an ochre handprint

good morning ~

(click the link / nighttime driveway to listen)

My Big Breakan ochre handprint

today’s zone is another series of deconstructed loops, really fascinated by this mode lately

want to dedicate some space today to StretchMetal’s year-end fundraiser - - StretchMetal is an ambitious and very cool nonprofit org that organizes atmospheric music events - primarily in Chicago and upstate New York - with a really robust and impressively meaningful online community. It’s still in the very early stages, but they make things happen in the world that to me feel important. I was really happy to get into the mix with them as a performer last year and I’ve been serving on their Board for about a year.

We just launched an annual year-end fundraising campaign and I would very much recommend you check it out and throw them some bones - some great thank yous available (their hats are particularly appealing) plus the chance to win some legitimately great music gear.

Plus, there’s this thing where, well, the fundraising is a little bit of a friendly competition with a running leaderboard, etc. And though I’m not qualified to win any prizes as a member of the Board it would be sick to land in the top three. So if you did want to contribute to StretchMetal’s valiant efforts, you can do so at this link. If you really felt the spirit, you could also start your own fundraising team :)

more on this in the coming weeks - including a virtual/IRL event in December

plus check out this extremely cute graphic they made :)

I don't think of the weekly tracks I publish here as songs.

To me a song is a collection of repeatable phrases and musical gestures that can be recognizably duplicated. So yeah, lyrics, choruses, chord progressions, samples, drum programming, melodies - these are all qualities that can make a song a song. Not because a song requires any of those things to be considered a song necessarily, but because they are legible, observable gestures. But there's also a certain amount of tolerance, songs have give. By which I mean that a song is something that can be performed in infinite ways but still categorically be understood as a song. You can obviously perform a song written for guitar on the piano, or you can arrange a song that is usually sung by a vocalist as an instrumental. And people have long been interested in seeing how far you can push something and still have it be reasonably understood as a version of the original song - can you change the lyrics? Can you switch up the rhythmic feeling entirely? Can you sing a different melody over different chords? As long as there is some inherent kernel of familiarity from the composition, I would say yes. There's a million miles of interpretation necessary to go from a sheet of music to the performing of sound - just because an interpretation of the material is not to your taste does not mean it's not a version of the song, it's bones are there.

Which leads me to another point that I think a lot of people get hung up on - a recording of a song is only one of infinite possible iterations of that song, even if its a very popular recording. And that's partially because the song is kind of eternal and ethereal and a capture of it is a little more actual, a little more alchemical - putting the bird in the cage, so to speak. It's kind of like believing the pages and the binding themselves are the book itself when - hang on with me here - the thing you read is actually just a manifestation of the book (fair to point out that listening to an audiobook counts as reading - it is simply another manifestation of the source). Think of it this way, a photograph could most often be described as a capture of light. Framing the light is the song, making the print is the recording.

But what about a painting, you ask, isn't the painting comprised of the pigments and the oil themselves? Astute point, however, I think what we're talking about here is the distinct, unique phenomena, gestures, and other applications of creative force in their singular, original form. A photograph of a painting is the painting in the same way that a recording of a song is the song - you see it, you can analyze it deeply, but something inherent is missing. Even a second copy of a painting done in the same hand by the same person lacks that original authorial spark - a painting of a painting is not the painting.

So a song for me is this kind of lofty bundle of sonic (and sometimes verbal) notions that can be realized, performed, and recorded, theoretically by anyone. I have written a lot of these over the years, and some I've played hundreds of times. These Thursday tracks, on the other hand, are - by design - spontaneous, often free from the mechanical tricks of evocative songwriting like bridges, key changes, etc, and more-or-less impossible to duplicate (although I guess theoretically if someone wanted to go moment by moment and recreate this week's piano loops with notation and an ensemble they theoretically could, feels outside the realm of possibility, though). These Thursday recordings are much more an exploration of technique, phenomena, and spontaneity - most of the ideas for the My Big Break sounds come from trying something with a microphone or a sampler or a synthesizer I've never tried before, and then I kind of fill in as necessary from there. For instance this week I've continued going really deep on using my own piano improvisations as source material for aggressive, destructive sampling - from maybe 20 minutes of unguided playing I pulled a few choice moments of chord and melody and fashioned what you're hearing now, relying on novel combinations of plugins and the chance overlaps of loops. There is authorship, but it's of a fashion closer to a snapshot photograph than that of a beautifully, intentionally rendered painting. Imagine what would happen if I tried to recreate any of these Thursday sounds - I could hew as possible to the source, but the result would still be another recording, not another version of a song.

Pressed on this over dinner the other night - friends were surprisingly incredulous at my saying these recordings aren't songs - I had to come up with a distinctive term to classify these. Best I could do was to refer to them as zones, which is a term I like a lot. They're sonic barriers, reproducible phenomena that can fill your ears and the room, intended probably as companions in the living of life, not necessarily as something to be consumed with perfect attention to detail and full clarity of mind. For a time they're capable of altering the sonic space, not unlike the way a lamp can make a room more cozy (although the amount of coziness available from these tracks will vary greatly - I am a maker of many lamps). A song is a platonic ideal that you can never quite grab all of and in that little distance between great and truly perfect is where you can locate the grace of being human (what's a nearly perfect rendition of a song? First thing that comes to mind is the Black Sabbath song "Changes" and the sublime Charles Bradley cover). A zone at its best on the other hand is only and completely that grace, an ochre handprint on the wall of the cave.

But what about you? What songs have you been writing lately? What phenomena have you captured?