I have had a piece on the back burner for a while that is coming to life and I am so excited. I’m so drawn to interacting with sound, playing keyboard and using text in different ways at all the same time. This is why I wanted to learn Ableton. Working on this new piece over the last couple of days has me really fucking psyched for what I am doing and figuring out how do do 8000000 things at once with software. I just found myself speaking, triggering vocal effects on my qwerty keyboard, triggering drums, loops, glitchy whatsits and basslines on my APC40, recording new loops into Ableton clip slots, and playing live piano/noise lines on my Yamaha S90 XS all without stopping the flow of what was happening. I’ve just been spending so much of the last year learning this software, and these moments when I am suddenly at one–living and breathing with a piece of fucking SOFTWARE and a bunch of buttons and keys—— I’m just amazed and thrilled about creating music and sound so effortlessly!
Anyway this piece is in much the same vein as “When It Will Bloom” and “Shadowing” though it seems like the text and music are interacting with one another in a much more organic and relaxed way. The whole piece just erupts at the end in this swell of lush static noise that completely made my morning.
Summer is upon me and for the next couple of months I have so much time to write. The plan is to continue writing with this theme of text/electronics/piano/strings and complete and evening length piece with an accompanying album. Fun and spooky to say it out loud.
Laurie Anderson’s words have been in my mind for the past couple of days:
“No one will ever ask you to do the thing you really want to do…do not wait for this to happen, it will never happen…so just think of what you’d like to do, what you dream of doing, and then just start doing it.”
Here’s the clip from whence the words came, with thanks to Madge Weinstein for making me aware of this.
