I’m going to make music in 2015. At least one song every month, I hope.
January’s tune was described by an early listener as “shoe-gaze”, which is a term I’m not entirely familiar with. But I’m pretty sure I get the gist. And it’s probably accurate. I wanted to slow things down from the other things I have made over the last six months. I wanted to use fewer sounds, and draw the mood out, and work without any kind of narrative in the music.
I found working without a ‘narrative structure’, without a crescendo or emotional climax, to be challenging. I couldn’t tell when I was making progress, or when I was regressing to old habits of adding more in, rather than twisting what was already there. Luckily a friend stepped in and gave me a better perspective before I went and did something horrible, like record vocals.
With the thought in mind to put something out every month, I also wanted to learn something about letting go of the things I create, even while still creating. To this end, I arranged most of the percussive effects randomly using an arpeggiator on a set of preselected samples. For my workflow, that meant that all of my perfectionist tweaking could be undermined if I rendered out the song and the samples were great. I’d have to make do with the imperfections because I wouldn’t be able to reproduce the percussion track exactly.
That’s exactly what happened. I’m glad it did, I think it’s going to make February a little easier.
Recent Discussion