I pulled myself out of the fog of procrastination to write this one. Taking cues from the etymology of the word Monday, specifically "Murk Monday", the Scottish name for a solar eclipse that occurred on Monday 29 March 1652, and thermometer. The harmony also comes from the word Monday, which I serialised. I don't really experience traditional Mondayitis any more, as I work unconventional hours, but I had plenty of past office job experience to draw on for this one.
Read MoreHands was my starting point for this piece, and I found it quite meditative to both compose and perform. This is only the second piece I have performed on electric mandolin. The other attempt was interrupted by flooding, which was about the time this project really started to challenge me. I haven't even thought about what to do when it all ends, but I suppose I should watch everything back through from start to finish. Although each piece of music is not exactly a journal entry, they will certainly reflect my mind and life in that particular moment. If I can bear to sit through twelve months worth of videos I am curious to see how the music I have made has been shaped by the life I have lived alongside it.
Read MoreI am struggling to return to the routine of this project, and have ended up a few days behind again. My life is messy at the moment: my mental energy is being swallowed by recent rental uncertainties, and the potential disruption and financial pressure of having to move to a new apartment is really stressing me out. This is fuelling the voice that asks "what is the point of doing this?", and not just this project, but music altogether.
Read MoreI felt a lot of pressure to produce something decent after my break, as though the imaginary audience in my mind were waiting to judge me on whether the pause was worthwhile, and if I still had it in me to create a decent piece of music. In order to keep those voices at bay I kept myself to some very strict compositional exercises.
Read MoreIn addition to writing about forests, my student and I were also working on the theme growing up. This was my little musing, filmed in the reflection of a photograph of myself taken right before I detoured into music.
Read MoreThis one is connected to the previous piece through light-play. The text came from some exercises I did with one of my students, we were doing some timed writing exercises around the theme forest.
Read MoreHere's a proper song, rather than me making light fun of my irritation at this project. I started with nothing as a theme, and used the word to generate some melodic ideas. The lyrics come from the word "thing", and the themes of "stretch of time" and "thingamajig" suggested by the etymological dictionary. My clock theme of early in this project makes a reappearance.
Read MoreFrom the previous day's gelatin to wishbone, dug out of a hot roast chicken. In my bone-related research I discovered that the wishbone used to be called a "merrythought", which is kind of nice.
Read MoreAnother spoken piece inspired by bones, and office drudgery.
Read MoreA little spoken word piece based, using bones as a starting prompt. I've just realised now that "Funny Bones" might have been a catchier title, but that's OK, I can always change it later on.
Read MoreAfter my three improvised experiments using the glove mind map I used it for a little sung piece too.
Read MoreThe third of my glove mind map improvisation experiments.
Read MoreThis is the first in a series of three experiments with a mind map for the theme glove. The mind map became a kind of graphic score, with a random starting point chosen and then the lyrics improvised in performance using parts of the mind map as prompts. This is similar to the way my brain works when I sit down to do a timed writing exercise, but I find it much easier to translate my thoughts to pen and paper rather than speech. This exercise was an interesting way to bypass the pen and go straight to my voice. I found it quite challenging, but resisted the urge to record second takes of any of the improvisations.
Read MoreI am not top of this project at the moment. I am chasing it, and, like a Will-'O-The-Wisp, when I run for it it retreats and I can never catch it up. This was meant to be Tuesday's piece, but I didn't manage to get anything done that day and ended up a song behind. I caught up on Wednesday, but then I spent Thursday editing this podcast episode in preparation for my gig with Lucy Roleff on Monday night, missed Thursday's song, and had to catch up again on Friday. There's a fine line between allowing myself to take a day off and catch up the next day when I really need to, and taking the day off and catching up the next day just because I can. I need to find the balance between the two.
Read MoreI had a little songwriting energy back, so I took the original Scuffle text and used that as the starting point for this piece. I kept the spirit of the previous video's randomness by improvising the melody and piano part. And by improvising on piano I mean randomly hitting white keys without much consideration for what I was playing. Perhaps I shouldn't have admitted that...
Read MoreFrom scuff to scuffle, to looking out my window and noticing the leaves blowing down the street.
Read MoreI reached 100, though only just. This was some rejected text from number 99, what I lacked in creative songwriting energy I made up for in creative visuals.
Read MoreSaturday's piece, a very quick improvisation before I took the night off. Just one take with both the text and melody improvised in the moment.
Read MoreMy last post was Thursday, which seems like an eternity ago as the last few days have been really difficult. This project was never meant to be easy, although up to now it has never felt impossible, and I've generally kept to my deadlines and retained my confidence in my ability to churn out new music when required. Over the weekend, however, I fell apart and spent a large part of it paralysed by anxiety. My rational brain knew that if I could just sit down and do the work I would end up with something, but when I tried I was unable to concentrate and found the anxiety expressing itself in physical symptoms, which is something I haven't really experienced before.
Read MoreThis is Tuesday's song, continuing the fingerprint theme. Fingerprints look a lot like topographic map markings, which was the inspiration for this one. I did a little fingers-in-random-places on my ukulele to find ideas for the harmony.
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