Postcard Helicopters

I finally finished the music video, Axiom[atic] and posted it to YouTube. The video focuses on the kinetic sculpture at the WTA Terminal in downtown Bellingham, WA, which was made by Anthony Howe. I shot the video several months ago, but it took me a while to get the music just right.

I suppose this qualifies as a lo-fi video since I shot it with my digital still camera in Video Mode. That’s the main reason why it’s more square than rectangular. The other reason is that I’m still learning how to use Sony Vegas Movie Studio to make these videos.

The video is in two parts and the songs are the two tracks, At The Inner Circle Parts one and two. My goal was to make a quiet, hypnotic or trance-like piece that was relaxing to watch and listen to.

I hope you enjoy it.

I made a few quick switcheroos to the website, today. Since I’m not releasing a lot of albums, I decided to switch places between the albums and blogs pages.

I may not update the blog on a daily basis, but it does update more frequently than the albums page and seems like a better candidate for a home page to the website.

In other news, I’ve spent the last few days working on another music-related website that I’m really excited about. It means that there is a lot of stuff for me to learn if I’m going to do it justice, but I think I can do a graduated roll-out as I learn each new step. I’ll post an official link once I get the basics sorted out, and maybe you’ll enjoy that site as much as I do!

Tonight, I was watching High Fidelity for the I-don’t-know-how-many-th time, and when they started talking about Top Five Songs to play at funerals, I was suddenly inspired to make a list.

I don’t know if this would be my definitive list, but for tonight, here’s what that Final Playlist would look like:

1. The Talking Heads – This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)
2. R.E.M. – The Great Beyond
3. The Beatles – Flying
4. Brian Eno – Always Returning
5. Maria McKee – Life is Sweet/Afterlife

While it’s true the last item is actually two songs, the first leads directly into the second on the album, so it’s more like one extra-long song.

I wanted to find links online that I could use to post a playlist of these tunes, but I haven’t had the best of luck. I was doing pretty well on blip.fm but, wouldn’t you know it, my set closer wasn’t working so that kinda blows the whole thing.

So – if you have these songs or if you can find these songs; cue ‘em up, and listen to my High Fidelity-inspired Funeral Playlist.

What would yours be?

Well, here’s a first. An audio blog post!

Why for? Well, there’s a bit of a story behind it, but I don’t want to go in depth as it’s also covered in the audio blog.

Recently, my main computer died and it’s taken a couple of weeks to get around to connecting my USB audio interface to my little netbook computer.

This audio blog post is a result of finally making that connection and figuring out how to make it work.

A couple of administrative points on the post you’re about to hear:

When I’m groping around trying to describe the “different plug-in thing” I mean the combined headset/mic that came with a very old copy of the voice recognition software that AOL offered about a decade ago.

When I say “Audio Techna” I actually mean to say “Audio Technica.” Sorry.

Also, when I say “music technology” you will realize I mean “music terminology” instead.

Again, it’s all off-the-cuff so, oopsie.

And so, without further ado, here’s the premier Postcard Helicopters audio blog post.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Yes, I know I’m late for my Day 90 Update. Things got a little hectic there at the end. To answer what must be the most important question, I didn’t do half-bad once the Challenge came to a close.

I imagine it became apparent toward the end that I was losing heart and also losing steam. On the one hand, I was disappointed to have only seven songs to show for three whole months of songwriting, but on the other I was telling myself that at least it was an improvement over last year when I didn’t post a single damned thing.

I think there was an element of “Push me? Fuck you!” going on inside, where I actively resisted writing songs, and not with just a demurred, “no thanks” but with a definite coarsely-stated pushback against the sense of being bossed around. I’m not sure I have a cure for that, at this point.

By the time 17 September rolled around, I had stopped writing music completely. That’s the last date that shows up in my project files list. There were several unfinished pieces tucked away, going all the way back to 4 July, but I had stopped working on them. Some felt closer to being finished than others. Some were merely drum patterns or recordings of guitar riffs. And some were just experiments in sound (“Hello, Typewriter Room!”) that didn’t yield the desired results. It became easier and easier to come up with excuses for not working on songs. It was a pretty picture to take, lemme tell you.

Finally, the countdown clock was in the single digits. Nine hours left. Eight hours left. Seven hours left.

It was at this point I decided to give it one last shot. The previous day I’d collected, into a single folder, the rendered versions of all the projects I’d begun but had yet to finish or otherwise add to my list of posted songs. With seven hours left, I listened to all of them and picked those I felt were “good enough” to stand as unfinished demos – songs which held enough flavor of what the finished piece might sound like that I wouldn’t feel like a total noob for posting them.

