a positive reception

Posted by on October 23, 2009 No comments

I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback and some constructive criticism of Nothing Of Consequence after its release this week. It felt really good to put it out there and feel like the project, though fairly short for me, was finally complete. It’s good stuff.

Now for the recap. My goal was to get 100 people to download it. The zip file that contained all of the songs was downloaded about 150 times in the first two days. Some folks may have elected to download the tracks individually (there’s no accounting for taste) and until I see those stats I won’t have a good idea of how many times the entire album was taken. No matter how you slice it, I made my goal.

What’s not reflected there is how many people listened to it. I’d argue that a percentage large enough to fill a room did. Best of all, the people that I wanted to listen did. From that perspective, it’s a complete success.

facewhat?

Some things that amused me were those folks asking how much it would cost when it was advertised as being free. And that’s free as in “give it to your friends and everyone you know” free. Money is such a part of art now that it adds a twinge of bitterness to the process. I guess it’s easy to assume that music on the Internet is either going to cost you $9.99 an album or is illegal. So I can forgive that and let it slide.

I have turned into a bit of a Facebook apologist though. The vast majority of my referrals were via that site and it’s in no small part due to my friends linking to my stuff there. People came out of the woodwork to pass on the good word and for that I am very appreciative. This whole social networking media stuff really works. I’m more than a little surprised. But the quizzes and games still suck. I honestly don’t care what kind of tree I’d be. Morons.

I deem the experiment a success and when my next collection (now under construction) is complete I’ll do the same thing. I would like to make the things I do available to podcasters for their free use and push things from that direction, but that’s something for another day. Unless you have a podcast and want to use my stuff. Just drop me a line and we’ll work it out.

My new plan is to do two things at once. First, construct a new collection of songs for release in (hopefully) 6 months. Second, get back to releasing sketches and pieces of sound art weekly. I like having something out there every week. So you can expect more of that starting next week. The only thing more exciting than finishing a project is starting the next.

Thanks to everyone who listened. And double thanks to those who listened and passed it on.

nothing of consequence

Posted by on October 20, 2009 No comments

Work on this collection of songs started in the middle of this past summer. It was horribly hot and quite honestly no place for a viking. In general, I go dormant in the summer. There’s too much sunlight and heat for me to think straight and any effort to do something useful is met with a ton of resistence and frustration. But after some revelations it occurred to me that I still mow the lawn and go to work in the summer so I should be able to do something I really enjoy despite the crippling, 100F+ heat index, 80%+ humidity, day in and day out.

Each night for the past four months I went into my studio with a bottle of ice water and got down to work. I’m pleased with the results. It’s off the beaten path for me as I’m not generally an ambient music composer, but it feels good. And with that, I’m proud to present Nothing Of Consequence.

You can hit that link for the page for the album or download the entire collection of 9 songs right here: NothingOfConsequence.zip.

I’m really excited to release this and my goal is to have 100 people listen to it. If you’d like to help by pushing links through Facebook, Twitter, E-mail or what have you, I’d be much obliged.

All of the tunes are released under my favorite (for now) Creative Commons license free of charge so share them with your friends!

Thanks and enjoy!

Creative Commons License
Nothing Of Consequence by J.C. Wilson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.othertime.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://othertime.com.

next!

Posted by on October 19, 2009 No comments

Tomorrow, I will put Nothing of Consequence (my new collection of tunes) up on the site and provide appropriate links. I might put it up on the iTunes store or on emusic, but for now it will be free to anyone who drops by and clicks the link. I’m excited to see if I can get 100 people to download the album. That would be really cool. To my mind, it’s like having a recital with 100 people in the audience and that’s the way I’m approaching music right now.

The era of the rock star is fading (more slowly than it ought) and taking with it a pile of assumptions. Platinum albums that lead to mansions and fast cars are not what the future has to offer a dreaming musician. What artists have to look forward to now has perhaps more in common with 200 years ago than 50 which, incidentally, I think is what we’re all looking at in every aspect of our lives. But the value of music and art is pushing ahead into a place where everything revolves around real connections.

gold

I would never pretend to guess what the almighty market will do with music. People will still get paid to play and to write. There will be commercials for years to come that will need hip and edgy sounds from the almost underground to advertise bad cologne and cars. There will always be posers who need to listen to the most obscure pieces they can find. There will always be artistic adventurers who genuinely crave and seek out the new. And in the absence of those, there will always be family and friends (hi mom!) which is sort of the point of creative endeavors the more I think about it. Community. Family.

