A ramble about creative processes, deliberate obfuscation and civil blood
Early this morning, before either of us had really grown eyes, Hiro quoted a line from Romeo and Juliet that had stuck in her mind during the night, describing a town "Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean." The phrase careened through my brain like a school bus full of howling children and slammed into the concept of an EP that I am currently working on (one of several, actually). I sighed that if it was not such a long phrase, it really ought to have been the final title of the project. Hiro then suggested that I just call the record 'Civil Blood', for short. I think this would have been a great title, for someone else. I immediately drifted more towards the second half of the line, the 'Civil Hands Unclean,' which Hiro pointed out would divorce the title from much of the meaning of the phrase, if you didn't happen to know the quote. So wouldn't that defeat the point of using it? (This is my follow-up question, not her words). Hiro mentioned that she is sometimes put off by the "crypticness" of psychedelic folk, which led me to attempt an explanation of the processes I follow when trying to make something meaningful and important to myself (which I almost always hope that other people will latch on to and somehow enjoy, as well).
After mulling it over, this is a topic that I do feel like expounding upon, a little bit. I haven't ever written much about my work process or ambitions in making music. There are good reasons for this: Firstly, my feelings about both are changing all the time. Secondly, I try to be driven by gut feeling and instinct, instead of theory, and thirdly, I don't want to sound pretentious, if I can help it. Nevertheless, in talking to Hiro, I realized that sometimes it does make a bit of a difference to know the perspective that an artist (*cue gag reflex*) is working from. Sometimes, it is probably also helpful for the artist (*cue rolling eyes*) to try to put these things into words.
Now, I would like to immediately separate this entry from the context of psychedelic folk. I love a lot of that stuff, and it probably is a good shorthand for what I do, but I can only speak for myself, and taken as a genre, there is just much too much crap (excuse me, insert "imho" as often as you like, when reading this) out there, for it to be a good heading for this discussion.
I have a very ambivalent relationship to obfuscation. It tends to annoy me, whenever it seems frivolous and unnecessary, and I often drift towards very straight-forward storytellers in literature or music. Yet I find myself making music that often starts out like a drunk telling a fairly cohesive story on one side of the road and ends up face down in the ditch on the other side, with a badger chewing his leg, before he has finished making his point. I guess the idea is that the most interesting part is the drunk himself, and what went through his mind, rather than what came out of his mouth. I am not the drunk in this ridiculous metaphor, by the way.
As I explained to Hiro, I often try to find a koan-like quality in the words and sounds that I use. I look for things that can be turned over and over until they lose their original content and are filled up with something new and exciting and revealing.
Specifically on Weather Charms, this became the core of my work process: Absent-minded improvisation. Repeated over and over. Selected and edited. Recorded over with new improvisation. Repeated over and over. Every time something would burn a small hole in my attention, I would try to keep it in, or enhance it in the music. Both the album and the songs changed their titles many times through leaps of association with each reworking of the music, and still each track feels almost linear when I look back at them, now, as if there was a strong sense of direction along a path that was so faint that it would disappear if I had ever stopped to plan the next step.
It is the toe nail clipping on the floor that becomes a crescent new moon. A new moon that becomes an old moon that becomes the swollen side of the breast of a woman that gave birth to seven sons. The moon becomes a wolf that pounces on her like grief when all her seven sons go off to war (Bone Charms). I try hold these things in my mind, turning and turning them over and over, and while I may forget the sequence, the associations tend to stick.
And then, suddenly I read, in Slagtebænk Dybbøl, a letter from Dorothea Schau whose seven sons all went off to war, and whose last two surviving sons were killed in the same battle in 1864. Now the song is for her, and I wonder how much of the series of associations was there before I knew her story, and how much is reconstructed memory. I wonder, but it really doesn't matter.
The same process is mirrored in the "off" sounds in the music. Fragments sometimes become meaningful when they are released from their original context and repeated with an insistence on their potential importance. Sometimes nothing happens. Of course, it is not the fragment that is important, but the series of cognitive leaps that it might prompt.
The idea is for each piece to have a distinct meaning - as much as possible, I only pick up new fragments when I get a strong response or association from them myself - but to recombine them as a new, cognitive bricolage of fetishes (*cue self hurt*), so the meaning is changed by the context.
