Just Because

 

Gerhard Richter -- Abstraktes Bild (1980)

To be "sincere" in my view in terms of making art or music is to simply do the work. If you're just doing the work and you look at what the results are, that's what you made--and whether there's any meaning in that or not has to be determined. Making music with machine learning might be the cool thing to do at the moment but I would be miserable doing it. I'd rather do what Marcel Duchamp eventually did: stop making anything and just play chess or something.

I think it's good to have certain periods that you go through in order to be sincere about the idea of exploration of new territory--and finding it an enriching experience instead of simply signaling that it is. To keep making the same things all the time--whether it be work that's conservative or work that's radical--we're generally generally being very insincere to our own desires and the changing of methodology is a way to regulate that. The idea of being cool in culture is being PC to other people's values and PC to cultural values. It's like the idea of the curated playlist that we publicly share when it might be false to the things that we actually listen to. [Yesterday I watched a 1972 performance of Three Dog Night. I loved their vocal work, and it was an interesting counterpoint of what pop songs are today. It was otherwise extremely old-fashioned, yet didactic in a strange way].

Lately I've been revisiting material I wrote in the 90s and rearranging them and cannibalizing them for parts. In the process you find new material simply by recycling it or putting it in different frames or frameworks. Even changing meter and tempo makes it something completely different, but still retains its parentage. But is this just a nostalgia trip in disguise and should I move into something more algorithmic and writing code instead of music notation just because? What would happen if I used pre-existing work as a part of a data set? Why should I care about that process as weighed against what I could just do by writing at the piano just because?

When I began exploring ambient music I combined it with songwriting in both directions: an idea may have started on a guitar then became more atmospheric, or an atmosphere was padded with guitars and basses--the opposite of using synth pads in a piece with mostly guitars. It's like the artist that does abstracts and representational work. The artist that I always cite on that score is Gerhard Richter: He's a fine painter and can do representational painting. But his abstract and conceptual work is great as well. An artist just enjoying what they're doing is truly authentic for the moment.

(5/2/2021)