On Rewrites

Very often once you reach a certain point in a work you realize it has to be revised. I feel I'm always moving towards a Resolution, which doesn't always mean it's finished. Like a visual artist, you have to step back and look at it and figure out what it needs.

One of Eno's Oblique Strategies is something like "Step outside" or "Go to another room" (Maybe you can find it) 

Your piece wants something, and a part of the creative process is finding out what that is.

On one of my current projects for the Music For Places (Music For Photographs) I recorded multiple bass parts, which I wanted to interlock into one composite bass part. This continued on in the same fashion with the guitar and keyboard parts. But once I started to mix it I realized some of the original parts were not working, and so I had to replace them--with one part! Ultimately, almost everything had to be replaced. In a painting, the corollary would be the scraping off or rubbing out a part of the surface, then painting over it.

I'm always reminded what art historian Kirk Varnedoe said about Jasper Johns "cross-hatch" paintings:

“This thatch of babbling, cut-up meaning is suppressed and supplanted--again, the idea of burying or canceling. Here the crisp and aerated order in [Pollock’s] Scent is churned thick, gooey, and molten. [It is]  canceled in the process of being made! The gesture itself is the gesture of both making and burying.” Varnedoe, Kirk. Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock. United Kingdom, Princeton University Press, 2006. p. 231

 

Jasper Johns, Corpse and Mirror (1974)

Creativity typically involves a lot of revising. Writers know this very well because they have to do rewrites. Composers and songwriters also have to do rewrites.

You always are where you are--you're looking at where the piece is and you're thinking "This isn't working--I have some other ideas here where I can make a change." Sometimes you have to go back to square one and just redo it. The interesting thing about restarting is that all the lessons that you had learned up to that point get inherited into the new work and the rewriting actually can go fairly quickly. For me, this also leads to the post-release alt-mixes where I can scrape off even more, and make them completely new pieces.

Even this blog post started from one of my audio diary riffs, which was "scraped" to find its essential meaning--what I was really saying.

The process of both saying something and writing it out is better than one or the other.