It's been a busy month, creatively. I'm very grateful for that. I've made a lot of health progress, and there's a lot to do if I hope to maintain that. I hope things stick. Things have been okay, recently. Here's what I've been working on:
A big thing I decided to do this year is to participate in Weeklybeats. In the past two years my music practice has been to try to stick to a daily routine--get a scribble out every single day, build a body of work, look back in retrospect to see what sort of throughline i can cast. This process makes me pretty efficient, but there are times where I think it makes me less imaginative and less inclined to push myself. The idea of pursuing "one song a week" as a goal so far has allowed me to spend more time on research and development rather than just throwing something at the wall until something sticks. We'll see how it ends up :).
I'm still figuring out how I want to "distribute" these songs. It's likely that they'll end up on bandcamp in some form eventually. Right now they're on this website, on my Weeklybeats profile, and my Soundcloud.
This is a project file I picked up from late last year to finish. something about a scribble over an alternating 4:3 -> 6:3 polyrhythm. destabilizing, stabilizing, destabilizing again. tension, release.
Timbral note--overhearing at one point that something crazy happens when you "let saw waves be saw waves". I avoid harshness in my music, but not for any particular reason (I certainly enjoy music that plays with it). Letting things stand out as their own instruments, an exercise in courage.
Arrangement note--I'm afraid of letting things jump directly from one place to another. Some of my favorite arrangements feel more like loosely associated ideas in sequence, unafraid of letting the listener track the conceptual jump themselves. In this one I tried to write passages that were loosely associated and just stuck them together and over each other. I think it worked.
Iterations and re-iterations on a small space. Focusing mostly on transformative-yet-still-associative resampling. Just as much an exercise in getting out a super quick chord progression on a synth and doing as much as I possibly can in relation to it.
Unlike last week the primary ideas from this one came first, but I still found ways of incorporating older material. A lot of this takes from a few sessions with Cardinal from a few weeks back.
Again--learning to be content with throwing a few almost-disparate ideas directly together.
This one feels a little bit like I phoned it in for the week. I did, a little bit, but I still like a lot of what came out.
Writing a small passage, stretching it to exhausting lengths, decorating it with in-synth articulations, et cetera... Pretty simple stuff, following routine.
I started going to a ceramics studio recently! It's been 6 years since I've been able to do any pottery work. I missed it a whole bunch.
The first thing I decided to tackle was making a few mugs for myself. A lot of the mugs I had before that I had a lot of fondness for have broken over time. By the time I stopped making ceramics, I had just recently gotten to the point where I could make a mug I actually like--I think these ones will fit the bill once they're glazed and fired. (Look at those handles. That second one might be the hardest I've ever tried to make a handle look good. It attached well, shaped well, fits my hand well, I'm excited to see how it holds up.)
I think my favorite part about this medium is how catastrophically and frequently things break or go unaccording to plan. There's hardly any fixing wrongs, no recuperations or compensations to be done if something breaks. You really have to let the present moment pull you through the process, and any attachment to the outcome has to be tempered. The mug shatters in your hands as you're carving it, you laugh, sweep it up, reclaim the clay, start over. The necessity of understanding that transience has taught me a lot, creatively. I'm happy to be back.
(I haven't been taking many pictures as I work, but here's what I have so far!)
I've mostly been sketching to occupy idle time. It's good for that. Here are a few pages I've done this month.
I still need to get a 2022 and 2023 archive page up. Most of the art I've made in that time period has been stuff I haven't been keen on cementing into the web, during the moment. I've made a lot of progress in killing the artist-on-social-media neuroses that made it draining to even think about. I'll get working on that SOMETIME.
Thank you for reading. See you around, maybe! ^_^