June 17ths

6/17/1886 

Bumped into Ed Billingsley by Marshall Field's. We walked for a bit by the lake. We said we’d stay in touch. [More]

6/17/2005      
         
One thing I have been thinking about lately is the sense of spirituality in music, either for the writer or listener—this is ultimately what makes music and art great—the perception that something is coming from the heart with a deep numinous quality, either happy or sad. Work that is forced or contrived generally lacks spirituality.

[6/17/2025: I’ve found that some AI-generated music has “soul” or “spirituality”, as in my 6/14 post Do LLMs Have Soul? ]

6/17/2010

           
Harbor Walk: Continued walk past DuSable Harbor towards the Abegweit. There was a blues band playing on deck which you can hear in the background. A passerby says ‘Party Boat!’. The strong breezes make for very clanky boat masts. As I walked south along the curved shore along came several hundred joggers running past me. Continued path past yacht club and into Monroe Harbor area, traffic noise from LSD on right, end at Balbo Drive. 

6/17/2024 

When you look for synchronicities and don’t see them, they are happening to someone else which may involve you in the future. 

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What I would say to young people: What skills (preferably rigorous manual skills) will you be able to revisit in 30 or 40 years, that won’t rely on new technologies?

If AI-generated art is a toy, or a toy tool, and we can get accessories or different materials to use—for example different kinds of clay or putty with different attachments or extensions—it would produce very little variety. Anyone can make art with some crap ordered online. That’s what AI music is to me. I make prototypes with my primary tools, a guitar, a bass, a keyboard, manuscript paper and a pen, although the latter is notation software.

[6/17/2025: It is still a toy, but an interesting one. It’s the alternation between the profane and the sacred tools. If the toy produces something that interests you, why not incorporate it into what you’ve always done? Many of the orchestral arrangements include phrases transcribed from the AI-generations because I thought they were things I would have never thought of].
            
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Did a music video for one of the Rifts pieces, Terranes (again) using footage from Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante. Instead of scoring for film, and composing segments for the film, I’m clipping film segments to fit the music, sometimes in ironic ways, such as scenes of people running against slow solo piano music. 

6/17/2025

It’s interesting to trace the path of a musical project, especially the ones that are now starting with lyrics and being used in AI generations. Sometimes the funnest part is the creation of the visuals. I finally decided on using brutalist architecture as the design vibe because I thought it went well with the music, which I’m calling “concrete metal”. I’ve been mulling over the possibility of using the portmanteau “Butalism” (Beautiful Brutalism). It would be an architecture that would use pastel-colored or vibrant-colored concrete instead of the raw concrete, But it would be a raw beauty.