Second week at #art14 complete! This post is a little later than I'd like, but here we are.
Up front, the only #music I published this week was one song in drifts. I did finish two more songs and make progress on another though, so I'm making good headway.
At the beginning of the week, I was spending a lot of time thinking about "what's the point". That thought was a bit in a depressed way, but mostly in a "what am I trying to say" or a "why am I making this art" way. I haven't really come up with a good answer. Something about wanting to share my love of nature and technology or something? I am still not sure.
A point I've mentioned to people is I struggle with the fact that I am bad at making music. My two creative outlets for so long have been coding and writing. When I wanted to stretch a creative muscle or just make #art, that is what I did. I'll write in a notebook or code up some dumb little app1. It's not good writing or good code, but I can write it and I can properly traverse a flow from "idea" to "I wonder if that's possible" to "oh look, a basic thing".
An example of doing this happened yesterday, which I'll technically put in Week Three territory but since I was late on this post, I guess I'll shove in here. I wrote a little Discord bot. I took timball/Careen, song.link, and a few other ideas (including past discord bots), shoved it into Cursor, made some tweaks, and ended up with linkbot. I wanted it because I am debating moving off of Spotify, and wanted something to genericise links I would post in music channels for communities I am in. It took about five hours to go form "idea" to "I'm done, this works".
Music has not been that way. I am too new. I struggle at every step.
- With idea generation, I don't know what's possible so I can't doodle as easily as I can writing or with code.
- With execution & crafting, I struggle to turn an idea into something finished.
- With finishing, I don't know what's good, so I don't know when to stop.
Coming to terms with that being OK has been a journey these last two weeks. And in good news: I think I am finally accepting that. Friday I feel like I had a bit of a break through. I listened to all of the sounds I have recorded over the last two weeks. Random nature sounds. Bleeps. Bloops. Songs. Me singing about bugs. A lot was trash or useless, but I could see progress, and there was stuff that I liked. Things that I created where I was like, oh hey, I made that and I like it.
Recorded outside
Just some eurorack drums
Neither of these are masterpieces or anything, just snippets of audio that I kind of liked.
Things that helped me get there, beyond just spending time making music, included:
- An interview with Flying Lotus where he talks about how some people prefer his music from when he knew nothing.
- Alan Tudyk Eats His Last Meal, because of his descriptions of how not every artist's life turns out well.
- Bâan and the making of documentary. Both are very moving stories and was interesting to think about control and design.
I also consumed a lot of music. Some of the albums that stuck out to me included:
- Trying Times by James Blake
- Time Heals Everything by Blu & Exile
- The Great Divide by Noah Kahan
- Ghosts I-IV by Nine Inch Nails
I continued my distractions of writing code, fixing up robot.villas more, building another midi script for norns: pauper, and cleaning up my personal website and this blog.
I also watched a lot of TV... more than I'd like to admit. I think because I was depressed, and we had a cold snap, so I stayed inside a bit more.
Finally some photos of my time this week are below. I did go on a few more hikes, and I did some recording in various places around the town and in Prince Gallitzin State Park.
Thanks for reading!