In the first week, we were introduced to this unit and what the outcome would be by the end of it, which would be a digital space that showcases our work, demonstrating the importance of an online presence within the art world in its current climate, as to making our work accessible for possibly interested collaborators/employers. I do have qualms with this reliance, but it is not so much that can be argued with as much as it is the facts, as a lot of the underground circles I enjoy have been built from scenes specific to places and niches, and a lot of what is exciting to me about this is the need to seek people out and hunt down work, which gives the work more value to me personally is this removal of formality and encouragement for engagement on a personal level, but if the intent of the work is to actually be profitable and to be visable for employers, then this approach I like is very counterintuitive, obviously.

An inspiration for my approach to an online showcase portfolio would be to maybe do something like Lucy Johnson, who has created a space for her composition and soundtrack work on Bandcamp (https://lucyjohnson.bandcamp.com/music), separate from her more unfriendly Noise endeavours released through esoteric cassette labels, for example, her work as Smut or with Witchblood is released through Matching Head or Turgid Animal, which would not be findable next to these “professional” works. This is useful as it directs possible employers in one direction while still giving artistic freedom to create anything elsewhere, which is one of the many advantages of delegating aliases; it kind of filters out those not seeking out what you’re serving.

I do have an online presence already, on Instagram as @lamo.noise, which I use both to advertise my own work (mainly work as Silver Dove) and engage with other artists, but something I don’t have is a concise portfolio Website, which would be really useful since I do like to distribute a lot of music in a lot of different places, and I would like ideally to make my practice into my job, so a home base for these things would be great to get what I’m doing in one spot and easily visible for any collaborator/employer. My Instagram is already a bit like the type of presence I mentioned before; it is not presenting everything I’m doing, only things I deem to be bigger projects that I would like a new visitor to see, still allowing me to make things that hide off elsewhere when I’d like it to.

I don’t think I will have much difficulty with the website since I already run a website for my netlabel, which I code in HTML and host on the free platform Neocities (https://foxmusicawesome.neocities.org/), and I think for my portfolio, I will do the same, since Neocities ties me back to the netlabel roots and I admire the free ethic of the service. I still obviously have a lot to learn, mind you, my knowledge of HTML is extremely basic, but I would rather make something from scratch than use any of these template-based drag and drop services, just so I am learning something during the construction of the site and not just feeding it information, I want to learn how to make a site that looks professional, which my label site does not really adhere to, hence the URL.

We were shown some of the past students’ sites this session, and some of them were quite abstract for what I expect a portfolio site to be, which I think is probably good for an art portfolio to be, showing creativity for the design. A lot of them were quite barebones information-wise, I guess as a way to present the work without intervening much and keep the information compartmentalised to a different section. We were not told the grades given to the sites, mind you, so I’m not sure if this is the way to go or not, but it is something to definitely think about – how much needs explaining? And how much should I present? I have a ridiculous amount of output online, so I should figure out if I want this site to be a portal leading to all of them or to go with the approach I mentioned prior like Lucy Johnson, make this site just lead to work I would like employers to see, which gives the best first impression, but then the site is redundant if it is displaying the same information as my Instagram, but how much redundancy matters in the online landscape is a bit trivial also.

This week’s session was an off-site visit to the headquarters/home of SM-LL, whom I didn’t know I was aware of until we arrived, and I was surprised to see it was Lucia H Chung, whom I have seen play numerous times before in different settings (gigs for Sound Art, Noise, etc), and I would like to say I am a fan of! We learnt mostly about their history of record labels, mostly from Martin, who had quite a history within underground Techno-oriented scenes and was still actively putting out those kinds of materials, and it was very reinvigorating to just talk about music for an extended period of time with people so passionate about it. Martin seems to have a similar ethic that I do regarding art in encouraging this kind of messy/”outsider” approach and working around the blockade of self-imposed “quality” restrictions, encouraging music creation as an activity. One of his labels just called “the label” I liked it as it falls in line with some of the Netlabels my friends and I are/have been doing, encouraging this kind of ego-less, curation-less expression through anonymity, through this label being records cut without any information, just black label records, which I guess is a logical step for anonymous music.