I was expecting to get three, maybe four songs. I ended up with eight.

Hey! Not bad! “They may yet be of some use to us…”

I opted to brew up some coffee to help me through this home-stretch sprint, but first I opened up Reaper on the music computer so it would be ready and waiting. Making coffee is such an automatic task that my mind began to wander. Words popped into my head. I was smart enough to write them down and sleep-deprived enough to not censor them. That’s not to say I didn’t work on them – I did – I pushed the words around a bit to see if I could get something nice-sounding out of them, but doing this without making a judgement on whether it was a good or a bad song.

And that seemed to be all the momentum I needed. Well, that and a specific goal. When I added the orphan audio tracks to my 50/90 profile page they took me from seven to fifteen songs. That put me ten songs shy of the halfway mark. Could I really reach that point? The decision came so automatically I didn’t experience it as a conscious one; instead, I knew without-knowing that if I were to reach that goal, it would have to be by writing only lyrics. For some reason, this focused all my attention and energies into doing something I had been longing to do, yet had also thrown up such tremendous barriers against doing, that I was sure I would never surmount them. But what pleased and surprised me more than I expected, was how much fun I had writing all these lyrics in such a short amount of time.

Part of the trick was to dare myself to write the worst lyrics possible. Try to see just how low I could go. That became one of my songs. It was my permission song and it allowed me the luxury of failing badly, to challenge and push me to intentionally fail and, on that night, it actually worked. Song lyrics rolled out, one after the other in the time left remaining. It was speed-writing. It was stream-of-consciousness. But it was also a kind of non-judgemental revision that let me refine the lyrics to some extent but without becoming bound up in knots over them. As if the guiding principles were “getting it done” and “good enough is better than perfect.” It’s a subtle distinction I’m trying to articulate, to say that I put the words on the screen and then played with them for a while but somehow avoided that cramping brick wall of censorship that brings everything to a halt.

I suppose anyone who has been through this experience knows something about what I’m doing such a lousy job of articulating. You could probably call it a Peak Experience in creativity; of a period of going with the Flow, and perhaps something that shouldn’t be examined too closely. Just simply say, “thank you!” and move on. But understanding how this works and figuring out a way to describe it and tap into it more willfully is a pursuit I’m invested in.

As a result of this, I managed to write lyrics for ten more songs, and in that way, I was able to post Twenty-Five Songs to this year’s 50/90 Challenge, and to do so with a whole hour remaining.

Wow.

Jumping from seven to twenty-five songs in six hours. Ten completely new songs and eight compositions that I’d previously judged too harshly as being “not good enough.” There are lessons for me in this and I’d like to think I was smart enough for them to sink in quickly, but I know myself a little better than to expect that.

It does seem clear, however, that deadlines can motivate me more in the short-term than they can over longer periods of time. I don’t find that quality completely appealing. I would prefer a more steady pace, simply because I expect that it would be more sustainable in the long run. It’s nice to know I can still sprint from time to time, but I guess I would rather be fit enough to complete a marathon, as well.

Since this post has rambled on far longer than I expected, I’ll save the actual posting of the songs for a later entry.

Well, it’s clear that I’m running out of steam before the challenge is officially over. It probably doesn’t help that I’m so far behind. I don’t recall working on any of the in-process songs at all this week. There is one song that I’d like to finish off before the end, so that could become Song Number Eight. Eep… It means my showing this year will be less than one fifth of the stated goal. Still, it’s an improvement over last year, so I am pleased about that.

I want to hold off on any analysis of the challenge until it’s over, so instead of getting to that, I’ll call this entry “good enough” for now.

On an unrelated note, it seems that a few people have gone to visit the video for Floating Out to Sea and that makes me feel good. I submitted it as a Video Response to the original, sped-up clip, but it wasn’t approved by the NASA TV YouTube account. It would’ve been a nice ego-boost to see it linked there, but I tell myself they don’t approve any video responses to avoid problems and complaints.

Well, I should be back to report on the 50/90 Challenge in 5 days, 09 hours, 36 minutes and 32 seconds.

Oops!

With all the fuss around posting the music video on Friday, I forgot to write the weekly update on my 50/90 Challenge progress.

