January 11ths

1/11/1999            

Idea: an album of very short songs, 30 seconds or less, “stamp” songs.

1/11/2000

The great thing about films is that they don’t need text in order to convey information, tell stories, or evoke emotion. Text can be added as an embedded layer between image and sound.

[1/11/2026: This is what I’m doing with the Curios, which are “microfilms”]

1/11/2003
            
Bill Russo died at 74. Great obituary in paper. Bill got my musical thinking where it is now.

1/11/2005
            
The term “music composition” and “composer” are constantly changing, but the process is always essentially the same: making art that unfolds over time.

1/11/2007

Idea: Band that forms and collaborates online, writes all the material, then finally meets in person and rehearses for one show. Band name: Blind Date–or for my band on Second Life.

[1/11/2026: What would be interesting to me is a band that performs AI-generated songs].

1/11/2008
            
Musicians have pronounced the death of music recording, and the rebirth of performance, which has resulted in a glut of festivals. This is another example of emergence: one bird directs the flight of the entire flock.

1/11/2011

A day of ones.

Idea: An ambient opera. Has anyone ever done this? All the voices would be auto-tuned or vocoded.

1/11/2022
            
Music is supernatural in that it lies “above” nature and harnesses spectra of frequencies by dividing it into 12 intervals, combinations of which can be consonant and dissonant intervals. Equal Temperament is the Operating System and music is the software or “app” that can run on that system. Culture is the OS on which both ET and composition operate. For example, Indian culture is an Operating System. Blues and Jazz are Operating Systems, and so on. They both use some variation of taking pure sound as a material and making something from it, as a kind of alchemy.

Excerpt Library (Music Theory Articles): "Discuss Equal Temperament"

***

Every week on Monday, I get the results of my Google Alert on music AI. The articles are basically all championing its bright future—a kind of green-washing. What would music have been like in the 1960s, say 1967, the Summer of Love, if music AI existed then? 1967-1969 was the pinnacle of spirituality in pop music, with the Finale the lunar landing. But it wasn’t spiritual at all. It was something more “mundane”: the US winning the moon race. The “spirituality” of the moment is more of a desire than a reality of what it was really about, and yet lingers to this day. AI is in some ways a desire for a Moon or Mars-landing, and we read mystical things into it. But with the current AI there’s no spirituality in it at all—it’s leaving the humans out of the loop. It’s a form of self-deprecation—perhaps self-loathing. We’ve become so misanthropic that the music has to be equally deprecating, even to the level where machines are having the ideas, and we’re merely steering them. It now seems that having original ideas or even the desire to create something from an original idea is quaint and sentimental. There is a more compelling allure in artificial intelligence in that we’re going to have a machine make our content for us and therefore there is no need for us to be intimately involved. We want things to be hands-off because we have gotten used to the precautions: It’s safer to “glove and mask” in many things we do. Having ideas and manually shaping them is just this old thing that previous generations did: We don’t necessarily have to be involved in idea creation and is perhaps something that we want to avoid, so as to be postmodernist or to do things with a feigned diffidence. So if ideas emanate from algorithms rather than from someone playing a guitar and singing a melody, we would never have had a David Bowie for example.#riff
            
[1/11/2025: I’ve found that generated music can have a “magical” quality where it interprets a lyric in unpredictable ways. But “spirituality” in anything is dependent upon what we bring to it in the moment. For most listeners on first hearing a piece of (pop) music is mostly timbral: they might not tune into the lyrics. It can sometimes take years to get the meaning in lyrics–even if they weren’t cryptic. Yes’ lyrics were typically cryptic, but Jon Anderson gave them a mystical quality. This is what AI is doing in some cases, but it might be just a few people who are interpreting them that way. I’ve always liked to leave a margin of ambiguity so that they are less literal and more like visual abstractions rather than portraits and landscapes.]

1/11/2023
            
Jeff Beck died at 78, apparently yesterday 1/10 from bacterial meningitis. I had to immediately revisit Blow By Blow and Wired, two albums that were on continuous play in 1977 when I first started playing. BBB has particular resonance because it has an art connection: I made a replica of the album cover in pastels and soon after a visionary art mural based on a continuous play of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here and Animals. In retrospect, that’s when the "annealing" of art and music took place. Wired also has a unique resonance: It is decidedly more metallic and funky and I loved how guitar and Moog riffs could “throw” at each other, creating a disorienting effect—you didn’t know who was playing what.
            
Jeff Beck was also in the lineup of my first concert in the summer of 1976 at Comiskey Park in Chicago, along with Aerosmith and Rick Derringer. Jeff Beck set the place literally on fire.

1/11/2024

The music video as a genre is a purely postmodern idea. Actually, all of rock and roll is postmodern, so anything that’s secondary to it is postmodern. But craft and skill don’t have an ism: it can be modern, postmodern (not premodern). 
            
Technology is joined at the hip with isms. Isms make certain technologies possible and vice versa—technologies make isms possible.

1/11/2025

Was wondering about all the art that was destroyed in the fires, not to mention musical instruments and recording studios. Took a few pics...some of the first of the year, one of just a frame on a wall with some painted areas. It reminded me of Erased de Kooning. On further reflection, this was probably done by an art student. (Might as well BRD—be arty). Also, this would be good for the “peripherique” idea/concept with the frame glued to the panel.
 

Apparently, microcinema (Video 45s) is now a thing, with episodes a minute long (Reelshort app) and shot in portrait mode. It’s seen as a gimmick now but will be used by filmmakers, like in the Mommy film.

1/11/2026

As we obsessively pore over every frame of the Good video, the camera becomes an "emotional camera" for some, where emotions override what we actually see as evidence. If it doesn't already exist, what would be interesting is a photo app that creates images that distort the thing you're shooting and/or generates an image combined with other images--like what ChatGPT does.   

Excerpt Library (Cinema): "Discuss temporal and spatial distortion"