A steady day of generally admin duties. It's the release day of Lou Salome Empathy With Daisies. I've made a few general online posts about this, updated the website(s), basic linsk etc., and shared the new review by Kev Milsom.
I've also made more props for next week's show, and finalised many Christmas presents. I feel tired and worried about money, but this is normal when I'm not furiously focused on a project. I (and we) need to record a new more Fall in Green things, some pieces that we've performed live often but not yet recorded, we have at least an album worth of those. I need to work on my painters album, and the many other exciting ideas. I must relentlessly focus on production quality and quantity, as any artist must.
I need a new computer too, this one is 13 years old and, throughout its life has been barely able to run my own (simple!) games. It's a sad state for a game developer to be in.
The day the music died wasn't when Buddy Holly died, but when the BBC decided to end Top of the Pops. The British music industry used to lead the world, and Top of the Pops was a world-renowned famous part of it. No other channel decided to bother about contemporary music, and since the death of that program, nobody cares about contemporary music. I love music, and certainly think that eras have changed with the demise of a physical format (as I've said many times, I think the world needs one); but in some ways that 1950-2010 era was anachronistic in the long history of music, and our era now is as it was from 1800, and the ending of exclusive royal patronage, to 1950 and mass recording. This is exciting, we creators are free again, free agents, yet, there are no curators except for casual, amateur, random in every sense, 'influencers'; social-media commentators with agendas, bloggers, vloggers.
For 12 years now, musical culture has stood still, worried, uncertain, anxiously seeing trends and claiming 'this is good, this old Kate Bush tune'. This is unique, culture does stand still sometimes, but normally it is the new which in exciting, hip, cool, the in-thing, but we have no guides to the new or the current now. There is too much, the quantity of content is growing and the return from it, economically and culturally, diminishing.
I need to work harder, and be bolder, but I have been wroking every day for over a decade now. I want to found 10 bands! But I'll wait. Like Beethoven, I must be deaf to the world, and consider what is difficult and therefore what is good, and what is new to me and my experience.
