September 29ths

9/29/2024           
            
Dynaxiom drafts: If music is too much about emotion, it will never go in a different direction. It’s too hard to reinvent.    

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Last night I was watching some footage from the David Gilmour Luck and Strange tour, specifically Great Gig In the Sky, where in place of the vocal improv by Clare Tory, they had a female vocal ensemble based on it–essentially a “scored” piece. It’s interesting that something spontaneous can later be arranged and played as if it was through-composed. This has happened to me many times where I’ll be playing something in a track as an improvisation and then later go back and actually score it for strings, even if it’s something musical in a field recording. Similar riffs happen in culture as well, where you take some cultural or historical element and spin it into something else that takes on secondary meanings...

[9/29/2025. There was a nice happy accident at the end of the video that loops the phrase "Catch you on the next deep dive". I reduced it to notation and scored it for strings. It nicely demonstrates the sometimes musical nature of language.]

Catch You On the Next Deep Dive by meta4s 

A Photographs For Music video using Urban Biota and a Gregory Crewdson photograph 

I discovered that the Kirk Varnedoe National Gallery of Arts lectures from 2003 are now on video. He had such an enthusiasm for Modern Art and really defended it. What's particularly remarkable was that at the time he was giving the lectures he had colon cancer and he knew that he was going to die, and this was going to be his swan song. The lectures were also very influential in my wanting to make artwork. Learning that Walter Di Maria was also a musician I thought, I have ideas, I could really get absorbed into doing something like that–and I in fact did about a decade later, ultimately going back to music. Now I feel inspired to go back to art, but in today's climate would any of it matter? It's so hard to be seen these days–and you can’t be derivative because people will accuse you of being derivative–that you don't have any original ideas. The reason I continue to do music is because I find it rigorous and I like to be involved in doing something rather than just making AI art. I want something that I can work on for weeks or months, and artwork doesn't always do that for me. But music I can work on for weeks and months and years. If I could find a unique style of idea I would want to do art again. If I had the wherewithal I would make conceptual art and have it fabricated. But those days are over too because there's fewer fabricators around. We've moved on to “artificial intelligence fabrication”, and I wonder how that all fits in with art history. If Kirk Varnedoe was still alive what would he say about this new era in art? #riff