Thursday, May 19, 2011

Spring floods

Spring has always been a wet event when I was growing up; living right next to a river brings certain things into perspective, like just how bad things can get. This year, the flood is pretty bad, as its making evening news. Americans may think its normal for places along the Mississippi, and there are always certain spots where the damage is more extensive than in others, so seeing it on the news didn't mean much to me.

Then I asked my family if the situation as reported was really that bad, or was it just slow news week and no juicy scandals were out and about to distract the masses. It was (and still is) much worse than I thought. It wasn't just a few isolated spots that got swamped, it was the whole freaking region. While flooding is expected in the more peripheral zones, this time the water has risen in the heart of the town in places that never flood. Its bad enough that evacuation was necessary.

The wet shit has hit the fan indeed, and was making sure that everyone got a generous helping.

But this is not the spring flood I want to talk about. I have been struggling for a few years now to get some tracks together, make anything that got from A to B with some sort of aural sense and have been hitting the auditory blank page at pretty much every attempt. Of sure, there's several recordings of varied guitar noodlings, some very basic riffs recorded for later use, but nothing is turning up on that front so far.

The last complete tracks I had made date back to my work being published by the microlabel Bone Structure. Some of the material released in the compilation were actually dug out from the archives, but there were a couple of tracks that were new material, and there was a certain amount of new noise work that got done (including a pretty cool atmospheric track in collaboration with Beta Cloud.) But for one reason or another, the muse buggered off and nothing worth mentioning had come out for long stretches.

I had projects, work I had wanted to put out, but just couldn't get past the apparently massive creative hurdles. Its amazing really just how may obstacles you can put in your own way when some difficulties arise and you create problems instead of creating solutions.

It becomes a time of "if only'; a quest for that silver bullet that will make things work, that will magically solve the problem.

And then you clue in that the problem is that you're just not getting the job done.

The floodgate has been pried open and the tracks are happening. Its sort of shocking how fast they happen, after such a long time of drought. Its come to the point where I have to tell myself to stop working and head to bed, or I'd sleep three hours a night so that I could spend more time in the studio. One thing that helped, the crowbar that did the heavy work is that I ignored the defeatist mind and kept on working when difficulty arose. No "I'll work on it later", or "fuck it it wont work" and dropping the project into oblivion (and a cluttered graveyard it is indeed.)

I have spent a weekend of night and pushed one project to completion, a gift for my dear friend, Madame Cagliastro. I had offered her a theme song for her radio show some time ago, and finally pushed the stone off to the top of the hill and let it roll at the feet of the spiteful gods. I have delivered on my promise and the piece will premiere this Friday on her show.

I'm excited, as this is the most public showing of my work since  Bone Structure. And its not shying me either, as I spend more time and creative juices building new works, which I deem mostly practice tracks, but which get me doing, instead of whining and pining for that thing that used to be.

Sometimes you need a hit to the head to get the right perspective; sometimes you need a kick in the ass. Whatever gets the creative juices flooding.

I'm back, baby. Let the games begin.

No comments:

Post a Comment