'19–'21 Mix (2023–2024)
This started as a little project to create a record of a bunch of stuff I worked on between 2019 and 2021 but never finished. I thought that mashing it all together unfinished was at least better than having it sat in a hard drive but once I started thinking about sequencing and finished a couple of things it became an album.
If you're going to work in some kind of creative field you'll find that you sooner or later run into the limitations of what you're able to achieve. You'll eventually reconfigure your idea of what a creative project is, since anything anybody makes will lie somewhere on the intersect between their original idea and what was practically achievable given the resources, time, collaborators, space, everything they had available. That's just the way it is, an idea is only theoretical and will undergo some kind of transformation as you translate it into reality.
I might have relayed this anecdote somewhere else on this website but I enjoy Jon Hopkins talking about his process in this episode of Song Exploder (go to about 3:10). He says he works on something as an initial idea, leaves it for it a few days thinking it's fire, and sometimes comes back to it only to find that it, quote, 'makes [him] want to be sick'. This disgust with your work is something you will encounter as you're reconfiguring your idea of creativity.
I can confess that I was a bit appalled at my inability to work fluently in the genres my ideas fell into during this period despite my compositional training. This was perhaps due to a misguided belief that this was a lesser music and I should have been able to pick it up the way a pro golfer would dominate a game of crazy golf*. Of course, it's supreme arrogance to suppose that your partiality to 'high' art automatically grants you access to the upper echelons of 'popular' art as part of the ticket price. They are different practices with their own tropes, skills and languages to master, and you have to earn your stripes by doing the work no matter what. If you are willing to get down into the mud of aesthetics and all the Adorno reading that that entails with me to discover why one form of music might be objectively better than another, we can do that together, but here I'm content simply to call them different.
But I did view the work I did during this period as worthy of disgrace. Almost all of it was unfished and I failed to realise the lofty creative plans I had for each one that would have made them worthy of my creative ambitions. I can see in hindsight that it was, actually, pretty productive. I think that what formal training does is prepare you for how to learn, so while you do not immediately understand every musical tradition, you know where to look to find out. In making all this stuff I did push myself and develop a bit of a working knowledge of a lot of different styles of music. If you aim for like 1,000, you might score 100, which you might not have if you might have fallen short of it you had just aimed for 100. Aim, fail, learn, move on.
Here's the plan I made for the mix after I realised how much stuff I had:
Despite most of being unfinished, I thought the amount would make it viable in some way. If push came to shove I could even insist that it was meant to be that way and I was doing a Dilla Donuts thing, actually. But things started to happen. As I had kind of freed myself from allegiance to whatever perfect ideals I had imagined for the pieces when I first conceived of them, I found that I was able to engage with the pieces in new ways and the idea of finishing some of them no longer gave me with the feeling of dread it did before. Guitar Beat 4a was definitely the strongest of the little fragments I had and I knew that finishing it was of the few mandatory conditions I set myself, but then in the midst of adding touch ups to everything at the end of 2023 I fleshed it out into a full piece almost accidentally. Cold Blue was literally just the sub bass and some programming for the rhythmic kick cells. I worked on it in summer 2024 and it all happened so fast that I don't really even remember it. Once I had those two I felt that I could call it an album and I wouldn't be lying to myself.
Things like Saturday pt. 2 and Farewell to a Dream made this project necessary. I'd had them since about 2020 and while they weren't developed enough to release as standalone projects (I worked on Saturday as a whole for so long but it became unfinishable, and for a while Farewell to a Dream was my big project that I worked on a Max patch for and was looking for funding to record live) I wanted them available somewhere in some format given the work I did on them. The aggregation of all this stuff means I could be a bit more forgiving about quality and development, though I think it is also the cause of some of the weaker parts, particularly Blue and the Liquid D&B for which the lack of detail is more apparent.
A quick word on Smack--Bitchslap is the name of a Slipknot song (from the Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat. demo. I bet you will be surprised by what early Slipknot sounds like) and my reason for using the word was really nothing more than it sounds cool and I had a minor fixation on it for a little while. It is juvenile. It is the fastest-produced of anything on the album, the result of a single evening's work that I also don't even remember doing really, and was made more as a joke that I didn't have the intention of releasing anywhere publicly. If pressed to defend the use of a misogynistic term I'm not sure I could, but the problem I had is the beat goes so hard and I couldn't leave it out for this reason. Maybe I could convince you that a bit of transgression adds to the nastiness of that percussive swing?
There is something from this period that isn't included on this album. I finished and released Sunshower in 2021 and was pretty happy with it, but it feels separate to everything else here as a result so I didn't include it. I suppose it could have gone between Blue and Saturday pt. 1 or something:
Also here's a bonus little something that didn't make the cut:
I moved pretty quickly with the video because by the time I was ready to start working on it I could barely stomach the idea of spending another day on this let alone the potential months I could have put into making a 45-minute visual for an album. My options were therefore limited to things I could do quickly without ever overthinking anything or second-guessing myself, and I think this enforced the limitation really helped it. I could write a separate page's worth of stuff on the video so I'll say no more on it.
Finishing things is very important. Heed the warning of the case of Richard Williams and his futile 28 years of work on The Thief and the Cobbler--do what you can in advance to make sure you never ever get stuck in the trap of being unable to finish or release something because it feels like you're in a Zeno paradox and the finish line is infinitely far away. You probably have some kind of neurosis or disfunction that compels you to create in the first place, but if you're clever you'll remember that your brain is pliable and malleable and you'll see that you can harness and channel the things that motivate you whether they are healthy or not. Use them to get through the work stage, use them for ideas that drive you to want to do the work in the first place, but intervene once they cease to be useful. There are other things you'll want to be doing and you can't stifle the growth of your body of work because you're stuck on one thing trying to perfect that last 0.1% that, realistically, very few people are going to pay attention to anyway.
*One final relevant anecdote I heard in a podcast: the writer Paul Auster enjoyed reading detective fiction and figured he would do that while he was struggling to find a publisher for his first novel. Only, it's not as easy as that. The story is here at about 36:00 and apparently sourced from the writer's autobiography Hand to Mouth.