Catching up.

I feel pretty behind on stuff. So much to do, both at school and outside it. It'd be ok, except being in a band means having to wrangle other people for rehearsal, and other bands for gigs. I'm broke too, and have a bunch of band stuff to pay for (promo and mastering,etc). None the less, I'm managing to put it all together. I felt like last week I went through a billion different emotional states. I had a great day last Thursday, I feel like I really succeeded at things. I had a terrible weekend. I was totally blocked and didn't really make anything or do any work, and my ipod died forever.

I've started making some new remixes of two of my older tracks, Analogies for the Universe, and Black Comedy. I love remixes, and I love remixing. Doing remixes of your own work is hard, because all your original ideas are there already. But since these tracks are old, I can bring new approaches to the sounds, and so far I'm getting some really different stuff happening. I'm launching the first Glasfrosch remix collection on June 3rd, remixes of the song Green. The cut I did of that is really fun and different.



Later in the year I'll put out the new collection, and then focus all my energy on releasing the Aubades Ep.

So now that the whinging is out of the way...

I've been enjoying the explorations of perception and listening that we've been doing in class. The sound walk concept was interesting. It was a tiring exercise, but it had a real impact of my perception. I found that after the break, I felt sharper than earlier in the day, even though I felt drained from the walk initially. Heading home I felt really open and connected to the sounds around me. Usually I have the ipod on and isolate myself from the world, but since it died on Saturday, I don't have that option anymore. Jess was an ace person. Her concepts and work were really cool. I love Twin Peaks too. I particularly love Badelamenti, and the little video she played us was awesome. I loved the way Angelo does Lynch's voice. They've worked on so much together, he really knows him, and their connection must be so strong to have worked in the way he describes. I love those themes, they're exactly what he says they are. And iconic too. The Where We're From project seems pretty cool. I've followed the blog and will follow up on it a bit more this week to find out more about it. The questions that it poses are challenging and thought provoking, and could be good to answer for my own benefit.

The Milton Babbit reading was a curious experience. When I read it initially, I both agreed and disagreed equally. I think I disagree more strongly with certain things now, but agree with, or perhaps accept, his ideas more after having discussed it in class. What I don't like about this article is his disconnection from audience. I think audience is a powerful and important component of art. I don't like the way he refers to the layman. I think there are problems with people's acceptance of music that is challenging to listen to, but you're a jerk and a fool to put yourself and your art above other people. People will always be behind the times with music., His analogy to physics, well, their are plenty of people out their who don't understand scientific theories who claim to know better than learned experts. Religious people/"christian science", conservatives/climate change deniers. There are people out there who claim the universe is 10,000 years old and because science can't prove there's no God that they're right (although science can prove the universe is over 14,000,000,000 years. So while I appreciate Babbit's analogy, it's pretty arrogant and flimsy. I think that it's important that people like him were doing that sort of thing back then, but that attitude just doesn't fit into the contemporary world. Music for music sake as research is cool, but as art, it needs to connect with the world somehow. I don't mean the whole world, but a place in it. I guess I just prefer expressive forms over academic. I may be paraphrasing, but I think it was Basquiat said about minimalist painting, there's only so far you can take it before it's exhausted, it becomes pure academia. Expression is personal and can reach people in different ways and is therefore an evolving process that relies on audience connection. I know Babbit isn't "minimalism", but the principal is the same. Serialism is the same sort of thing.
Another thing I'm reminded of is from a Bjork documentary from around 1997. She was complaining about people's attitude to electronic music, about the perception that electronics have "no soul". Her perspective was that all music has the potential to be soul less, if the composer fails to imbue it with any soul. Truely, an instrumental performance can be stale and soul less if the performer doesn't feel the music and express it in their playing. The same can be said of electronic composition. If the composer doesn't put a piece of their life into the music and composes it purely with interlect, then it's not going to be "felt" at the other end. Then the piece becomes an analytical exercise. I'm not opposed to a bit of this, but I don't think it's a thorough way to compose. Perhaps a starting method. I want more human condition in my music/art. I want play, I want love, I want loss, I want thought and challenge too, but I want it in a way that makes me feel at the same time.
Eliane Radigue's Jetsun Mila was a great example of music imbued with life. That piece was exceptional. I got lost in it, and didn't want it to stop. Her sounds were amazing, and the process was just gorgeous. I want an ARP so much.

So I thought I'd just comment on the week prior's topics quickly as I hadn't blogged last week.

We spent a lot of time discussing Morton Feldman and memory. Looking at Feldman's different scoring techniques and listening to the evolution of his work over his career we got a sense of a man who began quite un-precious and non-specific about things, but grew to become much more specific about his work. Admittedly, his earlier graph score work didn't really impress me as much as the later stuff, not that I didn't like, but I liked the later work with it's micro variation and more mellowed out feel. I found the earlier graph piece felt to (inserts a series of hand gestures here for lack of words coming to mind) bland, perhaps, or because there are things left to the performers, there's almost a lack of commitment to the piece, or should I say, conviction. The performers, not having been given exact pitch material, play with less conviction. The rigid geometric time structure also made it feel bland, or perhaps I mean, lazily assembled. Which I guess on paper the piece is solid, but the resulting music lacks a certain completeness. The music from the later piece, fully and specifically scored, sounded much more committed. I also loved the meditation of it. I've played around at home improvisationally with this single chord concept a bit since and tried to explore the memory of it. It's a fascinating process, and something I think would be challenging to develop.
I think long pieces are really hard to pull off. I composed a piece a few years ago, I was calling it Absinthe Music. It was for synths, tuned percussion, electric piano, electric guitar and bowed acoustic guitar. The total score length was different for each instrument, and resulted in an approximate duration of a bout an hour. The instrumentation and form are split into 3 independent time frames. The first is the main synth sound, which is a long, slow, and noisy high pad sound. follows a blues chord progression with an extended turn-around that creates a 15 bar cycle. But these chords are then deconstructed and extended at such a slow pace as they become unrecognisable from the blues progression. The second tier to the form is in the bass drone and guitars. At specifically determined intervals (unto themselves but in no relation to the previously mentioned synth part) a bass drone based on the chord root notes in a jumbled sequence (and to be honest, I forget what that sequence/process behind it was) fades in for a time and then out again. In conjunction with this drone, the acoustic guitar, which is tuned to an open chord for ease of fitting in with each of the bass notes, is bowed with a cello bow and simultaneously the electric guitar sustains another note from the same corresponding chord. This section tends to cycle in half the time to the high pad section, and thus is potentially played twice through. the Third element to the form is in the percussion and rhodes parts. the percussion has 15 frames of material to work through, and is mostly the feature of the piece. Each page, or cell, or frame, is grouped in a similar way and represents a bar in the form of the blues progression. The gestures are grouped over three lines and consist of vibraphone grace note runs, alien disc washes, glockenspiel hits, bowed cymbal and bowed vibraphones. The ordering of each page is similar and figured out in such a way that as they're played slowly and quitely so the piece develops without you noticing the changes. The rhodes piano part is simply chords from the same progression, that synchronise with particular cymbal washes in the percussion part. The chord performance instructions are simply to voice the chord anyway you wish, and play express it with a slight arpegiation, how slight is at your, the performer's, discretion. I was reminded of this piece greatly by the Feldman. It seems I was on his level without knowing it. I did make a recording of the piece, but the guitars were never finished. Perhaps I could finish it eventually.