Author: Zack Ramey

Reinterpreted as a COVID concept album

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Reflecting on Love is a Place as a concept album about my experience during the COVID-19 quarantine

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It took a while to master the album because it was my first time mastering anything and that learning curve is steep. The process took place during the lockdown. There’s a way that these tracks help me remember and reflect some of my experiences of COVID. I acknowledge I am fortunate enough not to have personally known the sort of tragedy that others have known.

  1. Creature Cry.  COVID hits.  Who is affected?  How do we care for each other? The reach and depth of our concern.  Human infrastructures (economies, technologies, institutions and their values) envelope the life systems on earth.  Will that envelope be loving?
  2. Excess of Blessings.  No toilet paper.  The odd first wave.  The feeling that It’s here.  
  3. Christmas this Year.  Makes me wonder: what is Christmas really about?  Toilet paper ran out because of breakdowns in supply chains.  We depend on a global system, but we know almost nothing about the people making that system function. What are we contributing to when everything comes from abroad? So many externalities…who can throw their hands in the air and forfeit responsibility?
  4. Pilgrim’s First Step.  Going to the store is dramatized.  Going outside becomes a major event.
  5. Space Between Mountains.  The difficulty of being cut off from those we love.
  6. How to Make Love Stay?  This, too, is about love.  Where do we live these days?  Where, how are you?
  7. It was Always in Me.  Finding the good again in the dynamic Ground of Being.
  8. Fools Wait for Perfect, and Who is not Sometimes the Fool.  Had we been holding something back?  Are we waiting for something?  What world do we want to land back into?
  9. Homestead Life.  It’s just you and me.
  10. I’m This, I’m That.  Forced into isolation, forced to learn.
  11. Apocatastasis, part 2 [“reconstitution of a primordial state”]  Go back to the source.  You must. Yes, through the dark.
  12. Philosophy.  With kids.  A reminiscence of an elementary class I subbed for in Washington.  Gives me hope to remember the natural way kids learn.
  13. Place.  There is nowhere outside this. Where can you go?  Surrender. This is it.
  14. Story 2.  What is our next story?  What is your next story?  What is on the other side of this?  Of all this?  And how would you proceed?
  15. Natural Law.  Some things are immutable.  What can be changed and what cannot? 

Dignity, a Shape

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Images contain thoughts. We need images to think. Some images have more vocal thoughts than others. While I drew this a question kept resurfacing: could dignity be contained in a shape, in form alone? There is something dignified about inner proportion and balance. Of course! Nature has dignity. Trees, vegetables, seashells, skeletons: they do not need words or explanation for their goodness. Their whole being is a summation of their action. The mere fact that they are alive, and continue living, is some indication that they are doing right.

Ink Drawing and a Note on Effortless Effort

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The titanic effort that we sometimes suspect is required for what we want–whether to calm our restless inner chatter, to attain peace, happiness, or motivation–is what prevents us from attaining it. Over the last couple of days, I have not been able to shake this image of a mother putting her infant to bed. An idea clings to the image: that the way she so carefully slides her arm out from beneath the infant’s back so as not to reawaken it embodies the way we might put forth effort and comport ourselves, the way we might adjust ourselves when we begin to lose hope, lose our sense of well-being, our sense of inner-outer balance, or our motivation. With a sense of trust. Without desperation. There is a thread of deep care running through the world, straight through us, but it is quiet and vanishes if grabbed at. Choosing to make my efforts simpler, like these stippled dots, little by little, is learning to trust the quieter instincts.

A student showed me this drawing looks like a heart surrounded by daggers.  Jen says it has a crane thing going on.

12 Ways of Looking at It

Posted on Posted in ambient music, drawing, guitar, improvised music, loop music, Nature, sketchbook drawingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments


I’m excited to have this design made available by demand for printing on clothing by a company called Design By Humans.

I’m calling the soundscape “Opticentric” in keeping with the theme.  It and the drawing were finished at about the same time.  Shout out to Alphonso Dunn, whose eye ink studies have been a great inspiration to me (I copied directly from his drawings for four out of the 12 in this series).  Check him out on YouTube.  He’s a great teacher!