8/23/2018
Blue Sky Black
Posts
Some September
On September 14, 2017, I was predicting that the future of music would be driven by AI, and in some ways singing its praises, but on September 14, 2021, I was rather singing the praises of the book The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: “Now my go-to book to support my cynicism about AI.” On Friday, September 16, 1816, Anne Lister arrives in Buxton (Derbyshire) for a few days stay, while 152 years later, on Friday, September 16, 1968, a British popular music ensemble is in the previously unfathomable “recording studio” recording While My Guitar Gently Weeps. 9 years later, one of the Beatles’ major influences, Elvis Presley, dies. On September 16, 1997, it was the 20th anniversary of his death and I got caught in a deluge where it rained for 2-1/2 hours, and diaried, “The second coming of Elvis”. On September 16, 2010, I discovered two keys on the seat next to me on the El. “The supernaturalist in me wants to ascribe meaning to this, but someone may have simply lost their k...
August 28ths
8/28/1963 Field recording: March on Washington. (Audio Snapshot) 8/28/1999 My approach to music: Design a system that allows you to express ideas, rather than using a configured system and thinking of ideas based on prepackaged concepts. (Exploration rather than a guided tour). [8/28/2024: 20 years later–the Songday system. I love working this way]. 8/28/2002 Story idea: Set in Anytown, USA, where every character is a cliche (the old woman, the barber, the criminal, the crooked politician, the idiot savant), but we find out at the end of the film that the people are not ordinary at all. Possible title: “Everyone’s Got One”. 8/28/2004 Baptismal: 8/28/2008 Obama is nominated at Dem convention and gives historic speech in Denver. His “Big Night” 4 years in the making, and 45 years after King’s “I have a dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. (“The fierce urgency of now”). I like what congressman James Clybur...
August 19ths
8/19/2004 Someone is making a CD that approximates the sounds that tinnitus sufferers hear. (Make something with no aesthetic value, yet has a use in a specific context— “function before form”). How do you approximate what someone else is hearing? It's an “audio POV”, “audio fiction”. The primary aim of the recording is that it helps break down the sense of isolation. It externalizes the internal “ambient music”. [8/19/2024: Re-invention, re-discovery, re-modernism, going back to nature, going back to the roots. This is the natural reaction to the effect of too much involvement with technology for the sake of itself–even language itself.] 8/19/2017 Neckers: 8/19/2019 Knickers: 8/19/2022 Either art is made manually or can be generative or cybernetic, created by rules. Even if we could make art using a brain-com...
August 18ths
8/18/2017 Talent is more innate than inherited—nurture rather than nature. If a child grows up in an environment where music is more valued, musical skills might be ‘selected’. What I do think is innate is rhythmic ability and the ability to hear key centers. If you can easily identify key centers and feel the ‘one’, you have a natural inclination for music. There are now other talents associated with music that are influenced by the visual arts, specifically electronic composition which involves the creation of logical structures that don’t necessarily involve rudiments. This is not to say that one couldn’t develop these skills, but if there was a talent, it would be apparent within a short time. In the future, musical ability could be genetically engineered, but it might be on the level of endurance. You can’t ‘engineer’ artistry or craft in the same way. That comes through nurture. [8/18/2025: Now with AI, people won’t want to lift a finger to make music man...
August 8ths
On the Other Side of the Year 8/8/1998 “Fate is a vehicle that gets you where you’re going.” (Dynaxiom 0256) 8/8/2000 I had a dream I had visited a poet, an elderly woman about 60 years old. She was sitting on a bed with all of her incunabula scattered around her. There was one document that was dated 1942, and was a letter from a former lover. A cinematic treatment: A Short (Single): 8/8/2020 Caustic Shadows: [Became the cover of Some August ] 8/8/2024 I have an eye for shadows in photography so I notice them right away. Similarly in music, I have an ear for “sound shadows” where something will coincide with something in real time, such as squeaking brakes fitting in with music that’s playing. If you don’t have a “camera” at the ready, you can’t capture them. This is how I think AI music should work—or it shou...
