Curtains to blinds.
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From spill to overflow.
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I can't quite believe it, but I have made it to the end of six months. I should write a proper update about how I'm feeling, but for now here's a song. My starting theme was slow, and branches of a mind map led me to the lyrics. The melody is mostly improvised save for a little hook, and a few questionable notes snuck their way in and will need to be plucked out when I finally get time to revisit all these songs and do something exciting with them. What that something might be, I have no idea yet.
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A chord taken from The Cause Of Your Calluses, and my clock as a metronome. I only recorded one take: the lyrics and melody were improvised, and I treated the performance like a meditation.
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Hands 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.
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I did my best to perform to the rhythm of my knitting. It's a lace pattern, and slightly fiddly, which makes this piece nicely wonky.
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An ode to dreaming, recorded while the sun was setting.
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I was a little behind, so I caught up with a few improvisations inspired by dreaming, wishing and wasting time. These are three things I've been doing a lot of recently.
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A song! As much as I have been enjoying playing around with light it also feels nice to spend time on some composition. I was woken very early the other morning, and sitting waiting for the sun to rise I began daydreaming about being on a plane to somewhere else in the world. I took light as my theme from the previous piece and spun that together with my travel imaginings. I was originally playing this on piano, but something about it sounded too much like musical theatre so I rearranged it for vocal loops and bass. I was back to late night recording, so everything is played very quietly.
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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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I 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.
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A little video to mark my break. I didn't include today, which I guess means I'd better get writing.
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This was where I decided to take a proper break. I think this video suggests that was a good idea.
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More on the growing up theme, with a very un-grown-up performance (although the next video trumps this one in terms of childish behaviour).
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In 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.
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This 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.
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The third between improvisation.
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The second between improvisation.
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