Regarding yesterday’s post I have a few thoughts I want to add.
Since writing that post I came up with several ideas that would be fun. One of those ideas, and perhaps my favorite one, will require some engineering, although the concept is simple enough. Food for body and soul. I thought of the age old trope of baking a key into a loaf of bread, which is then smuggled to the captive who can at last free themselves. I think you will already see where this is going. A loaf of sourdough bread with music inside. The problem is the temperature… CDs can withstand quite a bit of heat but bread is baked at 450º. I looked for industrial memory cards that might be able to better cope with some heat but haven found anything…. yet. To me it only works if the music is baked into the loaf – cutting the finished loaf and slipping a memory card or CD inside just doesn’t feel right. I should test how hot the inside of a loaf gets, if my meat thermometer goes that high. The temp in the center may be lower than 450º but probably not low enough. The only solution I could think of was to put a piece of paper containing a URL into a small metal container that gets baked into the bread. I don’t love that, though. If you have an idea that would help me, please put it in the comments.
Another idea I had yesterday was to sew a CD and a booklet of some kind into a piece of fabric. Similar to the bread that has to be cut open, the fabric would have to be cut, or the thread removed, in order to get to the music.
It would be really really really cool to grow something with memory inside it. Japanese farmers can grow square pumpkins and French farmers grow pears inside a bottle… so…
As you can see I am not aiming to sell memory sticks dipped in gold or anything like that. But it would be cool to create a special package once in a while.
Drops like rhythms on a leaf. Like sheet music for dense chords. Lines and pearls. This would be an interesting painting at 2.4 x 3.6 meters.
I might have a title for the Rain album. I also discovered that I already have nine songs that are in different stages of finish. All of them have rhythm guitars and some are completely done. When one starts to walk one doesn’t notice the distance until one turns around and looks back.
My favorite way to work with music is, perhaps, akin to Sumi-e – painting with sumi ink on rice paper. The strokes have to flow quickly and the brush can’t linger anywhere or it might break through the rice paper. At least that’s the way I understand the process.
In this case, on Thursday evening I had played around with four chords that I could play in such a way that all of them had the open E as the top note. D maj 7, Bm, G, A9. Of those four chords only the last one would normally be played with an open E at the top. I have always liked a top note that connects several chord changes. Sounds great in string sections. While the violas and cellos define the chord change, some of the violins keep the connecting note going.
Yesterday morning I wanted to give this idea a go. Sometime last month, I had put together a rain rhythm, with a tempo of 65BPM, that also included the call of corvids on Jon’s street in Santa Fe (he let me use his recording) and that tempo worked for my idea. I played the chord changes as an arpeggio. Then I played the E as a harmonic, to fall exactly where the open string was played at the end of every chord. Next I improvised some melodies. Et voilá, two hours later I walked to a favorite cafe for lunch, listening to the piece on repeat.
What do you hear? I hear a late Summer’s afternoon. Perhaps one sits, happy and satisfied after a late lunch, under the awning of a cafe when a rain shower starts. While the drops are falling, sunlight is breaking through the clouds, filtering through the leaves of tall trees, which makes everything shimmer. Corvids are having a conversation. There is absolutely no need to get up and do anything. Just play the music again…
I think when creating something, anything, it’s important to mute the judgement section of one’s brain. You know, the part of us that says it’s not complicated enough, it’s not impressive enough, it just won’t do! Those are the thoughts that make the brush break through the rice paper and ruin the movement.
Or, as Nike says, Just Do It. You can always bin it later. :-)
Did some work on a new piece this morning. This is the HuHeartDrive Mobile in situ in Lisbon. The Genelec are powered monitors I bought in the mid Nineties. Carried them here in a suitcase a year ago. I use them to play music in the apartment, normally plugging them straight into the computer. In this case they are plugged into the headphone output of the MixPre6. The second screen, on the left, is my iPad and it’s attached to a foldable magnetic stand by a company called Lululook. I carried the stand in my carryon bag. Left of the laptop are the MixPre6 and the Euclid IEMs, to the right is a vertical Bluetooth mouse by Logitech.
We pulled the album Fete from its digital distributor at the beginning of this year, if you were wondering what happened to it. All other HuHeartDrive albums are distributed by UnitedMasters and I wanted Fete to be grouped with them, rather than with the preceding SSRI albums. Fete remains on of my favorite albums and puts a smile on my face every time I give if a listen. The re-release will occur on 21 April.