In the end, I want both aspects of what I love to be there - the direct, hamfisted whole and the loose piece of oatmeal that sticks to the roof of your mouth and becomes a vast, contured landscape of annoyance (or something more appealing, but with the same sudden loss of proportion). I am trying to figure out how to get it right.
The above is as much a statement of intent, as it is a description. I am always trying to change the way I do things, to make music that sounds even more like it feels to me. Or, alternatively, music that helps me realize how I feel in the first place.
I cheapened a lot of expensive words in the above, but there you have it. There I have it. It might be that I deliberately make things confusing because I am too much of a coward to be direct. That is another theory I have.
After mulling it over, this is a topic that I do feel like expounding upon, a little bit. I haven't ever written much about my work process or ambitions in making music. There are good reasons for this: Firstly, my feelings about both are changing all the time. Secondly, I try to be driven by gut feeling and instinct, instead of theory, and thirdly, I don't want to sound pretentious, if I can help it. Nevertheless, in talking to Hiro, I realized that sometimes it does make a bit of a difference to know the perspective that an artist (*cue gag reflex*) is working from. Sometimes, it is probably also helpful for the artist (*cue rolling eyes*) to try to put these things into words.
Now, I would like to immediately separate this entry from the context of psychedelic folk. I love a lot of that stuff, and it probably is a good shorthand for what I do, but I can only speak for myself, and taken as a genre, there is just much too much crap (excuse me, insert "imho" as often as you like, when reading this) out there, for it to be a good heading for this discussion.
I have a very ambivalent relationship to obfuscation. It tends to annoy me, whenever it seems frivolous and unnecessary, and I often drift towards very straight-forward storytellers in literature or music. Yet I find myself making music that often starts out like a drunk telling a fairly cohesive story on one side of the road and ends up face down in the ditch on the other side, with a badger chewing his leg, before he has finished making his point. I guess the idea is that the most interesting part is the drunk himself, and what went through his mind, rather than what came out of his mouth. I am not the drunk in this ridiculous metaphor, by the way.
As I explained to Hiro, I often try to find a koan-like quality in the words and sounds that I use. I look for things that can be turned over and over until they lose their original content and are filled up with something new and exciting and revealing.
Specifically on Weather Charms, this became the core of my work process: Absent-minded improvisation. Repeated over and over. Selected and edited. Recorded over with new improvisation. Repeated over and over. Every time something would burn a small hole in my attention, I would try to keep it in, or enhance it in the music. Both the album and the songs changed their titles many times through leaps of association with each reworking of the music, and still each track feels almost linear when I look back at them, now, as if there was a strong sense of direction along a path that was so faint that it would disappear if I had ever stopped to plan the next step.
It is the toe nail clipping on the floor that becomes a crescent new moon. A new moon that becomes an old moon that becomes the swollen side of the breast of a woman that gave birth to seven sons. The moon becomes a wolf that pounces on her like grief when all her seven sons go off to war (Bone Charms). I try hold these things in my mind, turning and turning them over and over, and while I may forget the sequence, the associations tend to stick.
And then, suddenly I read, in Slagtebænk Dybbøl, a letter from Dorothea Schau whose seven sons all went off to war, and whose last two surviving sons were killed in the same battle in 1864. Now the song is for her, and I wonder how much of the series of associations was there before I knew her story, and how much is reconstructed memory. I wonder, but it really doesn't matter.
The same process is mirrored in the "off" sounds in the music. Fragments sometimes become meaningful when they are released from their original context and repeated with an insistence on their potential importance. Sometimes nothing happens. Of course, it is not the fragment that is important, but the series of cognitive leaps that it might prompt.
The idea is for each piece to have a distinct meaning - as much as possible, I only pick up new fragments when I get a strong response or association from them myself - but to recombine them as a new, cognitive bricolage of fetishes (*cue self hurt*), so the meaning is changed by the context.
In the end, I want both aspects of what I love to be there - the direct, hamfisted whole and the loose piece of oatmeal that sticks to the roof of your mouth and becomes a vast, contured landscape of annoyance (or something more appealing, but with the same sudden loss of proportion). I am trying to figure out how to get it right.
The above is as much a statement of intent, as it is a description. I am always trying to change the way I do things, to make music that sounds even more like it feels to me. Or, alternatively, music that helps me realize how I feel in the first place.
I cheapened a lot of expensive words in the above, but there you have it. There I have it. It might be that I deliberately make things confusing because I am too much of a coward to be direct. That is another theory I have.