Present in this visit was the persistence needed to make experimental music into a living, as well as to live by a strict political foundation that acknowledges where action can end, as everything around the label/group was non-conformist from an anarchist outlook, but they still kept day jobs to keep the lights on, as is obvious but still important to note, that art is not sustainable but that is because that is not the point, it is excercising a personal need, it is something that we feel like we have to be doing and work facilitates us being able to do that, making a living from this work is something that needs to be thoughtfully approached and somewhat “gamed”. Lucia, whom I would deem one of the bigger names in the London experimental scene, mentioned how long it took for her to start to get paid for gigs, which was quite surprising…

I was also made aware this week of the deadline for applications to the Iklektik show, which I have now applied to play at as a way to trial my set I have been working on based on “ostranenie“. I am pretty excited that it will be at Iklektic, since I have been to the old one and not to this new one, but they are having pretty wild gigs on in the coming months, so this feels like a good “in” of sorts and a good opportunity to blast my stuff, as well as to get to hear what everyone else is up to. My set is like really overwhelmingly pretty heavy ambient stuff sourced from a Fleetwood Mac song as a way to prove this hypothesis of obfuscation being further purification and therefore enhancement of its inherent qualities, which kind of ties together all of my work but adapts it to this chosen theme of defamiliarisation. Everything I’ve been doing this year in University has been this kind of Musical Purity Spiral, and it’s really allowed me to figure out that that is an overarching theme in everything I’ve ever done, and my view of Noise being entropy worship and my dissertation being related to the purest form of Noise being this state of absolute zero kind of abstracts it so that this stagnant state can be clawed at from anything, and I guess here I’m doing it with Fleetwood Mac since it feels right, and I’m excited to get the performance done to demonstrate this.

I’m also expecting the documentation for the performance to be far better than the performance I’m doing in Manchester, since the one in Manchester is far less professional and put on by just myself and my friend, so I mostly just want to get an audio recording since that’s what I like, so having a more “proper” video recording in Iklektik would be great to include in my portfolio, especially when the deadline for the portfolio site is one day after the set in Manchester, I doubt I will have it ready for display by that date but would like to be displaying something.

The off-site visit got me thinking about malleability as well, as far as sound as a career goes, and what I really would like to be doing after this course. I have spoken to friends and some family about using my technical skills to get experience through interning in radio back home in Liverpool, as London has given me a better appreciation for the art form through the Radio module in my second year and really what I am doing with the Noise “soundscape” kind of work is applicable all over, sound is sound regardless. I also am quite tight with a newer venue back home called Commune that I feel like would be open to having me helping with the Sound there, since often it is pretty rough as it is a DIY space. The overarching idea, though, is that my interests can be applied in these situations without needing to compromise; it still embodies what I am interested in without being that thing, and it also makes apparent that my main aspirations lie in expanding the music scene in Liverpool. I don’t think London is the place for me, it has felt like inserting myself into something already established, it doesn’t feel right, even though the community is much more there.

This week’s session was hosted by Steve, who has more experience with the more on the business side of things than the artistic, so he gave us a more objective reality on our practice. His main point of advice was to diversify what we are doing in order to cover as many bases as possible, being able to make commercial sound work in different settings for different mediums, as to spread ourselves throughout as many income sources as possible, as obviously working purely on art for a living is not a realistic living. He also gave us some pointers on starting our own business, which I found interesting for the possibility of self-employment, which I have never really thought of as a tangible goal before, but it was in all honesty, a bit daunting and difficult to digest since it was so stark with the business element. I had difficulty following after the session got too statistical, but he gave us a good list regarding who to contact regarding grant applications and overall good advice.

