4/1/2020

-

 


A musical idea for the blog post: What Happens When the Loneliness Is Over?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

30000 Years

-
Image
A remix of diary entries from my 11/10 diary 1998-current transformed into a lyric using a text randomizer. This isn't AI, but it's like AI in the sense that you are using an algorithm. But instead of using a pre-made one you make one of your own, which is ultimately more fun and interesting. You can use the constraints but you can change them as well. This is essentially a cut-up technique. Using the natural rhythms in the words, "get the thing" created the main motif.       The main chorus riff is 30000 Year s, with this rhythmic motif:        Get the thing Everything Rapidly Love the thing Started abandoning Hoping it was the thing 
Read more

1110

-
Image
Lines from a Paul Cezanne letter (~1930), with other random lines from 2024. Played on acoustic guitar and demo'd by AI.    Listen on Suno
Read more

Conundra

-
Image
Every so often I'll compose etudes for myself based on repeating cycles. It can be practiced on any instrument and consists playing over a pair of chord changes a tritone apart, then proceeding up in fourths (or down in fifths). Each chord has a set of chord scales that can be played over them, and you can play one type across then all, e.g. the Phrygian mode going down in major thirds, or simply playing arpeggios, or mixing it up in different ways. 
Read more

On Speech Rhythms

-
Image
  In terms of the connection between language and music, there is a finite number of rhythms that can be extracted from poetry and prose—probably in any language. If you read a passage in a book out loud, sometimes you will come upon phrases that are inherently musical.  The musicality of language (prosody) arises from the stresses on syllables, which have to be either on an upbeat or a downbeat in order for them to be coherent. In musical contexts, you can shape language however you want, and make things wrong for the sake of making them wrong for artistic effect, or emphasizing particular vowels when singing them. Ignoring strict meter and using a roving bar line is a cool way of approaching language in different ways in a musical context. Rhythmic displacement is one of the main tools for improvisation. For example, starting a phrase on an upbeat sounds less square than starting on a downbeat. Bass players are known to do this as well leaving the first eighth or quarter not...
Read more

10/25/2026

-
Image
0256. Be careful that a planned trajectory does not circle back to where you started. Without bold acts of will, things will naturally default to the basic shapes and characteristics of the universe, circular shapes, orbits, and routines. 
Read more

1111

-
Image
0034. The camera lies, or the camera finds the truth hiding behind the lies, sometimes the camera see better than the eye because it slows it down. In the end, will the camera lie or will the camera tell the truth?  *** Listen on Suno
Read more

January 2nds

-
Image
1/2/2005 They’re razing the old Sun-Times building in the Loop, and when I pass by it I always tune into the sound of jackhammers echoing through the empty space. [Now site of Trump Tower]                Ambient Audio: [1/2/2025: Little did we know how that eponymous tower would represent the end of American democracy as we knew it. Perhaps it was always fragile and we naively thought, even after 9/11, that it would be razed].      1/2/2007 Projects for 2007: Music For Places, Highway Cinema.  [1/2/2026: Resolutions actually do work, but it can take sometimes a decade to see the results. What's important are "seeds"]  1/2/2012             James Howard Kunstler’s prediction/forecast:             “Vlad Putin has held things together there impressively after the meltdown of the 1990s, but apparently the tranquil veneer is thin. Except for two big citie...
Read more

Kuda Bux (The Man With the X-Ray Eyes)

-
Image
Bowie was the first artist to successfully fuse rock with sci-fi. I wrote Dome City ten years ago, primarily inspired by the album "Outside". The chord change cliche of a major chord with the inner voice descending chromatically somehow always reminded me of early Bowie, and I still love it, cliche or not. Dome City by Lee Barry (Part 2 was actually the original idea, that I did an acoustic version of): Dome City by Lee Barry
Read more