On Combinatory Creativity

 

 I'm a quirky musical artist because my background is in visual art and writing. In my tweens, I was writing plays and wanted to be an architect. I would design houses and make models out of shoe boxes, including the landscape design. Doing that and playing with Legos informed my creative style, which is essentially a combinatory construction of things in blocks–which is the way I work on music to this day–both at the song and album level. 

When I started to make art in the aughts, I was most interested in conceptual art because it was based on ideas--where it overlapped with music based on ideas (rhythmic, harmonic, melodic), so I was interested in the works by Michael Heiser, James Turrell and Walter DeMaria (a drummer), and also a big fan of the Neo-Dada movement–Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Back in the early days of podcasts around 2006, I used to listen to the National Gallery of Art lectures, among other art podcasts, which inspired me to start making art. I already had ideas that I jotted in the diary and started actually making them. A lot of that carries over to what I do in music.

Making conceptual music is like making conceptual art where the focus is on ideas rather than skill. I am not a skilled artist, so I don't draw or paint very well. I'm sort of like the musicians who weren't trained, so I have a certain degree of respect for people who are de-skilled and don't focus on skill. A lot of the music that I've liked since the 1980s, like Roxy Music and Talking Heads, bleeds into how I approach music. I don't always work from theory. If you look at my body of work, a lot of the things I've done have been ambient; They're not in song form. I started to get into ambient music as a way to get away from songs in the late 1990s because I was more interested in doing something more postmodern. I made quite a few ambient albums, but got kind of tired of it. I wanted to go back to writing songs. What happened ultimately was that they merged. When I work on songs now, there is an atmospheric element to them. When I do the keyboard parts, I'll do mostly organ and piano parts, but then there'll be synth parts as atmosphere. Sometimes I use a systems approach where you take a number of elements, let them permutate, then use that as a background. It’s a way of generating things without always feeling that I have to be religious about a particular style. I like doing things as they come up, and I typically don't judge them. I might think about the philosophical aspects and whether I could pull it off, but I don’t want to go down the road of thinking too much about every idea. Sometimes it's a whiplash going from ambient music to pop songs, but over the years I've come to terms with it, and have become more comfortable with wide shifts between genres. I can marry all of them and make them into musical communities of songs or cannibalize other ideas for something–either for a sound or for a chord change, etc. I always cite Rodin, who made parts of sculptures–a leg or an arm or a nose–and then would get assembled. That's how I work, and am able to work. That's my natural style. I don't have to get in the mood to create something. I can always build something, and whether it works or not is another story. But once something is made, you cannibalize it for other parts. That’s what I like about combinatory creativity. 

 

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"Discuss creative frameworks, lists, and combinatorial creativity"