Blue Sequin Dress
Based on a dream on 6/1/1997 about a tornado turning into a woman in a blue sequin dress. This is the "seed" riff: A possible lyric: Woman in a blue sequin dress Wondering what she'll do when you're next When your life is taken by the wind It's just a woman in a blue sequin dress The Short: As a string "shortet": Blue Sequin Dress (6-1-1997) Strings by meta4s The video uses clips from an episode from Secrets of The Unknown. It works well with the music with almost no edits--and references tornadoes. The outro is generated by AI.
August 9ths
February 9ths A piece made from two Beatles titles. 8/9/1968, Friday (Beatles Studio Diary) Studio Two: “Not Guilty” and “Mother Nature’s Son” (White Album) 8/9/1997, Saturday Albums should arise out of your current circumstances, where the world is, internal feelings, a conflation of variables, of looking back to see why something worked or didn’t work. [8/9/2025: The pandemic was a shift for me, from postmodernist and conceptual work to more traditional work–my attempt at being metamodern or “remodern”, blending modernism and postmodernism. I still love postmodern approaches because it’s as foundational as traditional approaches. The “Sum” series is all about that]. 8/9/2001 Strategy: make very dense music at the macro level and add micro treatments, such that minor details of music are detected at the periphery but not central to the idea. The listener “expects” to hear things and the compos...
August 3rds
8/3/2010 Dappled garden (Art Institute south garden) 8/3/2011 New lap steel. A blues/country/work song idea using a lap steel in open G minor. The "language" motif: The Short: Footage is from John Ford's 3 Bad Men . 8/3/2022 Quartet for “1966”. Decade Highways It’s only later in your life when you have access to both the side streets and the highways in your life. If you were born in the 1960s and an adolescent in the 70s, those are the side streets of your life. Then there’s the highway of the 1960s. I didn’t access the highway of the 1960s until the late 1970s, at which time I was “on the road” with the other generations that have been on those roads for a long time, including the highway of the 1950s and 1940s. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that I actually started to be influenced by the 1960...
June 2nds
6/2/1943 (Taliesen Diary) Typed essay for box—now I have to work on plans. Fifth day of rain—and today after a beautiful orange sunrise that made me jump out of bed to see the way it gilded the valley, tho directly opposite were thick grey clouds & ominous thunder.) Choir and strings: 6/2/1966 (Beatles Studio Diary) George Harrison brow-beat for having no titles for his songs, or dumb ones like “Granny Smith”. It eventually became “I Don’t Know” and “I Want To Tell You”. [ The Short] 6/2/2000: Jackie Chan and John Woo films—you see them only for the action —Films don’t always have narratives, just as good songs can have nonsense lyrics. The seed on which the song is based on: This video is a montage of chase scenes from various films, including the classic Bullet . The production is almost all synth for a 2000s vibe with a syrupy string arrangement. Only For The Action (Strings) by meta4s Slomo Mix, same chord changes: 6/...
August 2nds
On the other side of the year: Groundhog Day 8/2/1998 Interesting article in Pulse magazine about the connection between football fight songs in England and pop music, written by Boff, the guitar player for Chumbawamba. At one time, pop stars would have their songs lifted by footballers. Now it’s the pop groups that steal from the Terraces. 8/2/2002 New field of study: “Musics” (like physics). Title: “Musicists”. Most of music is really not music in the traditional sense, but has rhythm, tempo. “Musics” also deals with social context and politics, which often get ignored in the craft of music. [8/2/2024: In retrospect, what I thought was Musing is now Music relative to AI-generated music, which I think is the current form of Musing. Artists who are currently absorbed in it are Musicists in the domain of music, as Physicists are in the domain of physics]. [See Music Versus Musing ] 8/2/2005 Galena (Dowling House) 8/2/2009 ...
