began what I ended up calling the very first incarnation of 'The Chaos System', both the symbol/logo and the name, as a concept and system going forward. You've already seen a number of different incarnations of what that Chaos System logo turned into in the design section of this site, and have seen it reflected throughout all of the videos as well.

The reality is that on my own, I have a lot of understanding of many different skills, not so much a lot of understanding of business management. I have been through a couple of years of business school through community college in Phoenix, but this is not the kind of thing that would fully prepare me for real-world management. Along with that, partnering with Joe, while a great thing as a friend, didn't entirely work out in a business sense. Humans are a messy business, and him eventually including a third party, i.e. somebody else in the community who eventually became his girlfriend, really didn't Pan out well for how it could have ended up as a business. Some attempts were made.

I also don't want to mention, as a realistic thing I had to think about, that I've not always had the fondest conceptual relationship with the idea of money. My conceptions of it through time have matured since this time, but let's just say I very often found everything about how money and the monetary system existed, as far as I had understood it to, to be almost without any exception, something very oppressive and often infuriating when it comes to doing anything of actual benefit for all of the people around me, outside of compelling them to sell their labor for questionable return in jobs they didn't necessarily like, including my own experience working for at least quite a few companies throughout my life, although not all of them.

This led me to want to approach the use of this system in an entirely different way than I realized anybody else would be coming from, which was that I wanted it to be community first and a way to benefit as many people as possible. So I wrote up an entire post (in the form of a Note) on Facebook describing what it was that I had intended for this system to be used for. It was originally something I had written to my dad to fully illustrate my motivations for how I would end up using this sound system.

~

What follows is an unedited copy of the text from that note, plus some necessary context first for how I thought at the time:

This should give you an idea of what I'm describing regarding the kind of relationship I had to the ideas of money, and how I wanted to approach what I was doing with how I wanted to use all of this equipment. What I would say at this point is that my relationship with concepts like capitalism have radically shifted, not in the sense that I excuse it for all of the negative expressions that it is capable of and responsible for, but that I attribute those negatives more towards misunderstandings, mismanagement, and the fact that I've learned a huge amount more about monetary theory and everything else related in my journey through deep diving into things like Bitcoin, which led to Ludwig von Mises, and the Austrian School of Economics.

While it's easy to look at the following content as something that one might tend to want to easily associate with leftist thinking, this really doesn't describe how it is that I operate as a thinker. I'm simply searching for something that creates the most opportunity for the most people. And because of the development of my understanding of systems theory and really understanding the importance of the difference between bottom-up and top-down systems of governance, at the point in my life that I was at, this is the kind of approach I took towards explaining what it was I was trying to get across to everybody in an arts community (and obviously initially to my dad), what I wanted to do with all of this extremely high-quality and powerful equipment that would otherwise never be something anyone in this class level would ever have access to.

When it comes to my conceptions of capitalism now, it has matured even further from there, and I feel even less of an alignment to what the left is and has become. I'm not saying this in order to be political. I'm neither left nor right, so in that sense, that's irrelevant. This is meant to give context for where I was in my life and how things developed and changed, and to point out that I've never found alignment politically in a way that I've ended up attaching myself and my identity to any political affiliation. I just wanted to create and use and enable a system that could benefit as many as possible in the most interesting way that I could. You will see in the following pages on this site many more things that will align with this idea and develop themselves out in more ways, showing more about how my relationship with ideas like capitalism and money have shifted, and find much deeper understandings related to how I think, consider, and process almost everything through a systems lens.

What you'll actually find here, I think, is something far more rich and complex than would normally be attributed to someone who has a narrow ideological bent to them. And some of the ideas expressed in this document, you'll also find reflected in the final main section of this page, a more fully developed and illustrating what it was I was trying to get across in a way that I think is far more useful and cohesive ultimately than my understanding was able to put forward in how I described it here. At least a part of it. I ultimately figured out a way to fully express what it really was that I wanted to do with this idea through a document you're going to encounter on the AI page, which will be the second PDF after the same one you're seeing below this original attempt to publicly express my ideas about these things. What I did not really realize at the time was, although many of the things that I had learned while living in an arts community and as a part of a collective living experience, were in fact not the kind of ideas that most people fully could understand and do anything with, or are actually antithetical to a lot of the principles that we now see being expressed on certain sides in the political sphere, and simply unexplored on the other side.

This is all related to a lifelong study of human behavior and social systems, along with systems in general involving physics, technology, and every other avenue you could think to connect them through. As you continue through this site, this idea will continue to build itself and make itself more present as to how it matured, developed, and leads to my current understanding of everything related to these kinds of ideas. This is a running theme in my life as I continually develop, extrapolate, refine, and now with the use of AI, attempt to share and express in a fully articulated way through a medium that can be published and shared. It'll make more and more sense as you continue on your journey through this site.

When it came to my attempts to try to monetize the use of The Chaos System, there was some income for sure, and we were able to charge a considerable amount, especially considering how powerful this sound system actually is and how capable these subs are of producing unreasonably good amounts of extremely low bass in a way that I have simply never seen reflected in any other product I've experienced in pro audio. But ultimately, the business idea itself dissolved because of misaligned incentives and ideas about what this was all going to be used for. However, as mentioned in the note that I had published on Facebook, I had also been establishing a deeper relationship and connection to BASSBOSS itself.

