"Inkwell-being" with Jesse Ramos (2018 collaborations overview 1/5)


Hey AllOne Family,
     As we continue into early 2019 I thought it might be another fun retrospective weekly series to highlight some of the music I shared a role in throughout 2018. This year and 2015 were the only two years since 2010 that I didn't release some sort of full EP or LP project since I started sharing music publicly in 2010. However, Two-thousand and Collaborateen this was appropriately a relatively fecund year for quality collaborations and as a bonus, nearly all of them were unprecedented collaborations with artist friends as well!
     Here is the start of an overview of a few of the songs that made it to the public ear (some that I wrote and recorded are still in behind-the-curtain stages). I felt it may be interesting to know the origins of relationship that spawned them and perhaps to know a brief comment on my intent and experience writing them.
     I genuinely enjoy writing guest verses and answering the call to contribute to other's projects. It is a real honor for my skills and work ethic to be trusted to improve and compliment something as vulnerable and dear as another person's artistic vision. As suggested from the onset of my public music career with the debut album “Coal Aberrations” collaborating has always been a favorite creative experience of mine. It is rewarding for being rife with artistic challenges and therefore personal growth.
     I have a handful of collaborations projected for 2019 and I'm antsy for more creative endeavors! Please email me at AllOneVoice@gmail.com to discuss working on a project together if you're interested in working toward some collaborative projects!
Birds of a feather-pen and all that,
-Bruce “AllOne” Pandolfo

Inkwell-Being” Jesse The Tree (prod. By Mkour)

     Jesse is a gifted and laid back Rhode Island rapper friend that I met through Drent on tour some years ago. This collaboration was in talks for a while and I had my verse written for several months and if not for the typically harrowing misfortunes of life intervening in what may have been a 2017 release otherwise (this song was unveiled in March 2018). This was the first song released that I recorded with home-recording set up in my room, which has been an extraordinary advantage for experimenting and I recommend it thoroughly.

     Jesse came to me with the ideal level of preparation and vision, with this beautiful MKOUR instrumental, a chorus and a demo of his verse. He showed me where he wanted me to rap but his instructions stopped there.  Jesse is more of a visual and stream-of-consciousness writer and was characteristically open-ended about what he expected from me. This left me the fun task of interpreting his lyrics and identifying the thesis of the song, which I took to be a nod to our entangled relationship with the work we create and the thin line between the validity of our reality and the reality of the art we create. I absolutely love this concept and had recently read Alan Moore's genius comic series, “Promethea” where he explores this philosophy in vivid detail.

     I took the opportunity to double down on the referential, visual and stream of consciousness style of writing and use the simplicity of the beat as a challenge to change cadences often (from iambic pentameter to trap flows to double time to more laid back approaches). I thought of this writing as intentionally “tighter” phrases, making each word count and relate to the next one very precisely phonetically. My thesis statement so to speak was the desire to explore my love of creation that is so obsessive or optimistic to the point of seeing it as a redeeming belief system of sorts. My hope was to expound on the idea that through sharing our art and processing the world through our creative ideas we achieve immortality or at the very least ideally attaining an acknowledged and connected impact with others beyond our living life. 
   Jesse paid me the highest compliment imaginable from an artist whose work I write cameos for when telling me he loved my verse so much that he had to go back and write his so as to avoid a lopsided quality issue. Cheers to Jesse, whose work on this song is expressive, technical and incredible as to be expected. Be sure to check out “Inkwell-Being” and the rest of his work on his Soundcloud page. (www.soundcloud.com/jessethetree)



Inkwell-being (AllOne verse)

Think therefore iambic pentameter
Bringing forth my grand Bic pen's tacit worth
Ink enforcing quickened imagined words
Inklings forge expanded parameters

Spinning yarns to prevent looming death
(Scheherazade)
living art like clay molded famed soldiers
(the Terra Cotta)

our existence is a piteous pithy blip
in a jiff we sit at the winking lid
blinking at the brink of the abyss,
abysmal, shrinking to think of it,
timid, frantic tend to grasp a pen and pad
as a parchment script and wizard staff
and autograph, glyphs, and craft
enchant and chant in chance to scratch
an Escher map, of Penrose steps to lap,
in an attempt to stretch elapsing seconds
before I tap, collapse and they etch that dash
to represent my end in an epitaph,
in crypts equipped with an epic task to scripting
prose longing to prolong my sojourn
sold that my sole hope's to sew my
soul through a medium
previous to my soma's meeting its “so long”
to supposedly only be spoken through mediums.
No creationist but creation is our greatest gift,
Grecian myth to theater scripts
Dave Chapelle to HG Wells
relaying help and save ourselves,
They say we're spellbound
by what we spell out and it's magic
We exist in the legacies we crafted
remembered in legends we inhabit
My inkwell's expressive formaldehyde
to ink well-preserved forms I'll decide
Food for thought and you are what you eat
Art mimics life visa versa repeat

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