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.