A first quiet day for art in weeks. Things to do are to prepare some music for the Fall in Green performance on Monday, so I've composed and played some piano music with a great fanfarish quality, and created some background sounds. I feel I'm slightly doing this to distract myself from working on the god album, but that will come, that work is fermenting. This piano music begins with great chords at first, which is good practice. For any of these live and relatively free pieces, I want to push some technique so that I can practice as I play.
Tonight I've played another, very loose, piano tune for the next ArtSwarm, with a Frankenstein theme. Perhaps, in piano terms, I need to focus up my accuracy and timing. Timing, timing, yes, but this Frankenstein piece is a coarse stab at the keys, an aim at something grand and Gothic. It fades into gentleness in the middle too. Everything needs drama and contrast, and unity.
In the sequencer I overlaid a few clank sounds, made by irregular loops of recordings of me hitting a metal can. I thought it needed something from an old film, so used a Bela Lugosi speech from an Ed Wood film. Suddenly, the feeling of the piece seemed to reflect my frustration at not achieving what I want, the eternal struggle of failing to achieve a potential. There are elements of night battles and frustration, the clanking monsters, then a peace or rest, that leads into the defiant speech.
The mood might be influenced by a documentary about the actress Hedy Lamarr which I saw yesterday, an intelligent woman who didn't, it appeared, want to be an actress and seemed somewhat unable to fulfil her dreams of being a scientist, despite many opportunities. She appeared like a melody trapped in the groove of a record.
I must push on with the god music or the images, or some, or all of it! I want to get it out of the way by the end of October. The problems all come from a lack of clear direction. Problems must be coldly identified, quantified, qualified and worked out. The solution is always hammering away at the problem. Evasion will not help.