I started working on my site today. I made a domain using Neocities, as I previously mentioned, since I already have knowledge of how the service works and how to create a site in HTML, the domain being papertears.neocities.org, which is a reference to The Haters’ Paper Tears 7″ and relates to the previously mentioned entropy obsession. I just didn’t want it to be a domain name that is my real name, I don’t like that idea of the “business” being a monetisation of myself as this kind of cartoon-ified version of myself rather than related to what I am making and doing creatively, I know perhaps that is a misstep on my part but something about this being a public connection to my real person to what I make online rubs me the wrong way, I would rather it be the other way around so that those who know the real person will know the art from that, if that makes sense.

Anyway, I asked my friend Laura for some help on the site formatting since she helps a bit with my other site, and she helped me understand the importance of creating format prefaces in the style section so that I can format the page without it being this overcomplicated cluster, kind of creating these presets I can reuse throughout the site. I don’t think the site has to be too complex. I mentioned previously that there should be this balance between professionalism and creativity with portfolio sites, but I should first be focusing on what I am actually capable of, and expanding on it later, as I don’t particularly have any crazy ideas or really want it to be particularly difficult. I wanted to see if it was worth having an alias or release list like other artists do, like on Steve Roden’s site or Joe Colley’s having this really extensive list of releases and labels is beneficial but, as I mentioned with the example of Lucy Johnson, I quite like the segregation of work rather than having everything all in one place, I don’t think I would want an employer to see everything as a lot of it from when I was younger I would not want to be representative of the rest of my work. Regardless, the site is functional now. The next step is to do these drafts of my bio and project descriptions and articulate exactly what it is that I do now that the site is in a state where I can just fill in whatever necessary information, and it looks quite nice, all things considered.

This week’s session was kind of just to push us into making sure we are keeping up with work and that we are in a spot where we are comfortable, which I don’t feel like I am, but I don’t feel like I ever am. I’m always lagging behind, but I’m happy with the work I am doing regardless. The album I’ve done for my portfolio sounds really good still, I’ve been touching up obsessively this last song I want on it since I want it to be a full representation of how my stuff sounds and the spaces it occupies, it is structured as this softer, earthy sound that suddenly expands and crashes down as this cathartic release after an hour of lethargic, depressive ambient, and then slowly eats itself back into that spot again. My main issue is making it feel right, making it not too obtuse so that it is not too Harsh, since the purpose is to entice people into liking this genre I love and demonstrate the Harsh sound not as violent but as this sublime, psychedelic oversensuousness. My younger brother and I started working on the box for it as well last week when I visited home, since I wanted to package the album in this origami card box, and it was actually way more tough than I thought, but we got the template working enough to make one out of paper that we could write the dimensions all over.

This week, though, I was able to rehearse my set for the final year show in Iklektik for next week, which I have been making materials for throughout the year around the theme of defamiliarisation, resculpting a Fleetwood Mac into this Sunroof! style psychedelic noise drone endeavour. It has been a complete nightmare regarding my laptop though since it has been losing functionality gradually to the point where running Bespoke and VCV Rack lags my CPU to the point where it glitches and stutters in a horrible manner, so I recorded some takes of me playing them like I would live and laid them out in FL studio instead, so that I can have so effects to play with in there so it’s not the compromise of a backing track, and I can play my noise and guitar while those sounds strobe on. I did a lot of rehearsals in the Composition Room so I could explore the sound at a good volume, and Louie and I are going to do a session where we crit eachothers performance in W401 next week as a kind of final rehearsal session, but I got Song from the masters course to give me a little crit beforehand too, which as usual turned into more of a Jam, but loosened up the structure for the performance, freeing it up so that it is not so strict sections. Song assured me that the stagnance that I genuinely strive for is this slow crawl, which I’m very glad about since my ideal is for the sound to not move ever, and this is not a hindrance for other people, it does just enough for the audience to be engaged, and it’s not just self-amusement.

