Lee Barry Composition Diary

The Unabomber was arrested in April 1996. This was my reaction. It is also a send-up of Zappa's tune. The "billionaire" is thus a dental floss tycoon. (7/7/1996) The AI-generated version, a totally different vibe--redolent of T. Bone Burnett or Nick Cave.

An artist book where each page is some shade of blue, with its content relating to blue in some literal, self-referential, or figurative way. Most of the entries will draw from my book Dynaxiom , and also connects in series with Continuation and the set of human universals --primarily "Classification of Color", but also "time, cyclic",  "rituals" (daily entries), and "Continua (ordering as a cognitive pattern)". Other topics now include entries for the approximate hexadecimal values for the shade of blue of that particular page, lyrics that have the word 'blue' in them, chord changes from pieces of music that have blue in them (e.g. Miles Davis' Kind of Blue ), recalled dreams where blue was prevalent My decision to integrate red on the first page was reflexive of what was happening in the world in 2020. However, the original idea for the Blue Book came to me a long time ago, based upon Wittgenstein's Blue Book , as well as the b...

 

The original lyric re-styled using AI-generated music and re-titled T V Motel (2 Versions)   An R'n'B-ish song written around the beginning of the internet when computers still had tube monitors, even though I was using the word “widescreen”.  Marshall McLuhan had been talking about TV being a “hot” medium--that we couldn't interact with it. But in 1995,  interactive TV was already being talked about, along with the specter of mass surveillance. Technology is now “cool”  via social media, and perhaps not so cool in that it opened the door to the possibility of surveillance, as well as our addiction to social media,  the new way to be a couch potato. In retrospect, the lyrics are kind of a prediction. (6/4/1995)

  I am using a capo at the 5th fret, which makes it more of a strummed chordal instrument or "rhythm guitar" rather than a bass--and a very short-scale bass--only 16 frets. These are some fairly easy shapes for both major and minor chords, and switching between them it's fairly easy. Essentially it’s an open-A tuning.

12/2023: A short on the first verse using text-to-speech voices and shifting the syllables to where the original vocal was. (They voices are "Amy" and "Geraint" a Welsh voice) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XRB1OXK75P4 I now realize the song could be about the Nag Hammadi but I didn't realize it at the time. When I started to make the video I thought footage of flowing and thrusting lava flows would be an interesting element. I watched some documentaries of Iceland volcanic history, then I saw the news about the current fissure eruption there. A curious synchronicity.   10/30/1996 This was inspired by a documentary on the search for a lost city in the Arabian desert. I thought that it was interesting that our digital culture will leave no artifacts at all, even in a time capsule. There are no guitars on here at all. All the "guitar" parts were played on the bass through a distortion pedal.  

  A piece with a decidedly “Americana” feel.

  These are inspired by the symbol shapes in candlestick financial charts : "The bullish harami shows a downtrend of negative-colored (black) candlesticks engulfing a small positive (white) candlestick, giving a sign of a reversal of the downward trend." They also might suggest cigarettes or syringes if you didn't know the background. I see them as a "cell" as they are used in music, which are short thematic elements that are used as building blocks to generate the work. One of the ideas I had initially was to do them in encaustic and/or crayon as clever self-reference (wax). Perhaps the next in the series ("Three Line Strike"). The titles of the charts were also very cool: Doji Dragonfly Black Marubozu Takuri Line Bullish Harami Three Line Strike View the Series #2020