lee tran lam hosts a lovely radio show up on sydney’s fbi 94.5fm, its called local fidelity and it covers australian music - “wallflowerish bedroom singer-songwriters, beat-slick electronica, nerdy post-rock and much more” to be more specific. i tend to think of myself as a nerdy wallflowerish bedroom post-beat-electronica-rock songwriter, so i was very happy recently to run through a Q&A session for her new local fidelity blog.
go here to read some secrets that i’ve not yet divulged on this blog… like how beverly crusher keeps a watchful eye on me while i work… there’s also check out interviews with darwin’s jane woody and melbourne-via-japan indie hero alexis aka the motifs…
meanwhile, i’ve had a good weekend. on friday night i vanquished some possessed townsfolk, they were innocents but they probably had it coming, more specifically i utilised my cloud of bewilderment, which is incidentally what most people fall into after listening to a faux pas album, huh! then on saturday i got a year older, on sunday i watched battlestar galactica: razor, this morning i vanquished the vista that had come installed on my new notebook. feeling nerdy. i love it. now, back to the business of making music. today i continue fiddling with this band’s material and this band’s material. hopefully i can show you the results soon. in fact, head back to this post if you want to hear a sneak peek of the former.
progress continues.. i’ve had a couple of good days down here in my beachside hermitage, i’m making sounds i like, which are starting to arrange into layers, and then into ideas that seem like they might at some point become wholes, which in turn seem to carry the promise of being able to be threaded together into larger wholes or concepts which i may then be able to dither into a shiny disc and someone gives me ten dollars or something.
did i say wholes? i meant whales.
i’ve been listening to the field a lot in the past couple of weeks, after reading some interviews with him describing his process. “I use the computer as a sampler and I steal milliseconds from a track that I then rearrange and add new sounds and effects to.” SOUNDS EXCITING. thats a quote for the one-pager, no doubt. sure, so this most underwhelmingly accurate description doesn’t exactly imbue his music with much glamour, but it also pretty neatly describes my music too i guess. so perhaps we are brothers in trying to make exciting music via unexciting methods.
at least one part of that sentence isnt true - his methods excite me, particularly his approach to spontaneity. in another interview: “I can’t go back to a track. I have to make it when I start. If I don’t then I know I won’t make the track at all. Sometimes it takes an hour, sometimes a whole night… Live audio, the guitar, I don’t want to have to go back and mix it. Sorry [laughs].” i admire this. i wish i could work like this. that initial burst of energy (flow) when something is first coming together is by far the most exciting part of the whole damn process of making music, and every single moment after that is less and less interesting. sometimes with my stuff it feels like i spend 30 minutes coming up with the thing i love, and then 10-20 hours hacking away at it until its ‘acceptable’ - mixing it into something ‘better’, all the while trying desperately not to kill the thing in it that i loved in that first burst of spontaneity. so much time is spent moulding it into Something Good, and after a while i begin to question whether its just me that i’m trying to please when i tweak this or that EQ or remove this or that offending beat… i want to be able to share with people that initial burst of excitement, do i have to sit through hours of mixing and tweaking to be able to warp what i have on the screen into what i hear in my head?
maybe its just that thing where you have to rehearse how to be spontaneous - maybe after another 10 years of making spontaneous music i’ll have it down to the point where i don’t need to go back and re-edit and re-mix things into Something Good, i can just sit down and bang a song comes out, and i instantly love it and it just stands as this live document of an experience i had, an intimate experience between a lonely man and his machine. this strengthens the case for the theory that i am currently developing, where i will probably only begin to make works that i am truly proud of (right down into my balls) in 10-20 years, and that i should just get used to being vaguely unsatisfied with my own work until that time comes.
hey, imagine that, if i WAS to actually re-edit and re-mix everything i did into Something Good. then we’d have a winner on our hands. utah saints, the field.. this post is like some weird subliminal kate bush tribute.. i am going insane.
here, then, is something that came out of me last night, presented here before that tricky, necessary, tedious, and destructive/contructive process of editing begins, mostly because i’m as curious as you are (no, wait - its probably a safe bet that i’m much more curious than you) as to how this version will stand up against the ‘finished’ version, whenever that happens. will it lose its edge, will whatever ethereal spontaneity that i attribute to this un-sanitised version be gone by the time that evil part of me deems it ‘appropriate for consumption’? or is that spontaneity just imagined anyway, something only i hear in it because, you know, i was there when it happened?
O, product of last night, pre-edit, still containing misguided ideas and bad decisions, barer than the average labored faux pas monstrosity (?), also known as “this is what happened last night after i watched spicks and specks and before i watched the larry sanders show”
flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. i am familiar with this elusive feeling, and concur with a recent description of flow which emphasised the fact that past, future, self and other concepts dissolve when so focused in the now.
examples of when flow has occurred:
- when i swam the english channel
- when i entered the roland gift and came first
- when captain picard travelled to an alien planet and finally got some, after nigh on 10 years of not getting any (time stood still and crusher doesn’t count)
- when i watched captain picard travel to an alien planet and finally get some (time stood still)
- when i saw commander adama with a moustache
- when i found spock’s brain.
this following musical/visual combination may lead to you experiencing flow, it did for me. don’t be scared, embrace the now, the future will continue after the song finishes… or will it…. in my time machine:
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June 30, 2008 
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