I am also playing a Power Electronics gig next week in Manchester the day before the Iklektik gig (extremely micro-tour of sorts), which I have made some demo CDrs of this last track (it’s 40 minutes) I previously mentioned in order to have something to sell to make the money back for the Train, as well as leaving my email so that if any feedback comes through, I can hear it, as it is my main concern at the moment is that track. The track before it I tried a couple of times to create more action with the worry of the same thing, that I was being boring, but everything seemed to detract from what I have, it seems to demonstrate the trance-like blackout hypnosis of Wall Noise through a Guitar Ambient format, and I find it really poignant and emotional, I found it a bit difficult to work on to be honest because of this strong emotional feeling. This week has been a bit exhausting and a bit of a proper kick into shape as to finalising everything, but I’m pretty excited. The amount of time I’ve had for this stuff has made me more confident than I would usually be, as I have pretty much been accumulating material for these projects for months. I just need to make sure the execution is spot on. (I started my Bio briefly this week, too, but it’s not particularly great, I’ve been putting it off because I hate this kind of self-gloating stuff.)

Today’s class was covered by Jose, who showed us a lot of transgressive music with the idea of showing us artists with diverse practices, to show us that we can still make commercial work without compromising on creativity, specifically speaking on John Duncan who is still working today on quite public and well-regarded work with large ensembles even after his infamous Pleasure Escape album, which to me was a really baffling thing to include in a lecture since I was already aware of it, since it is an alleged necrophillia recording (I don’t believe in the story’s validity but I would expect his affirmations of its truth in most cases to be a career ender). Still, it did actually make a lot of sense, especially regarding things I’m doing; it’s nowhere near on that level, but I’m in between my very aggressive music and my very meditative music, and I like keeping them separate so as not to compromise the perception of either and allocate them space separately. I have been really ill at the moment, so I didn’t make the crit, I could barely really talk and being there for the first half of the class made me feel even worse, but I have been working on everything still.

The gigs last week went excellently, the Power Electronics show even though it was very last-minute, was pretty well attended, and I sold all of the CDrs I made pretty quickly, one of the people in attendance was an old-guard Noise artist as well which was pretty exciting, and I got landed another gig there in September alongside some of that scene from it, which I’m pretty excited about. The Iklektik show for my portfolio work went far better than I was hoping. With all the setbacks, it just all came out pretty fantastic, and even though the mix wasn’t so great, I felt like there wasn’t much I would change, other than a really garish solo, which I will not make stick out so starkly on the Manchester date for that performance. It was one of those things where, after playing it, I was stuck in this state of ecstasis for the rest of the night, which is fantastic. Lots of good feedback helped me kill the nerves around the hand-in, which I’m more scared of than the performance, which I’m glad about. It is very strange that I’m such a nervous person except when playing music but I also need to get around that since I do use it as a crutch.

Next week is Bandcamp Friday, so I’m planning to get the album for my other project out on that day to get it the most attention it can get before I want to roll out the CDrs. I made a couple of the boxes, and the materials I have are way more irritating than what I had back home. The sides don’t stay together so well, so I had to tape them, but I really like the tacky look of it. This kind of thing, to me, connects me back to the activity-like “play” that I want my work to embody; it is also very therapeutic to be doing these really micro adjustments to something; it is very representative of the process of the sound in the creation of the object. I love it. I got my Ukranian friend Kole Grey to do some artwork a little bit ago, since the artwork my friend Angel made, we want to use for a sound collaboration, and I adore Kole’s stuff so much. He drew me a panel of Hachi, who is a character from a manga that I’ve been using as this martyr/mascot as an emblem of purity for years now, and I’m glad that I have a network of people who know my stuff well enough now that I can ask for artwork and receive something absolutely what I wanted.

I have also been touching up the required artist CV and Bio for the website, as what I had prior was basically a bunch of bullet-point ideas; it still needs some work since I think it comes across as pretty unfriendly and maybe too pompous or militant.

“I make music about my life and my life about music. I play music as amplified sensitivity; noise as oversensuous kinetic humanity, it is sound from action and the choice of inaction, immediate compositions allow me to exorcise and explore emotion beyond language. Stagnant composition allows for obsessive purification of emotion and time; it is as much about a creative outlet as much a freezing of time. It is a result of listening to other people. DIY or die.”