My son is entering a creative phase. He’s two. The other day, he wrote his name. There’s really no way to describe how that feels. To see your child do something so amazing is visceral and powerful. I want to hear the songs he sings. See the towers he builds. Trace the lines of his crayons when he says it’s time to “color-color paper!” I have the same sense when it comes to my brother and my friends. I want to see what they’re doing. I want to read the pages of their manuscripts and look at their photographs and paintings. In them there are reflections of times and places that have meaning for me and I get to see them through another lens. The work offers me something and I take it.

None of that, mind you, recognizes money or professional status. T.S. Eliot was a banker when he wrote The Waste Land. Many great composers and artists created their ouvre without so much as a dime coming back for their efforts. The reason I ignore these things is that they have very little to do with the quality of the work or what draws me to it. Things like this certainly don’t compel me to create.

This is a long way of saying that no one needs publishers or middlemen anymore and no one really needs to be creating full time for it to have meaning. The Internet makes sharing a story or song as easy as dropping some extra tomatoes on someone’s porch when they’re not home. It’s easy for art to be by and for a community and if that sounds like a lot of hippie-free-love crap, it almost is. I say almost because the sentiment is over the top most of the time. But when I read a cool piece of fiction written by a friend or download some tunes by someone I know who lives too far away for me to jam with, it’s awesomely true. I see more and more of my moonlighting artist friends getting that point. It’s exciting. The excuses for skipping out on one’s creative life are fewer by the day.

So in the spirit of saluting anyone who buys notebooks for scribbling in over an outrageously priced coffee or sets up a blog to push a story like a crazy street preacher or sits in the park tentatively adding to the sounds of the city with a quiet guitar I will put my music out there too. As my uncle always said, more fools, more fun.

i believe…

Posted by on October 16, 2009 No comments

i believe it's done

history

Posted by on October 14, 2009 No comments

The information age has brought so much to the average person with access to the Internet that it’s hard to disparage it in any serious way. The benefits of the shared knowledge and easy access outweigh any serious concerns to the point where it’s almost silly to talk about the negative effects. Doing so seems precious and falls into the realm of navel-gazers. After all, at no other time could a person of any social standing come into contact with so much information on any and all subjects. With that said, there are days where I wish I knew less.

In high school I played in a band. Our singer didn’t have any training on stringed instruments, but he could pick up a bass guitar and do some stuff that sounded really great. Why did it sound so good? Because he had no pretense. He didn’t know his scales or arpeggios and thus had nothing to prove. The faces of Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke meant nothing to him. He was just having a good time. As a result of this lack of instruction (note I didn’t say talent or ability) he was able to take something that would have been deemed too simple for the almost-journeyman musician and make it convincing. There was no attempt to impress anyone technically, it was all about sounding good.

A lot of artists get lost when the art produced is for an audience of peers, living or dead, and I find myself in that boat from time to time. It’s given that at a certain point in the development of one’s voice it is critical to be reviewed by masters and peers. It’s very important to have that audience of others who are learning and growing. Much benefit can be derived from hearing a fellow composer discuss a more difficult passage and offer suggestions from a similar level of experience. When both members of the conversation are at the same point in the path up the mountain, there’s a lot of good information that can be shared and the passage can be more easily navigated by each. At the same time, when one composes only for one’s masters and peers the reason for starting the work can be lost to a desire for recognition and praise from “those who know.”

diagonal

It’s also difficult when framed with the historical precendents and their ready availability. I remember like it was yesterday (because it was) thinking back through pieces that I have heard or played and searching for permission to do something. Thinking that if Roger Sessions or Edgard Varese did something like what I was trying that I can do it too. Or in moments of despair defaulting to Cage and getting my pat on the head that anything with a start point and an end point is in bounds.

Why this deferrence to history, peers, and masters? I honestly don’t know. This hang up only comes to me when I compose. My painting could not possibly care less about the Canon of Western Art™. When I build an instrument, I’m not looking to the makers of old for anything more than solid construction techniques or jigs. I don’t need for Dave Grisman to approve of my mandolin picking or Henry Miller to agree with my writing. I simply do them.

I noted this search for permission that occasionally leads to writer’s block and the derailing of projects when I started college and have made great headway in ignoring it by working with people who are not trained, talking with artists who work from the gut, and trusting the judgement of those who are the goal: normal listeners. My wife can’t write a four voice chorale in the style of J.S. Bach but she can always give a thumbs up or down to a piece of music.

Part of moving toward mastery is scrutinizing the craft. Studying its history and understanding how it all fits together is to be expected. But the untaught lesson of when to use this knowledge and when to put it aside is something that has to be learned alone in the studio. It’s one of the seldom mentioned battles that is fought by anyone who studies and creates. In the end, the desire to know less is really the desire to understand more exposed.