Facing the music in a different direction, that is!
This is my twentieth weekly blog post documenting my fifth weekly jam. Nice. Now that I've done five versions of this music thing, I'm going to mess it all up a little.
Specifically, I don't think the video aspect is doing me any favors. It's a lot of work and it's just not that interesting to watch, especially if I'm not introducing new equipment for every jam or anything like that. I watch a lot of people make music on YouTube, but the big appeal for me in watching those is seeing some new piece of gear in use. These are not that.
By removing video, I also remove the pressure to get one continuous take. It's possible to tweak the audio track of a video in post, but if I want to reorganize or move things around or use a different take, it gets a lot more complicated. If I'm just dealing with audio, I have a lot more freedom, and the work is closer to regular music-making, which is the whole point of this. I still want to try to get one interesting 20-minute continuous take, but that's not the goal anymore. The goal is 20 minutes of interesting music, whatever process that calls for.
So I'm going to ditch YouTube for a while and just publish these to SoundCloud and my radio station. Did you know I have a radio station? All 40+ hours of music I've recorded are playing on it in a loop forever. I recently spruced it up along with the rest of my Music page, and it's now embedded there. Press play!
In a few weeks when I inevitably want to blow up the process again, I think I might try splitting the difference: audio-only, but live on the radio station! That would be stressful in a way I might enjoy.
I figured out the diorama, inspired by Gumby on a dachsund from last week and also a scene in an excellent clown show I saw this past weekend at the Elysian (which is playing again next Friday).
There's a creek cutting through the woods. A person is wading in the creek trying to coax their horse to walk through, tugging on its reins. The person is frustrated, thinking the horse is wary of the water, but we see what the horse sees and why it doesn't want to budge: a huge, unknowable creature on the other side of the creek, lurking just past the treeline.
I teased this last week and it's not quite finished enough to share more broadly, so I'll bury the announcement at the bottom of this post: I launched Episode Bottle! It's like Letterboxd but specifically for TV shows. You can mark the episodes you've seen to keep a running list of things you haven't seen yet. I watch a lot of TV and keep losing track of what's in progress, especially between seasons. It works nicely for solo use but it's still missing some "social" features that I want to add, like following, and maybe marking a show as seen on behalf of someone you watched with? Who knows! For now you can sign up and start using it if you want to, and email me if you notice anything weird or have ideas for improvements.
One last link: I fixed this little web toy I called Prince, inspired by Douglas D. Prince's "Photo-Sculptures." It's not obvious from the gallery but these are not multiple-exposure photos; they're multiple photos printed on transparent material and mounted with some space between them, so they have a bit of depth and parallax. I saw a bunch of these installed in the New York Public Library years ago and found them so entrancing. I made my tribute in 2014, initially on PutHTML (RIP PutHTML). At some point I moved it to my website and then that URL broke, so I fixed it and also changed the way it works to use real 3D, which maybe wasn't possible when I first made this.