Finally! New music! This collection of 6 simple songs has been incubating since the summer. It is primarily solo electric guitar and most of the tracks are chamber like. There are two tracks that my good friends Astra and Jason contributed to without really knowing. I won’t ruin the surprise but there are two vocal only tracks and, well, they fall well within the parameters of my style – if I have one.
So head on over here and DOWNLOAD CHASING SATURDAY! Pass it on! And thanks for listening.
In my studio closet there is a rack of gear that I have not powered up since I moved to Texas. This tells me something. It tells me that it’s time for it to go. Some of the stuff doesn’t work any more. Some of it is experimental and home brewed. There are a couple of cassette decks that I will need one more time to transfer the last of my tape media to digital. Most of the equipment is junk that just has to go because it has outlived its usefulness. In a world of flash recorders and endless hard disk space, who needs DAT (more so one that doesn’t work)? No one in a home studio, that’s for sure. So I will be purging the closet. This is fairly momentous.
There’s a lot of history in there. I’ve lugged around a ton of that gear since my college days. The K2000 is a good example. It was a great synth in its day, but I can get better results with my laptop and GarageBand. There are effects in there that can go as well since I do most of my guitar tweaking through massive plugin arrays and digital constructs of my own again on the laptop. Getting rid of this stuff will be a big deal.
If you know anything about musicians, you know that in our hearts we’re all gear whores. Especially the ones who swear all they ever need is a tape deck and a guitar and one mic and one pre-amp and… See? Even if the setup is as bare bones as it can get (and I have strong opinions about what a wonderful idea that is) we all still get the Musicians Friend catalog and flip through it with long, spindly webs of drool forming at the corners of our mouths. It’s the nature of the beast. What great things could I do with THAT widget or doodad?!? Think of the “Sonic Possibilities!”
In the end, it’s just more crap to haul when you move.
I would like for my studio to be focused on things that make sound. I have more instruments than I probably should (but I will never admit that to my wife) and that means that I should keep the rest of the gear as slim and trim as I can. It will make an entertaining pile at the electronics recycling center. Again, most of it hasn’t worked or been powered up in years. It’s the end of the era of big gear. It’s the beginning of the minimal phase. Soon enough, everything will be done on an iPad with a single mic or mixer anyway. I’ll try to get ahead of the curve on this one.
I’m preparing a new collection of tunes. It will be release on the first of November. Six tracks. All electronic and strange or solo electric guitar (and still strange). It’s primarily more improvisations and accidents. The nature of how the collection started and why I decided to continue working on it lends itself to a minor (or major) revision of my creative process and how I think about it. Hang tight. This could get thick.
One of the things that I loved about working on large scale works for an ensemble was the planning. There is so much detail that needs tending. Dynamics, articulations, accurate notation. All of the subtleties of orchestration in the service of the thematic material. These things can consume the mind and make it impossible to ever finish a work. I knew people who would revise and revise until it was just so and then start revising again after the very first performance of the work. It’s a tempting place to take up residence, this den of detail. I was on the edge of falling into it when I started working with the NYU New Music Ensemble way back when.
I saw what they did with improvisations over my electronic works. I never wrote anything down but instead communicated what I wanted to hear in the electronic sounds. Every time we did the piece it was different. But there were certain characteristics that never changed. The tone, the tempo, the textures had variations and would have been different had they been transcribed but the listener left with the same impression each time.
It doesn’t sound like a big deal but to me in that time and at that place in my education, it was like a bright shaft of light coming down from an otherwise dark sky. I started working with improvisation in mind from that day on. I stepped away from the paper and pen and most of my work today is improvised. That’s where this collection comes in.
A while back I got a new amp and a loop station. They’re cool and I’m having a lot of fun with them. On my first night with the loop station, I plugged it into my computer and started recording. Good things happened. I was still getting the hang of using it and what I could do with it. Let’s just say that I have no interest in the novelty act deal where you lay down a rhythm track and then cover it with an accompaniment and finally a lead line. That’s a powerful technique and is fun to watch, but I don’t feel like I’m going to create anything cool that way. What I want is the same thing I’ve always wanted: an insanely long delay line that loops back around at an unpredictable moment and forces everything out of balance and then back together again. And let’s just say that’s easier to buy in hardware than to program up in Pure Data.
I did several nights of improvising and found that I had something neat (let this be a lesson, kiddies: record EVERY SESSION!). Then I dove into my notebooks that I keep scribbling in and found some interesting concepts. I applied them. Good things happened. Now I have six pieces that came out of nothing and go together nicely.
