Sum I: Nostalgia Galaxy (2023)

 

First in the series with a piece of music for each month, beginning in September (when the summer "leaves"). The month is determined by when I first began the piece or when I finished it.

It will have an overall SciFi theme: In the future when space travel may take months or years, what is the meaning or feeling of a month, when outside the capsule window is the blackness of space and the bright sun, no atmosphere, no rising or setting sun or changing seasons?

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January 19, 2024

Today is the release date. It's always a big event for me and I try to celebrate in some way.  Last night I was experimenting with some graphics for some of the videos that I might do. There's going to be two videos for Side A Side B and I'm experimenting with some science fiction, and they don't seem to work. It's like that with a lot of things that I start--they're false starts. 

False starts are important in creativity. You have to spend quite a bit of time experimenting with things so that they look right, sound right, or feel right--that the experience is the one that is optimal and has the most "umami".  But it doesn't always work right out of the box...there's a resolution to everything. When I was working on artwork I would be waiting for the moment where I could say that it resolved...there's nothing else that I can do with it...I can't change anything. That's the point point where I know something's finished. But in a digital environment where things can be endlessly changed is there really a resolution? I suppose you could say that there is if you just stopped doing it, but in an environment where there's mashups and remixing, nothing is ever complete in terms of the work of art or music that exists in the world. People are always going to take it apart and do something with it, which I think is largely postmodernist. In terms of metamodernism, we want to get to the point where things are resolved. But even in in modernism, perhaps even in premodernism things were always in a state of flux, because life is in a state of flux: there are a lot of false starts--and false endings. The false ending is the one that assumes that something is complete. 

January 16, 2024

Reading the Geddy Lee memoir. re experiences in the studio and how frustrating it was, particularly with the Vapor Trails album which was very computer-heavy. I've had similar problems and it's affected the result, but I'm just going to leave it the way it is--wabi-sabi. If I tried to redo it it would turn into something different and other people involved would make it something different. It's my "painting". I may want some artisans who can contribute. It's like the huge Rubens paintings that probably took months to make and he had several people working with him, but they weren't painting the central figures in the painting--they would be doing the backgrounds and so on. How you make a painting is how you make a record.

January 9, 2024

As I've been watching the coverage of the Boeing 737 Max issue with the door that blew out, I was thinking about the just-in-time manufacturing process. As I've been doing the mastering, I realized this is how I made the album--tiled together as a mosaic. I wasn't always looking at the overall picture other than the concept. The recording process took place over a year in bits and fragments whenever I had time--which is different from the usual way of doing an album which can take perhaps a few days or months. But when it starts to take place over a year, it starts to feel too disjointed. Now that I'm doing the mastering, I'm finding the rough areas that need smoothing. This smoothing and polishing could go on indefinitely and at some point, you have to set it free, but obviously not something you can do with a commercial jet.

May 6, 2023

Still working on Ukiyo-e, which started in March and is now marching up in time. I've decided at this point the heuristic that I'm going to be using is that a piece for a month will be either when it started or when it was finished, so that period might be 3 months, or it might be 6 or 9 months. This makes more sense because I don't want to be punching a clock. I was just reading Jenny O'Dell's book Saving Time and she was talking about a solar time which I think is more logical because that's what most organisms follow. The fact that human lives are organized by patterned time, where months and seasons are a kind of "meter". Another analogy I like is "time remapping" in video where you can keyframe a frame and move it around on the x-axis of time. Knowing something is 10 light years away, for example, means, at least in the imagination, we can "remap" time in such a way that we can quickly go there. So instead of proceeding through the months sequentially, we can go from January to June, and back to April. The final track order of the album will probably be something like this. The order in which a story unfolds has nothing to do with sequential time or any other time frame.

January 19, 2023

After running through various possibilities of what I could do with this concept, I think it's starting to suggest that it's going to be something that's strictly sequential, where it opens with some kind of an Overture, as an opera or a symphonic work. I know that sounds cliche, but it seems like that's where it wants to go. I had thought about starting it not in January, but in September. The idea is that there's this space mission that takes a year-round trip and liftoff would be in September, but perhaps it makes more sense to start it in January.

The two or three January tracks that I have been working on mean they are tracks that I have started in January of whatever year. Some of them go back to 2016 or 2015. The (cliche) mood for January is sort of cold and gray, and the tracks do evoke that. It's a dense wall of sound, which is not exactly what I want. I can't seem to find much "space" (pun) in it. I've done five or six mixes to try to open that up, but when I open it up I lose the vibe of it. I think I'm going to stick with a wall of sound--maybe increase certain frequency ranges to make certain instruments stand out more. In terms of the Overture, there was a piece I wrote back in 2016 titled Delos, a short symphonic piece about a minute long based on the polychord Cm/D with French horns playing the C minor chord with some high strings and a low D in the basses. I thought that would be a good January-ish intro when they leave on the mission.

It's going to be interesting to see how this comes together. The plan is to release a track each month. Peter Gabriel is doing something similar where he's releasing a track on each full moon. I think it's a good framework. The more that I've worked on art and music simultaneously, I see the value in having frameworks as the scaffold. This way you don't always have to make big decisions. You don't have to sit around and wait for magic to happen. You have a good idea of how it's going to progress and some kind of expectation of what it is.

This morning I came up with some ideas for the visuals. I'm using a color-coded system: January is white, February is an off-white, March is a pale pink, April is a mauve, May is a light green, June is a bright green, July is a deep red, August is red-orange, September is a deeper orange or burnt orange or burnt sienna, November is a gold color and December is a gray. A black dot is used as a month marker, arranged diagonally, suggesting the movement of the sun or moon across the sky over the course of a year, sort of like Peter Gabriel's full moon releases.

Album Website

Preliminary mixes:

January:

 February:

 March:

 

 April:

 

 May:

 June:

 July:

 August:

 September:

 

October:

November:

December: