June 9ths

Antipode: December 9ths

6/9/2010

Field Audio: Union Station, Riverside at Adams

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6/9/2014

Composed a “placey” kind of piece—partly cloudy, then mostly sunny. The changing light in a place can affect the sound in an abstract way, similar to Debussy’s “Nuages”. 

[6/9/2024—10 years after: I transformed the piece to include field recordings of train stations then used it as the soundtrack for a montage for a music video, “Arrival of Trains”. The narrative emerges from an artificial context of a woman on a train postwar (1948) and having memories of it.] 

[6/9/2025: Play the two together--video and this repeating orchestral loop].  

6/9/2023

Writers tend to think it’s easy to write lyrics. Lyrics have to be singable by someone. Even if you can sing it yourself with some ability (and you should) you will locate the music in it. Some words are more naturally singable than others, further shaped by tempo and meter. If you can sing it yourself it does not mean it will be singable by other vocalists, but they will find their own way of doing it. 

[6/9/2025: The vocals in AI-generated music never have a problem with elocution but very often the syllables are shifted into clunky positions–where a phrase that should naturally be sung on an upbeat are sung on a downbeat and vice versa. I suppose it’s a matter of interpretation]. 

6/9/2024

Idea: On Sum II, the dates on Side 1 and Side 2 are antipodes, e.g. 6/9 and 12/9.

Music can’t exist just as music anymore—at least not as songs that anyone can “extrude” with gadgets everyone has: it has to be attached, or arise from something else—a piece of writing, a photograph, a painting, a dream, a video, a film, an experience you just had today. It can’t be something anyone can do, just as much as anyone can be you. This is why everyone needs top-level systems or conceptual frameworks if they’re going to produce something.

6/9/2025 

When I play AI-generated music for people, usually the first thing they say is that it’s “amazing”, that they can’t believe that the music sounds so good. But to writers, it’s a different story. I always spot the flaws amid the great production values. If I were a producer, I would suggest a change in the lyrics, and how the vocalist is phrasing. But it’s not something that the typical listener hears. The first thing that people hear is the production quality, and the quality of the voice. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, I wasn’t listening to the production. I was focusing on the bass performances and the songs themselves, but that’s not what people do with pop music. It has to wash over them in some way. But if you’ve ever been in the trenches as a writer, you look at it from a different perspective. Humans march to a different drummer.