Songs

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In June 2004, I purchased Apple’s new application called Garageband.

I launched the program and realized I could now sample, cut and paste, and create music the same way I designed with a desktop page-layout program. I caught my breath, sat down, and for eleven days straight

I made music.

I made these songs, one each day in this numerical order, until I had a “personalized CD”. Eleven songs in eleven days. It was a personal challenge, a gauntlet, a charrette. When it was finally over I cleaned up, shaved, and went to bed. Although I’ve never gotten around to making more songs since, Handmade was an essential, revelatory, autodidactic introduction into the craft of audio mixing.

...NOTE: The small dots below the numbers indicate videos I made to compliment my songs. These are examples of some of my first montage explorations. Here are a few others:

• • •

8-11 May 2010

Last Friday, 7 May 2010, I was invited to a private living-room “listening”. Kris Demeanor, a local celebrity troubadour, had written several new songs. And, with an eye towards eventual collaborative accompaniment, he invited several local visual-producers to attend, in order that we might personally select a song, make a complimentary video, and then perform both song and visual together in public some time in the future.

I brought along my cheap digital camera to “rough” capture the music audio during this informal performance preview. Afterwards, I went home, downloaded the ten songs onto my computer, and then spent the next 36 hours rough-sketching imagery for the entire album. Ten songs in two and a half days. This too was a personal challenge, a gauntlet, a charrette. Practice into Theory and back again by purposefully mixing word, image and sound; all of which are, no doubt, well “off-topic” to both Demeanor and his attendees. Indeed, I sent these quick-renders to the troubadour the very next day, but never heard from him again. And so it goes...

“To have great poets, there must be great audiences.”

Click the song title links, above, to access these quick renderings.