March 13ths

3/13/1995 

Eno: "Songs that don’t depend on composition depend instead on performance - so the fire has to be there in the playing, which it isn’t after several long days’ work".

[Is there ever a “fire” in composition? A rule of thumb for completing a symphony would be to write a minute of music a day. That can be hard on some days when you might have lots of 16th notes at fast tempos. Old master composers needed a different kind of fire to get through those days scratching with a calligraphy pen into manuscript paper--including drawing in the staves]. 

3/13/2014

Working on ambient music that should sound like this (Iceland--glacial outwash):

 

3/13/2024

As I was looking at Magritte paintings online I was thinking that it’s interesting now that when you do research on art pieces and artists you can easily spot the artists who are copying other artists in some way or doing send-ups. If you take this back to the surrealist period and asked one of the surrealists in the prime of their career whether in a hundred years people would be copying their work without them being involved, I suppose they would like the idea and wouldn’t be opposed to it but I think if they could come back to life and see what's happened with that idea I think they would have been horrified. The new surrealism has really become more of a horror show. 

[3/13/2025: The thing I like about AI is that it is something that can run in the background, like watching a [formulaic] film in the background and occasionally hearing something usable and capturing it in some way. But even if you're capturing and cataloging ideas you still have to create something. Usually what happens with me is that sometimes I'll dig into something I've already done or cataloged, and it doesn't involve AI at all. I don't see how it would be useful because it's just creating more inputs that I have to process and squirrel away. If I'm in pure music mode and working in a score I'm too busy to wait for a fish to bite. I don't want working to be like fishing].

3/13/2025

Worked on video for Goodbye to Berlin. I was going to use a clip from Leni Riefenstahl’s, Triumph of The Will, but it was too depressing with too much Hitler in it. Why am I thinking that the United States is now like Nazi Germany? I think it’s that we’re suggesting that it is, so it becomes a part of the collective thought that we’re moving in that direction.