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Sunday, 30 January 2005
Just playing ::
After being in musical Refining and Remixing mode through fall, since the holidays I’ve found myself feeling creatively barren. There’s a whole new round of refining mode ahead of me in preparation for going off to work with a great producer later this year if all goes well (more about that when it happens), and at the moment I’m finding that a bit overwhelming and daunting. Two helpful things happened over the past week.
Thursday I went to see my friend Justin Winokur do a solo voice/guitar show in San Jose. Despite the acoustics of the room leaving a lot to be desired, Justin played a marvelously dynamic show and his songs came through well. I know his CD, and found myself singing background vocals in my head during the show. So I shouldn’t have been too surprised when afterwards he asked if I’d be interested in learning some of the keyboard and backing vocal parts and perhaps performing with him down the road. He came over Saturday and we worked on a few tunes. I’m excited about this.
Yesterday, on the loopers-delight mailing list, I saw a message suggesting that fear of the red light (recording) is just physiological, that it’s not something to be superstitious of. I countered by quoting something my coworker James M. said at lunch one day, much to everyone’s amusement: “recording collapses the wave function.” I posted this and a link to How Not to Collapse the Wave Function. But I also agreed that recording everything was a good antidote.
But then I noticed that over the last few weeks, my entire musical creative output has consisted of firing up the newly-acquired Absynth 3, making a couple new sounds, layering them with piano, and just playing without recording anything. That seems like a fine antidote to being weary of polishing and refining artifacts from the past: make something new but let it be gone when it’s over. There’s no awareness of creating future work by leaving files on the hard disk that will eventually have to be scrutinized. And in fact this was precisely the point of the title of the thread: “the impermanence of looping.”
| << IBFF, 30 Jan. | 2005 > January | IBFF, 4 Feb. >> |