Because of the back and forth that I had with the designer David Lee, and the CEO, Lian Amber, at BASSBOSS, the fact that I had designed the cover plates for all of the speakers, and the communication I had with the designer, I think between the two of them they realized that it might not be the worst idea to bring me on as someone who could help out with what was definitely a more or less still kind of fledgling company trying to establish itself in the pro audio world. So although what my dad initially tried to enable for me to accomplish was, you know, creating some kind of a business, what it in fact did instead was it landed me a long term 'job' that I maintained for about 10 years.

~

The PDF you see next is me putting together a spec sheet for The Chaos System. At this point, I was not yet working for BASSBOSS, but I had pulled enough extra detail out of David Lee that I felt like I could fully extrapolate even more than the specs that they had on their website. I had also already had a number of experiences using the sound system, which gave me a real-world lived experience that allowed me to fully express what is described. So this is my explanation and narrative description of what it was that I thought really described the value that this sound system had and has. This is a sound system I still own and have full access to. Although how that relates to any use from someone coming here for any interest in some kind of business relationship or hiring really depends on the nature of the relationship. What it does, though, do outside of having this as a resource, is illustrate even more about how I approach what it is that I'm interested in representing and the way I think of things through a systems lens.

What I do have to say before you read these specs is this: It is quite literally impossible to fully encapsulate in words what it's like to experience a system like this. It's very easy to look through something like this, see the images, and just think it looks like a stylized version of something you would see at a bigger venue or a concert, and write it off as something you may have already experienced. I'm not so sure that that's true. Through every concert experience that I've been through all the way up to stadium levels, this is something very different. What David Lee was able to achieve with his design is frankly phenomenal and one of the most overwhelmingly amazing and wonderful experiences you can experience in your life. Of course, assuming that you like what really deep, really heavy, and really clean bass, along with extremely high-fidelity sound through the rest of the frequency band, are as a possibility. There really is nothing like it that I've found before or since.

Click to
Open PDF

One of the things I brought with me to BASSBOSS and developed further, after I'd been there for a bit and understood the company much more, was the same understanding of human social systems and ideas of community. One of the things that I had found in developing my relationship with BASSBOSS as a company was the way that they treated their customers was beyond top-notch, along with the fact that they labeled their customers as family, which to me says a lot about how they were looking to approach the notion of what a customer is in relation to their business.

One of the most important strategies that ended up developing as we were moving forward was the translation of a lot of understanding that David Lee had of these different systems (subs and tops) into something that the public, customers, family, i.e. community, were going to be able to understand. I'd gone through a number of discussions with the CEO, Lian about this, and ended up landing on YouTube as being the best vehicle for what could be accomplished. As you've already seen on the video page, I ended up developing a pretty effective strategy for using Keynote as a motion graphics engine for creating graphic overlays on videos, which had David Lee presenting information about the different systems, and my informational translation of his presentation into something visually understandable.

However, and something important to the context I’m establishing throughout this website that led to the YouTube channel and videos you’ve already experienced, was a document that I developed and submitted to the entire team at BASSBOSS describing what I thought it was that they might consider in relation to the strategy they were going to use regarding YouTube and many other things in order to create a stronger connection with their customers.

The PDF that you see here is this understanding that I had at the time,. You may notice it has some relationship to the previous text from the Facebook note that I had published, except for now developed and translated into a completely different context and related to what it looks like when you're doing it inside of an actual company. I think this should do the job that it needs to do to illustrate my understanding of what these ideas meant and my ability to translate those concepts into a completely different domain and construction.

Click to
Open PDF

As I have mentioned previously, I believe that I was responsible for helping them get to a place where they were able to add all of their products to a number of the largest product websites available on the internet, i.e., Guitar Center, Musician's Friend, Sweetwater, through my understanding and skills with Keynote presentations and the skills I've been developing there while working at BASSBOSS. The strategy I proposed being implemented in the way that was understood best for the company, is the place where things began to make the most sense on the path we took to build our connection with all of our customers in a different way. You should be able to see the connection between this document and the Facebook post that I originally wrote to my dad. And as will follow, this way of thinking is going to continue developing itself into the next PDF and more content throughout the rest of the site.

As far as I'm concerned, my so-called 'job' with BASSBOSS is something that I consider a unicorn job. It, bar none, outside of maybe only one other position I had when I was very young, was the best job I've ever had in my life. And if it weren't for extremely aggressive legal action taken against the person I was living with by her ex-husband during my employment, I would likely still be working for them. There will be more context for what exactly happened there in a different place on your journey through this website.

~

I don't consider my experience with this sound system to be something that is inconsequential in any way. It has affected my life in many important ways, opened up a number of opportunities, and given me the incentive and confidence to continue to explore many of the things that I have throughout the rest of my life.

It's another way to capture a collection of memories and to reflect on how it is that I've been able to continue to develop my understanding of how systems work and how I want to work with systems, along with the expression of even more advanced ideas that you will find as you progress through the rest of this website and what it has to offer.

~

The following gallery contains photos of The Chaos System itself, and does not include photos that were taken at any shows that it was a part of, except for if the system was in complete isolation.

You will have already experienced two other galleries, which will have all kinds of show photos in them, showing the system in use with people at events and all that jazz. This one is to show more of what these speakers look like, including some of the initial photos that were shot with me and my friend Phil in the driveway of the house I was living in at the time.

As so many of these different photos are simply variations, angles, different sides, etc., I don't think it really makes sense to add captions for them. If you want to identify who I am, and haven't been able to figure that out through any of the other images on the site yet. Look for the guy wearing the Chaos symbol on his shirt. It's the same symbol that is on the speakers 😉.