Tuesday, November 01, 2016

Thought process while compiling solo albums

1.   No one's going to listen to it anyway.

2.   The current tracklisting keeps sending me to sleep.  It's because there are very specific requirements for listening to this stuff.  It has to be dark, and you have to be staring into an open fire.  At 2 o'clock in the morning, when everyone else is in bed.

3.   How does one deal with the variety of genres and songs?  There are remixes, extractions, laptronica, straight singer/songwriter recordings with the microphone balanced atop the piano, ambient recordings of trains and half finished blips that sputter into existence, then immediately die a death before they properly get started.

4.   Try to embrace the unfinished, abandoned nature of it all.  See it as an opportunity to work in a different way, free of the perfectionism that has often interfered with previous work.

5.   It seems the best way to sequence the material is chronologically.  I found that there is just enough shared airspace between the various tracks composed while in London to bind them together, despite the radicals shifts in genre.  In earlier pieces, it's the access to the equipment that provides cohesion between the songs:  certain spaces, microphones and instruments available to me at the time act as the centre point, rather than a common musical theme.

6.   It's looking like there's going to be about four - maybe five - albums.  The reason why there are so many is because...

7.   I honestly can't stand listening to more than about 25 minutes of this stuff at a time.  After that, I start to feel tired.  I think it's because the material is quite dense:  there's a lot going on sonically in a short space of time.  So things have to be broken up into lots of installments.  This approach seems to dovetail well with presenting things chronologically, as there was never more than half an hour of material with each location I worked in.

8.   No one's going to listen to it anyway.