February 26ths

2/26/1998

Did remix of Ice Moons and remix of Splat, a short 2-minute piece. Could possibly be fleshed out.

2/26/1999

This is the age of recycling ideas rather than inventing them. The invention is the way in which ideas are recycled and what their effect is. But I'm sort of suspect of how merely creating collages of things can ultimately be that interesting.

Everyone seems to want to be somewhere other than where they are.

A friend showed me the mp3.com site. I'm skeptical because I think the sheer amount of things to listen to will trivialize music. We're overstuffed on music just like we're overstuffed on movies, food, and gadgets. But on the other hand, I think the website is exciting from a global perspective. This way we can hear new music coming from all points of the globe.

[2/26/2025: The age of Remix has now moved on to what I call “Restyle”, specifically with AI. Any songwriter can now restyle their songs. It’s still very crude at the moment, but will become more sophisticated. It is a recycling, which puts even more content into the art/music ecosystem. I still stand by my prediction that we’ll be able to generate music spontaneously, and it will all be something we never heard before. But given how we need a certain amount of saturation before we like something, even algorithms won’t be able to provide that, because you’ll never really know that you like something until you’ve heard it at least three times. This is because we judge everything at the get-go. It's also remarkable that mp3.com no longer exists. 25 years from now things we think will exist forever won't exist. Everything has been written on the wind since 1999, but LLMs seem to be a way of permanent capture, but also recycling. Data will be there, but it won't be the same data or the original ideas].

Edited Steckman’s book at coffee shop and came home to watch Phil Glass on Sessions at West 54th. I don’t completely see the point of having humans play like machines, or vice versa, but Glass found his voice and became successful at it which is what counts. 

2/26/2004

Browsed through the Tower Records store on Wabash. I hadn't been there in years. Pathetic, and a sad commentary on the state of the music business. It looked more like a seedy Dollar Store: a 4-pack of blank videotapes $1, blank cassette tapes with weeks (perhaps years) of dust. They moved all the rock and pop upstairs and put classical and jazz on the third floor. So dead you'd think they'd be bankrupt tomorrow, X-rated videos now in the back of the store—their only profit center. Thought perhaps I'd buy the new Bowie CD, Reality $18.99!!!

[2/26/2025: Now an America's Best eyewear shop. On the third was a guitar repair shop].

2/26/2018

Studio: More work on “Rings” album, specifically Gunhill: Dutch Fleet 1672.
 

---

2/26/2025

An AI-generated track from my lyrics. These hooks are actually pretty good... 

Also a nice quatrain emerged randomly. The couplets aren't related but the rhyme connects them in an interesting way:

The sunrise rode
A sunset train
The thinker is gone
But the thoughts remain