Studio Recap: Day Four

Yesterday started with a bang because Joey found a violin. It only had three strings. (violins normally have four?) None of us know how to play, but we never let things like lack of skill prevent us from doing things that are awesome. Things like forcing poor violins to make beautiful awful sounds.

We also took some time to make some structural choices regarding the Wurlitzer-based song we started on Monday. It is useful, I have found, to decide which chord progressions will comprise the verses and choruses (and pre-choruses!) in order to facilitate the writing of lyrics.

But we also had to take a lunch break, and after lunch we were sleepy. Jonathan and I took refuge in our laptops:



Joe was working on music, apparently, whilst we basked in the screen glow.

I ran off to live room B to work on lyrics for the aforementioned Wurly tune provisionally titled "Slinkitzer." Jonathan usually gets to pick the working titles for the songs, which seems only fair, because the final names almost always come from the lyrics that Joe and I write. This way Jonathan gets some naming glory, but we also have to call the songs things like "Slinkitzer" (or "Slinkitizer," or "Slinksville") until we come up with the titles.

When I returned to the control room, Joe was ready to enlist all of us in vocals for the number he'd been working on. Even Jonathan sang!






Thus concludes the day four recap. Today I have made a list of everything we need to do in the next week and a half, and it is terrifying. So back to work I go.

Studio Recap: Day Three

Yesterday we spent our entire eight hours of studio time on the pump organ piece we started Tuesday night. First we made structure choices; we decided which parts would be called things like Verse, Chorus, Bridge, and my favorite, Pre-chorus. When the dust settled, we were happy to find that we had cut a 14-minute jam down to less than half its original length. Then the boys played some drums. Then Jonathan played some guitar. Then Joe tried some lyrics. Feeling good about it.

Here's a short clip:

Convey Demo by Listing

Studio Recap: Day Two

We started around 11am yesterday with Joe on drums. Accordion/guitar/wurlitzer jam in the afternoon. Took a break in the evening, then went over to Nick Sibley's studio and played the pump organ for a while. Productive day all in all - two or three potential new songs....

Studio Recap: Day One

Yesterday was our first day back in the studio this year. This is how we spent it:

Played with slinky
Kidnapped Wurlitzer
Bamboo tubes
Goof wheel guitar
Drums
Brainstormed words for lyrics
Bent Casio

Key words for the day were:
Capillary action
Propulsion

We worked for about nine hours, and at the end of the day we had a meandering noise jam. But if there is anything we learned from last January, it is that our songs never end up sounding like the first recordings. The slow sludge jam is expected to evolve into a short, sweet, and nasty little pop song.

We're off for day two shortly. Will post progress.

Soundwalk: Brooklyn Botanic Garden (Work in Progress...)

Soundwalk by Meg Kramer

Here's the current version of my soundwalk project. The music in the first track is an early demo of one of the Listing tracks...and that's me trying to overcome my congestion and recent laryngitis in the voice-over. I haven't really achieved my ideal here, but I'm getting closer. Here's what I wrote in my intro for my classmates:

In this version, I decided to take more control over the listener's encounter with this space.

I used the following strategies:

* I used the physical experience of the soundwalk form to alter the listener's consciousness in the space of the garden. The use of personal headphones creates a dissociative effect in the listener; the audio information they are receiving contradicts the evidence of their other senses. The movement through space at a predetermined pace creates an interesting tension between the active physical state and the passive - following instructions - mental state.

* I borrowed from radio ballad methodology by using found texts. In this case, rather than using the news, I used history, literature, and scientific writing as the building blocks of my script. The listener experiences the space physically, but is also placed in historical and cultural context.

Ideally, these strategies will result in an active, yet meditative, experience for the listener.

The Process

Sometimes I wonder why I am not a more prolific creative person. After all, I have ideas, drive, and a smattering of discipline.

Today, I believe I have figured it out. It's because my creative process looks like this:



and it works like this:
1. Write a bunch of stuff down.
2. Lose everything.
3. Find some pages, but not of what I'm looking for.
4. Acquire scissors.
5. Cut pages into pieces.
6. Explode them all over the room.


I bet Dickens didn't write all of his novels by cutting up little pieces of paper and exploding them all over his habitat.

The Mid-November Total Life Assessment

This fall has been all about the big questions for me. Who do I want to be? What do I want to accomplish? What kind of life do I want to have?

I make a lot of lists. By default I tend to rebel against any method of organization, strategy, or planning, but my mom is a list-maker and when I was young she used to make me write out to-do lists. When I was an adolescent I thought that was a perfectly stupid way to spend my time. After all, I know what I need to do, or want to do, so why waste the time and the paper writing it down? But still, any time I found myself overwhelmed with all of the projects I had taken on - dramachoirmediaworkschoolcrosscountryandsoforth - Mom would sit me down and say let's make a list. Eventually, I had to admit that it felt good to cross off completed items. A few years ago I began listing on my own steam.

I can make lists of my goals, of places I want to go and things I want to do, but right now it doesn't seem to be making things clearer. I think that this is because the goals are really simple, and they don't need to be elaborated or broken down into tasks. Life is short, and I want to enjoy mine. I want to see as much of the world as I can see, and I want to make beautiful things.




My Twitter diary is up and running. I started it November 1, but I accidentally erased the first post. I'm not going to worry about it, though. So far, I have managed to be very disciplined and post every day, usually right before I go to sleep. The most interesting challenge so far - other than trying to hit exactly 140 characters - is negotiating the public nature of Twitter with the desire to document things that I don't necessarily want the entire world to know. One of the goals of this project is to create a document that will help me remember what has been important to me, and when things actually happen. So I've been playing with different ways to code information that I want to remember, but don't want to make public. It's a fun game.

I'm letting NaNoWriMo go this year (again). I was slammed with schoolwork and social obligations at the beginning of the month, and now I'm far too behind to catch up. I'm not beating myself up about it, because I've been pretty happy with some of the other writing projects I've been working on. Yesterday, I submitted a few things to 12th Street, the New School's literary journal. I think that my subject matter might be just a little too strange for 12th Street, but we'll see. My submission last year was rejected, so I'm not terribly optimistic about it. That's okay, though, it just means that there's another home out there somewhere for my stuff.

The soundwalk project I mentioned a while ago has been graded and peer-reviewed, and I was surprised at the positive feedback I received. Maybe my dreams for the project were too ambitious...but the responses made me reconsider abandoning the project. Maybe I will return to it for my final project, and try to make the audio walking tour of my dreams!

I haven't been working on music much. Tried to attack a lyric problem, but my head's not really in songwriting mode lately. BUT, I have been coordinating with Joe and Jonny to finish the Listing album, and we've blocked off studio time in January. The new Close-Far studio is going to be gorgeous. Jonathan lost his old studio space this summer, and at the time it seemed like a tragedy, but now I think that it may have been a stroke of luck. The new place is in a former radio station, so it's already set up for sound, and I think it'll seem a lot more legit to his potential clients. I am also looking forward to recording in a space that is not a basement. I mean, I have fond memories of basements, but last January I spent the better part of the month in the dark, embracing a space heater, and shivering.

The electricity essay is coming along. I wrote a chunk about circuits and hacking, and my professor compared me to Jacques Cousteau. I hardly have to tell you how happy that made me.