A few most steady days of music work, punctuated with helping my father with his passport, and with SFXEngine work, promotion of the Steam Sales.
Work on the music has been slow, but steady. Often I'm unsure why I'm doing it, but I am learning, and getting better with each song and each release. This isn't always evident on a day to day basis but more clear over longer times, and so worth doing for that reason alone. Artistically, these songs are often pop-like and simple, but not always, and, of course, I aim to do my best, the best, of each song and each section.
Yesterday I reworked an Oldfield 1 composition I called 'Yellow Balloon Attack', but added words and wrote a new song called 'Hydroxy-Chloroquinine-Aspartame' around it. For all of Oldfields' 'intelligence' I've had to do a lot of work to make this into a better song. The structure had to consist of the first couple of pattern's repeated, as it was too loose and stochastic at first, and the balancing was all over the place.
Much of the past three days have been taken up with Fake Plastic Lies and its tedious and exacting guitar accompaniment, strums and strokes in acoustic and electric. These sound good, and I've learned more about playing, as my fingers will attest. The song itself is one of the most simple and pop-like I've recently written, light in every way, which clashes (as it should) with the words... the album itself is very much an ironic comment on computerisation.
This work is hard, slow and unrewarding, though its aim was (as with much of my recent music) to put out there some of my good but unheard songs from both recent times and the past. I should paint too, though again my incentive is minimal, for my own self-improvement. I've read some fragments of Dali. I must agree with a lecture where he condemned (the art of) local customs, and all buildings over 20 years old. Such condemnations are more important than ever; what was his machine age is now a digital one even more divorced from 'tradition', and now we have 'community art' to add to the pile of pointless customs and minority art or art for/by specific exclusive groups. If we are to dispose of these things, what is left? The universal? In the universe, would the art of the Earth be considered parochial?
For now, our culture remains in 'anything goes' mode, a philosophy when applied to academia is 'everyone gets an A'. Things must change, but I've been expecting this for years, and the primary changes have been technological, and even socio-political due to that technology. Creation methods aside, cultural content seems to have been remarkably static, generic, noisy, unfocused for the last 10 years.
