|
2022-12-19 (Week 2246): Driving Back to Center
This past week has been an emotional rollercoaster. My weight was much higher than I would have liked, so I did some fasting and detoxing. Doing so led to some emotional highs and lows and helped me see things more clearly.
At the heart of music is emotion. I've tried to make things sound cool or dark, but that's all from a mental frame. The mental can play a part in music creation, but it can't lead the way.
I was able to tap into emotion for "Shattered Memories," and there is a particular emotion sitting forefront with me - it's a sort of haunted gauzy melancholia. It hits hard with two songs in particular - the first being Low's "Lullaby" (which Amorphis' "My Kantele - Acoustic Reprise" definitely pulls from). Low is a recent discovery (as documented previously), but the quality of Mimi Parker's voice in this track chills me to the bone.
The second is Jesu's "pity," which came out last week. The track calls back to "Heart Ache," which I fell in love with 18 years ago. It hits the same emotions it did before, which tells me something is unresolved. I feel the best way to resolve that is to explore that emotion and write from it, which I will attempt.
That leaves me with last week's musical creation (or noise creation) being of little relevance, save for the process I used to create. That process needs a few adjustments, but the foundations are solid. That also leaves the project I spoke of last week in the dust.
It also means rejecting all the noise and blurriness I've employed in my musical output for many years. A bit of fuzz is okay, but for the most part, it feels like the proceedings will be primarily clean guitar arpeggios, piano, background synthesizers (run through Audiobulb Ambient), drum samples, vocals, and everything's going to be sparse and slow.
The background synthesizers through Audiobulb Ambient will be a callback to my works from 2017-2020, and some of the pedals and tones I'm using on my guitar sound will be callbacks to my teenage years (likely because they're the same pedals). I'm trying to incorporate a little of everything I've done musically over the past 28+ years, so I'm hopeful those elements will fit in with what I'm writing.
The vocals will be the most challenging part because I haven't done them in ages and have limited windows to record them. I'm more confident with my voice than I used to be, but I'm still not the world's best singer. I also have to write lyrics, which part of me thinks was the inevitable result of the data collection and brain dumping.
A few stanzas are coming together, but it's all very piecemeal. I'll review my notes more thoroughly than I have been and see where I end up. I have some ideas, but they will be more apparent once I take action. The only way out is through, as they say.
Until next week!
|