The “I make music about my life and my life about music” is a miremembering of bvdub’s bandcamp bio “I make music about my life. I make music about life. I make music for life.” I think I like mine more, it is something that I wanted to be the subject of the album at least in part, being this oroborous media consumption for artists, it is not always negative but in my life it has been as someone who has grown up listening to a lot of Noise and Industrial related music, but now that I have lived some more and less parasocially my relationship with these things are more positive. “Immediate compositions” is a reference to Loren Connors, who frames his improvisations as such, which I find very apt and beautiful.

The artist’s overview was really bizarre. I really hate writing about myself in this third person; it feels so egotistical and wrong. I have written it out, but I don’t really like it. I will be going over it a few times before the hand-in, definitely, and trying to detach myself more from it. It seems like the idea is to just list accomplishments, but I have written it out in sentences since I think that works/flows better. If that is a misstep, then I’m fine with it; it is packed with as much as I could fit.

This is the final week before the hand-in, so the main thing this week has been getting everything up to scratch. The appraisal was something that I was struggling with a bit until I made the realisation of what it could be, and instead of making it about me personally (my practice) I made it centered around something that I actually wanted to do after Uni which was re-convert the Metal center by my house in Liverpool into an experimental music venue, since it has had really sparsely littered experimental music shows that kind of have slowed down completely, and I would love to keep going by bringing the Northern scene I am frequently visiting Newcastle to see down to Liverpool alongside my friends from Netlabels who I’ve been pestering to play there for a while. It is located within Edge Hill Train Station and has occasionally Sound Arts related work on like Sound Walks around the area and the like, but a few years ago these Noise adjacent shows were happening that I wanted to continue the routine of within my circle of artists, since it not only allows me to get over people from outside the UK to play music, but encourages those locally to participate and create within a time that I think it is especially important. The only other proper experimental specialist music venue is also in that area, but it is a private affair since they are running it out of their house. I would like to make it public and inviting for people, as there was nothing really happening around the time I was getting into it as a kid.

After university, it is apparent that what I like doing creatively is generally not so profitable, and I discovered that it is fine since it is actually very malleable, and through my studies, I have found that it embodies far more than I initially thought. I like the Sound Tech side of things as I generally enjoy sound, so it would be most appropriate to be doing either studio or live sound as these are commerical applications for that love, and I like curating music, and helping my friend put on some events in Manchester and doing the sound at his events has made me realise I could be seriously putting on music events, since there is especially now a lot more happening in the Northern England scene than there was while I was getting into this music, it is a great opportunity to insert myself more and put on people that I want to be seeing and make Liverpool a location for this kind of esoteric interest.

I overhauled the site with everything new, since the album project I was working on just released for Bandcamp Friday, and I got back the video for my performance, I added the links and write-ups for those projects. It is looking pretty nice, I am quite confident about the hand in that it is in a good spot and that I can focus on the Manchester date for the set I have been working on for my portfolio project, which I’m playing on the 6th. I’m very happy with the reception of the album so far, as I’m getting lots of positive feedback (I got enough money from it to pay for the travel to Manchester, which is nice). I have been told by my friend who stayed over with me that the CD box set needs more work so I have decided to take that off of what I am handing in, I personally like it but I am thinking for a “professional” portfolio it should be focused wholly on the music, since that is definitely the strongest point, and the physical package would drag it down if executed like it is now. After the hand-in, I will most likely sell some of the boxes to people and make enough in time for the Silver Dove show in Poland at the end of the month.

I think everything is up to scratch. I was stressed out about this since it’s so close to the other hand-in and the show which I’m mainly focusing on, but because they are so joint at the hip, it has been smooth and is looking good. The site will be useful for a professional-looking presentation of my work, and what I have made recently is definitely the best my stuff has sounded, hopefully ever.