A venetian mashup. I like the way both pieces seem to build and end at the same time.
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Curtains to blinds.
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Part three: jugs, water and light.
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Part II. More light play.
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I 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.
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About a week before I started my music degree I met someone at a party who had studied a similar degree overseas. He told me to just do the first year, learn the essentials, and then quit. This is what he and his friends had done, and he said they were more successful and making "better" music than the people who stuck it out until the end. In his opinion everyone who finished the degree was brainwashed by the jazz education, and the music they were making was either boring, complicated or weird.
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Most of the linguistic connections to vista focus on light, and this piece explores the opposite, continuing the same camera angle as the previous day. A quick improvisation taking advantage of the background noise in my apartment. I have a new mysterious British neighbour, and ever evening he speaks on the phone in our building's stairwell. Yet I've never managed to actually see him, only heard his voice amplified by the shape of the stairwell. Perhaps he is a phantom?
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My theme from the previous song was swell. I did some word fishing from the book I'm reading at the moment (The Master and Margarita in case you're interested), picking the first word on random pages starting with each letter of the word swell. I did this a couple of times and then mixed up the results, and the phrase little white embroidered eyebrows was the one that resonated. I turned that line into this song about a childhood doll.
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One of the songwriting tools I use regularly is an etymological dictionary. Looking at the origin of words is a really fascinating way of finding links between seemingly unrelated objects and ideas. My original starting point for this piece was umbrella, and the origin of that word comes from umbra, which is related to shadows and also to phantoms and ghosts. It is an interesting coincidence that the words shade and umbrella are linked, as shade also appeared in the previous day's piece. I took the ghostly route, and worked off the idea of trying to imagine a loved one back into existence.
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I delved into my experimental self for this piece, but unfortunately my audio recorder didn't pick up much of the water sounds. I was pretty exhausted yesterday, and so I allocated myself a half hour window in which to get the piece done. I used ink from the previous day as a starting theme, and a mind map led me to cobalt blue. Some internet wandering brought up Renoir's painting The Umbrellas, which was painted using two different shades of blue: the first stages of the painting done using cobalt, and later stages with ultramarine. This idea of an umbrella in two shades of blue inspired the text, and my kitchen provided the props.
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I could fib, and tell you that I recorded this yesterday and just didn't have time to upload it, but that's not really in the spirit of this project. So no, I didn't record this yesterday. I didn't even finish writing it yesterday. I had the guitar part and half the lyrics done, and then I fell asleep, exhausted, on the couch with a pencil in my hand while trying to work on the second half of the words. I gave in, and went to bed, I woke this morning refreshed but very annoyed that I hadn't just recorded what I had, instead of labouring over it when my mind had clearly switched off for the day.
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Today marks the end of the very first week of this project, and perhaps the end of the honeymoon period, as it's getting difficult now. It's a little surreal to realise I've churned out seven new musical ideas in as many days, and terrifying to realise I still have to find another 358 to make it to the end of the year.
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It seems I made the mistake yesterday of enjoying what I created, which put me under pressure to try and equal or better it today. My inner critic was turned on to max when I woke up, and I procrastinated for a good part of the day and then rejected my initial idea when I finally sat down to work. I decided making something vastly different to yesterday might help to distance me from comparisons, so I took just a few kernels of my rejected idea and improvised with them using my loop pedal.
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