I don’t have any more songs ready to upload, today, but I have two strong contenders for being complete before the end of the month. At this point, they are instrumental tracks, and I can’t tell if they will morph into songs with lyrics before I’ve finished having my way with them. Heh.

I have lots of lyric fragments lying around, but I haven’t worked them up, at all. I had the image in my head that I would write the music first, and then sort through these fragments and pick something that seemed to gybe with the vibe and work up a full lyric that way.

That decision may have been in error.

I also have several started-but-abandoned music tracks going back to the beginning of this challenge. Stuff that I worked on for a few hours or a few days and either lost interest in or couldn’t develop very far. I don’t know the number off the top of my head, but I suspect it’s less than a dozen pieces.

As the challenge comes to a close, I am tempted to push out all these unfinished pieces; not masquerading as songs, but to call them unfinished projects, incompletes, or some such nomenclature to say, “this is what I was working on, but I never finished them.”

The thought of doing that also has me re-evaluating my decision to try and post as much work-in-progress as I can as part of the journey for this website. One of the guiding ideas was to show the route from where I stepped on the path all the way through the various waystations I pass along the way as I pursue my musical goals. The idea was that it would be a chronicle of how I did it as it happens instead of re-visiting that journey at a later date and in that way being able to tell only the parts that make me look good (hint: I don’t think my inability to complete this year’s 50/90 Challenge would constitute “looking good” in that retrospective view).

Part of the problem with this approach is that I sometimes feel self-conscious about posting work that may not sound very good. I’ve been able to do it in the past by using F.A.W.M. and, now, 50/90 as containers for that work. But I feel slightly more squirrely about that during the “off-season” time. What this often leads to is not writing any music at all, since there is a conflict between the issues of will it be “good enough” to go online versus upholding some kind of completeness mandate. A part of my brain expects that all of the work will come out perfectly formed on the first try, and is very critical when that doesn’t happen: as if I were suffering from a momentary outbreak of bad manners. But I think most people are familiar with this internal editor or critic, so that’s not really news.

Perhaps it just calls for a slight adjustment of the trajectory. Perhaps I simply need to make it clear that those tracks are Works In Progress, sticky-notes, or sketches to go toward future projects. I think I just want a way to acknowledge that I’m approaching this process as much as a curator as a musician, and I worry that it gives the impression that when I post a song it’s from a place that sez, “Lookie what I just made! Innit Greeeaaat?” I think the frustrated Librarian in me wants to see it all go up, properly catagorized of course, and once it becomes a polished and refined thing, then I can crow about it.

I suppose one way to work that out is to keep the sketches or work-in-progress stuff in this blog but then to add another page that includes those Look! See! tracks; perhaps in some sort of jukebox format.

This is all just thinking out loud. I’m not sure how I plan to resolve this, but I wanted to at least speak toward the issue of why I post what I do and what I think about it.

And look at that – the clock has turned into Sunday and I’m late with this post. Another “in the moment” that would probably vanish to a more polished retrospective.

I made this music video at the end of August, but have been sitting on it since then because I wanted to post a different video first. How dumb is that? If the other video isn’t ready to be posted, that’s no reason to hold up the queue, right?

I found the video file on the NASA website. It turns out they are generally in Public Domain, so I now have a whole bunch more that I can work with for future projects.

This particular video was actually posted at a much faster speed. I slowed it down to try and get an idea of what it might’ve looked like in real time to perform this looping maneuver of the ISS, and when I did that, it just clicked as a perfect piece of video to accompany the song I had finished the day before. It was the fastest music video I’ve ever made – just stretch it to the length of the song, add the title cards and, there ya go!

Here’s the finished product.

Over the past few years, I’ve been trying to come up with the right phrase to describe just what kind of music I do. It’s really a tricky thing to sort out. Every few months I’d try out a new catchphrase to see if it fit. I was never truly sold on any of them. I was simply hoping that I’d stumble onto one that would work out. But in the end they would disappoint me by being, to varying degrees, just not right.

Part of the problem with finding the proper catchphrase, or slugline, is that it’s often used to introduce people to your particular musical style. It’s part of that Howdy Conversation when you meet someone new, and so, it’s helpful to have a phrase that’s somehow catchy or memorable. The exchange often goes something like this:

Them: So – what do you do?

Me: I write music.

Them: Really? What kind of music?

And that’s where it all comes to a screeching halt.

