Before the first story

I have lived a few lives already. Some ran one after another. Some ran at the same time.

There was the student at Columbia, studying anthropology with a focus on ethnomusicology and cybernetics, working on the repatriation of music archives: returning recorded sound to the communities it came from. There is the studio, Big Foote Music + Sound, where I have made music for campaigns since 2013. There was the road, five years drumming for Sir Chloe across the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe. And there is the life I am building now, Intelligence Meridian, where I help people and businesses become legible to the audiences, collaborators and tools they depend on.

A résumé lists those lives. It cannot show what each one taught me, or why they belong to the same person. That is what this journal is for.

Once a week I will write one story from one of those lives. A room, a person, a mistake, a night on tour, a session that went wrong and then right. There is no promised order. Some weeks will jump a decade.

If one of these stories reminds you of something in your own work, write to me.

Palmer