Curio No. 103
Slippery Slope , based on Dynaxiom 2878. The vibe is Barrett-era Floyd with the characteristic descending chromatic lines. *** How Suno spins it:
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Curio No. 253
Seed: Score: Audio, including AI versions. It's interesting how it develops them, but nothing I would ever do. They sound like marching band arrangements that would never be easily played. No one would want to make a score and parts for it. It words as sesquicentennial music.
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...
October 11ths
10/11/2011 Weather continued summery. Protests continue at LaSalle and Jackson. The energy here is amazing at both ends of the spectrum, with people looking downtrodden or completely electric. There’s a very loud drum circle grooving away, with car horns providing melody. [ Listen to a field recording taken simultaneously ] Transcribed drum: 10/11/2015 It was the MP3 file that killed music. It reduced music to a shareable file, first through emails, then on the Internet. It made music “good enough” as a freebie, disincentivized it, and placed too much value on recording technology. Music was once a wonder of the world. The thing that killed music wasn’t equal temperament. It was the recording. But who knew in 1970 that this would happen? Technology is weird in that it giveth and taketh away. [1...
September 11ths
9/11/1968 John’s song for those despised people who dissected his lyrics for hidden - but almost always unintended - revelations and conundrums. One of two songs on The Beatles to give mention in its lyric to another Beatles song title (“Savoy Truffle” mentioned “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”), “Glass Onion” is peppered with references to the Beatles” recent output: “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “I Am The Walrus”, “Lady Madonna”, “The Fool On The Hill” and “Fixing A Hole”. John also tossed in what may seem a cryptic line, about the “Cast Iron Shore”. This is a real place in Liverpool. [9/11/2025: Many of the lyrics that I’ve written for the Songday series are very much in the John Lennon vein. He was very much into cryptic lyrics and word play–much more than Paul McCartney. This was probably a Yoko Ono influence and Fluxus and Dada indirectly. The technique of the constructed or abstracted lyric is either a form of cut-up or bibliomancy , a form of divinatio...
0811
The first anniversary of the Songday diary. It's interesting to loop back and revisit the ideas. It's a routine like cultivating a garden. No writer’s block, no blank canvas, no despairing about not having any ideas. Now with AI (LLMs) in the loop, I'm able to research what I've written in the past as "compost".
August 11ths
8/11/1998 Book of interviews by Bill Duckworth, "Thinking Music"...section about Phil Glass. Interesting that he studied for years with Boulanger and then did something completely different. Lesson: Do something completely different and forget about theory. [8/11/2025: I’ve had a change about postmodern approaches to music, but not in visual art. “Anything goes” better in art than in music–at least for me at this point. Art generally is easier from a craft standpoint if all your focus is on ideas and concepts–which is different from generating art with zero art direction. With conceptual art, you are only the art director and the work is fabricated. With AI music, you are the producer only in the sense that you write prompts and curate the results. There is a fabrication process but there are no humans in the loop who are not anonymous or invisible. This is the biggest issue with AI music. Who are these musicians?] 8/11/2014 Bass players and those into fishing-...
June 11ths
Antipode: December 11ths 6/11/1886 [AI-Generated--with embellishments. He's now Thomas Sullivan, 30 years old living in Chicago] Blood has been scrubbed from the cobblestones, but memory stains deeper. Stockyards are a “red horizon”, not unlike a memory of violence. We are becoming something unprecedented. The question remains whether we'll recognize ourselves when the transformation completes. [ More ] 6/11/1887 What is it in a man that requires another man's suffering to feel safe? I've been turning this over for weeks. Saw old Henriksen in the evening. He works seventeen hours some days and believes himself to be free. I almost said something. Some arguments you have with yourself. 6/11/2001 Older jazz musician playing in the subway. He had several different thumb pianos with a pickup attached going through a cheesy amp. The sound was a cross between distorted guitar and Rhodes pia...
6/11/2010
Blackhawks Stanley Cup parade and celebration. Gaggles of suburbanites flocking to the inner city in a sea of red.
March 11ths
3/11/1998 First line for novel: “In the old days, there were so many regrets. It became a game to see how many we could get.” AI Version: 3/11/2021 Book: For the Love of Music . Most people see art as entertainment, and most artists see art as an inner exploration. It's hard to understand with any clarity, the minds of thousands of people. But once an artist has a lot of followers and fans, it's easier to get an idea of what the fans want. And so an artist feels he has to pander to his audience. Miscellaneous interesting bits: What we don't realize about the majesty and grandeur of cathedrals is the dogma that is within them that has caused such strife in human history. Cathedrals are a kind of "perfume" which covers up the nasty odor of hypocrisy. Re: Ravel's Bolero premiere in 1928, pe...
February 11ths
2/11/1979 (Keith Haring Journal) My interest in video is to explore the juxtaposition of words and images or sounds and images to formulate results that require the participation and individual interpretation of the viewer. My interest in painting is to explore the infinite variations of form and space relationships to produce objects and images that require the participation and individual interpretation of the viewer. [2/11/2025: We can probably trace this back to the rise of abstraction in painting in the early 20th century with Kazimir Malevich and other artists who created a paradigm shift away from representational art. The second sentence of Haring’s diary entry could have been made by David Lynch, an artist who fully explored the territory where painting and film overlap]. 2/11/1998...
December 11ths
12/11/1999 Interesting article in the Tribune about colors used in films. Before filming ever begins many tests are run to see how the colors will work against costumes, etc. I think this is how music should be done as well, where the stage is carefully set before the actual work even begins. In film, you have a visual narrative, in music and the sound narrative. (I want to do sound narratives that imply images). [12/11/2024: What I’m doing with the Music For Photographs series. Working on visuals (or just thinking visually) while working on music actually makes the music better--and probably vice-versa]. [12/11/2025: The visual vibe for David Byrne's "Who's is the Sky" tour is based on this where the costume colors are a kind of "interaction of color" (re: Albers)] 12/11/2001 To Milwaukee to photograph Milwaukee Art Museum. It is an absolutely stunning piece of architecture that fits so perfectly on the shore of Lake Michi...