I couldn’t seem to come up with a concise way to talk about the kind of music I make. I would ramble on about aspects of it that confused or bored people in that first casual Howdy. It generally took a long time to get it all out over multiple conversations and, sometimes, a few drinks. But in that first Howdy Conversation there really isn’t a lot of time available to go that deeply into it. This is why it’s useful to have a short saying that you can share with someone to give them a picture of what you’re work is like. Some people call this an Elevator Pitch, and I’ve been stymied as to how I can distill the essence of what I do into twenty words or less, and it felt like I was never gonna figure it out.

Until now.

Intimate Electronica with a touch of Synthpop

(plus some Squiggly Bits on the side)

In terms of a visual format, that is how it should read: as a main slugline with a parenthetical phrase on the line below. I generally have my fingers in one of these three musical pies at any given moment and this arrangement of the terms introduces them in the order of their importance. If I have just a brief moment for the Howdy Conversation, I can mention Intimate Electronica. If I have a little more time, I can talk about Synthpop. If they’re not going anywhere soon, then I can add the Squggly Bits, and maybe by this time we’ve come to know each other a little better than before.

A Listener’s Guide to Intimate Electronica, Synthpop and Squiggly Bits (by Yours Truly)

First up is the Intimate Electronica. It’s not the kind of music you’re going to hear at a stadium – ever. It’s not even something you are likely to hear me perform live. It’s more likely you will listen to these songs through headphones, or leave them playing during quiet moments when you are thinking about stuff, daydreaming, chilling out, in a mellow mood, or want something playing in the background while you are reading or working on other things that need your attention. It’s peaceful music that just happens to be made with synthesized sound. It can be thought of as a personal sountrack that plays underneath whatever is going on in your life, at the moment.

The melodies are often very simple, often repetitive, as they play over a bed of interesting soundscapes. The songs may otherwise include long impressionistic or textural solo voices that wind their way through these audio landscapes. Sometimes these solos are performed on acoustic or electric guitar, or with virtual synth voices that simulate other analogue instruments, but the aesthetic still falls under the banner of electronica more than acoustic instrumental.

An example of Intimage Electronica would be the song, Floating Out to Sea.

Floating Out to Sea

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Second in line is Synthpop. While I make a lot of quiet instrumental stuff, I also like making more active music with the tools at my disposal, as well. I have a deep fondness for pop music of the sixties and early-seventies. I’m also quite fond of modern Asian Pop music, as well. Add to this all the great synth music that came out in the eighties, and you have an idea of what fuels my work within this genre. While my Synthpop tracks generally have more of a beat to them with more apparent use of drum and bass, they rarely approach the shores of electronic dance music. They are, instead, built with more of a pop song structure or mentality. This is the arena where songs with lyrics come out to play. In spite of that, I still write a lot of instrumental Synthpop songs.

An example of Synthpop would be the song, Down the Rabbit Hole.

Down the Rabbit Hole

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

And finally, the Squiggly Bits are what I consider to be the oddball, one-off, or experimetal stuff. It can be a song that makes me laugh a lot, with funny lyrics, or it might be a bit dark or menacing. Maybe it’s a bit more jazzy or bluesy than the rest, or a bit more straight-up rock and roll. The Squiggly Bits are often a result of asking myself, “I wonder how this will sound?” It’s the musical melting pot where I play around with sounds, structures, recording techniques, and lyrics in a way that doesn’t really fit either the Intimate Electronica or Synthpop sensibilities. If you think of it as noodling around with sound, that might help clarify why I call them Squiggly Bits.

An example of Squiggly Bits would be the song, Skidmarks! (the demo was called, simply, “Background Harmonizing Exercise”).

Skidmarks!

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Class Dismissed!

And there you have it!

In just a few brief paragraphs I’ve been able to explain the kind of music I like to make, and also a little bit about what influences and fuels my musical obsessions.

Hopefully, this helps to explain what I’m looking to accomplish and gives you an idea if it’s the sort of music you might like to listen to. And I hope it also explains why my website now carries the following slugline:

Intimate Electronica with a touch of Synthpop (plus some Squiggly Bits on the side)

No new music to post, but I’m working on something of a sekrit project that might lead to a few songs that are very different from what I have been posting so far.

I’m also still following along with Andrew’s piano lessons. I’m also still impatient to make my way through the whole series, almost as if I believe they will disappear if I don’t.

At the moment, I’m having coffee at my favorite coffee shop, The Black Drop Coffeehouse and they’re playing Classic Rock on the shop stereo. A short while ago it was Toto’s “Hold the Line” and now it’s Deep Purple with “Smoke on the Water.”

Have a great retro Saturday!