What I have learned is that I really prefer working this way. Writing things down in notebooks and enormous, elaborate scores is a lot of fun but that’s fundamentally contrary to how I work. The hardest thing to do is to let go of training and do what comes naturally. Once we learn rules, we want to hold onto them. We want to believe that they are The Way. But we know the way the first time we set out to do something that matters. It’s not perfectly clear but it usually feels right. Obeying that internal directive can be a challenge to the traditions that we have invested so much effort but there’s no arguing with results.
I came across something interesting this morning at kottke.org. It was this little tidbit:
“Using that definition, it’s interesting that you can’t figure out whether you’re any good or not from your 300 friends on Facebook, the 23 people who liked your Tumblr post, the 415 people you follow on Twitter, or the 15 people who faved your Flickr photo.”
Exactly! It’s impossible to know if one has any aptitude or ability through what is (erroneously) labeled as positive feedback. The only way to determine where you are in the process of developing your talent is through criticism and open discussion. A binary mechanism akin to the “Like” button isn’t going to tell you anything. It may indicate the number of people who actually invested time in your work by reading or looking or listening – and that is very valuable! – but it certainly won’t tell you if you’re getting closer to your goals.
I have some people to whom I send my stuff. There are a few musicians and a few that aren’t. Getting a read on what I do from another musician might tell me how my music is changing. What am I doing differently? Has the quality slipped? Did I sound lost? These are the kinds of things that are difficult to know when listening to my own work. And let’s face it, in the bedroom studio to iPod listener chain of music that is rapidly becoming the new norm, it’s hard to get that feedback before something is released. So the input from other people who are musicians, though not doing the same kinds of things, is incredibly valuable.
My non-musician friends tell me how the rest of the world will hear my music. Since I’m aiming for an audience of 200 people, it’s a pretty small circle and my style tends to range at times. I wonder how I can keep the attention of a group that size. So it helps to hear something back from one of those collaborators (because that’s what they are) that might change the way I approach sequencing songs or whether or not something even makes the cut.
Did I mention that the people I have selected are brutally honest? That’s something else that is missing from the world of the re-tweet. I learned a long time ago that it takes just as much intestinal fortitude to give criticism as it does to take it. Sometimes more. And it is a talent in itself. To develop at all, an artist needs to have strong, trustworthy people around to assist in the process. Those folks are in short supply. They certainly aren’t the type to click “Like” and move on. The best stay and talk. They look for the weak spots. They find the imperfections in and recognize the center of the work. Remember, perfection means stasis. I’m glad I’m never perfect. That would be the end of it for me. A good critic will reach out and feed your talent by giving a potential direction for development. The answer to “what do I practice next?” always comes from someone who can see the thin spots. A great critic is a teacher.
That isn’t to say that I don’t really enjoy seeing all of the “Likes” – far from it! As I said, it means that someone is paying attention and has just made their network aware of my work. When I released Nothing of Consequence it was amazing to go to Facebook and see every status for two scrolling pages showing nothing but links to my album. That’s more exciting to me than the quick thumbs up. Sharing my work means a lot. We’ll see how I do in a couple of days with my new tunes.
Seek out good critics and when you find one, don’t let go!
Something about autumn brings out a deep nostalgia for beginnings. My life started in the fall. The old academic traditions that were beaten into me over the years all kick off their rituals just as the leaves are beginning to turn. Instead of a time for watching the world slip off to sleep it feels more like an awakening for me.
This excitement is only a piece of what makes me miss my work at the University but it’s an important one. I can remember the feeling in the air on the first cool day. A great time to take my coffee outside and listen to the people. Time for a new notebook. Cracking the seal and breaking in the spine. Maybe even a new writing instrument. Fretting over the first stroke of the pen and then writing with abandon.
And the new books! Treating myself to something meaty. A big book. A challenge. Underlining. Notes. Dog-earring pages. The extra weight in my bag. The long walks I would take at lunch to listen to new music. Those listening sessions are a walk through history! In my conservatory days, it was a pocket cassette player. When I was in New York it was a CD player with freshly burned mixes or friends’ pieces. In the frozen wilds of Minnesota, I moved to a MiniDisc player. Finally, an iPod. So much listening. Now I have my seemingly endless commute and fewer opportunities to walk and listen. The spaces don’t seem to exist for that in my daily routine.
In the north, there was a reverie that descended when the sun had moved a bit. The skies were a perfect, clear blue. The sound of the leaves in the trees drying out was like the ticking of a clock toward the first real freeze that would force my lunches inside, to the library or bookstore. Those days between the breaking of the summer heat and the first snow were precious.
Those days are here again – though they are different in my current latitude. One thing that hasn’t changed is the urge to create – to bite off more than I can possibly chew. It feels good.