the way forward

I want to use this space as a place to document and develop some of my ideas. Perhaps to practice writing a bit. I'm currently facing a number of challenges to my work. Over the next several months I hope to simplify my creative environment, my mental workbench, so that I'm able to work with only a few tools and produce something that is both interesting to me and useful to others.

I'm feeling a conflict between my purely experimental interests, and the world I'm working in, the small audience I've developed. On the one hand, I want my work to be very pure, to be the embodiment of only a few ideas, to be narrow and deep. On the other hand, I resist the idea of presenting the world with art that is too cold, too intellectual, too demanding. I want to make music which makes people feel good. I want to make a CD which people want to put on. I want to make music which people want to live with. And I want to present a clear evolution from the work I've presented previously. I want my next album to sound a bit like my last, but to grab some ideas and take them further. I want to nail that combiniation of intellectual excitement, rigorous exploration, and visceral satisfaction.

I'm intrigued by a bit of what I've read about Joseph Albers. From what I can tell, his values are somewhat similar to those I've been coming to. A few Albers concepts:

- develop imagination, not self-expression. Art is about vision, not expression.
- ORDER CLARITY CLEANLINESS

I see my decision to focus on programming as partly a technique to increase my reliance on imagination over expression. Building one's own tools, whether they be conceptual or physical (a fuzzy distinction inside a computer) is a type of vision. Perhaps it can be understood as the only type of vision. This value emphasis seems directly opposite to the values of the improvising musician. Purely improvised music can be thought of as pure expression, with a complete absence of vision. Maybe vision and expression are two different manifestations of the same thing, distinguished only by the time-frame in which they act. Is vision long-term expression? Is expression short-term vision? By overwhelmingly valuing vision over expression, is Albers valuing thought over emotion? If so, I wonder what his motivation for this is. Is thought somehow a "higher", less animalistic phenomenon than emotion, an indicator of civilization? I wonder...

Order, Clarity, Cleanliness. Such German-sounding concepts! I don't know how much I want to embrace these. Well, actually, I think I want to embrace these quite a lot. I could certainly use a bit more physical cleanliness. Somehow related to these is my feeling for the beauty of complexity arising from the interactions of simple elements. I suppose Albers would probably feel the same way as me about this.

To change gears a bit, I'd like to think about my own current approaches, what's working, what isn't. I'm heavily involved in experimenting with micro-loops now. They create fascinating, interwoven textures. Asawa's knit wire structures feel akin to what I'm interested in now -- heavy emphasis on repetition. Simple structures multipled to create a larger whole. Flocks of birds is a metaphor I continue to return to. Listening to recordings I've made, it's very clear that my textures are interesting only when there are multiple layers. My individual birds are not beautiful. It's only when they move as a group that they become interesting.

While trying to move forward with this focused, somewhat minimalist approach, I'm working to stay within the constraints of the "electronica" genre. This means that I want my music to be physical. It's meant to be played loud. I like for it to rattle the intestines a bit. There are other requirements I feel I must meet. I feel like some of my music must have a pulse. I feel like some of my music must have strong, well-developed melodies. These requirements are based more on my own history, my own strengths, and the current scene I'm operating in, than on any logical extension of the experiements I'm persuing. I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I think that this dilutes my work, that I could go farther if I let go of any ideas of which skills I want to use, and what my current (very small) audience and community want to hear. On the other hand, I've been leary of "art of art's sake" for a number of years. I don't mind the idea of seasoning what might otherwise be a rather saltless soup of experimental ideas.