the sausage factory

as you can see on the right side of my blog i have decided to start twittering my new project. so far i’m about 2 weeks into getting my chops back after spending the last 8 months editing, recording, and promotion of my retrace our steps EP and life's too short CD. the whole process that doesn’t really lend itself to creativity and i find it practically impossible to work on new pieces while recording, editing, mixing and promoting my older ones. so now as i’m winding down the promotion i’m getting ready to start a new project by each day transcribing some music that interests me.

the goal of this is to shed some light on the sausage factory and to make the complex simple by keeping a journal of the my process. twitter makes the most sense for just jotting down what i might be doing on any given day. blog posts like this are more to organize the “big picture”(like right now) and give some insight, but my main intent is to document how i get things done. hopefully by shedding a little light i can encourage others to share their own “dark arts” of composing. (i'm sure if you asked 50 composers what they do you will probably get 50 answers).

composers are a strange bunch. i can hang out with my mused friends and we swap our successes and failures, but i have found that composers are not really type of people to hang out and talk shop. we like to dish on the politics and philosophy that surround art music, but i think its like we each think we are guarding the secrets to our own personal alchemy and are afraid to expose our process to to the masses for fear that me might get called out for being a fraud. its too bad, the sharing of ideas, strategies, techniques and “best practices” is a great way to pass on the tools of our craft, yet the most common transmission of this information is only to our private students and not to each other. for me to fill this void, i have made up for this by gravitating to a small group assorted writers, artists and filmmakers that i try to hang out with on a weekly basis.

so here are some of background details about this project. i’m setting off in a new direction by changing my process up a bit. i’m writing music for a side project that is going to embrace my more electronic tendencies. i listen to quite a bit of it and am interested in the possibilities of what it can offer.

the first step started during the fall i have been making playlists of quite a bit of electronic music that i like and have been transcribing a piece a day over the last 2 weeks. i have mainly been figuring out how to make these sounds and timbres using my laptop as an instrument. right now its more of a performance based process, instead of transcribing a piece on paper, i am performing it and looping using the laptop (ableton live/macbookpro). so far i'm getting an idea of the strengths and weaknesses of using a laptop in live performance and what a ensemble would look and sound like that blends acoustic and electronic instruments.

the first project i’m working on is a deconstruction of david toub’s this piece intentionally left blank. the main reason of doing a deconstruction is quite simple, i want to get a handle on the technology with a piece i know really well (and like) and play around in its universe. i already have “deconstructed” the piece to its basic harmonic units/gestures and i’m going to turn them into loops that i can perform on my laptop (think a terry riley solo performance using modern technology) i figure as i get used to the technology i'll start to write more "original's", but i figure i better walk before i run (and right now i'm crawling).