The other night I was playing with a synthesiser called Morphine, which is additive and so fairly complex to program. You can individually adjust each overtone and theoretically achieve just about any noise you like. But you’ll soon find it easier to sample a sound and translate that into the raw sine waves that recreate it. Playing with synthesisers is fun but ultimately sterile (the worst case being MaxMSP-itus). So I spent a nice hour or two knocking out a melody. This turned out pretty good.
But then the old addiction crept in – here was a song. Maybe if I had a collection of these songs I could make an album. And if I had an album then I could design a cover. And then I could release it. And then…
… it could join the enormous polluting shit heap of albums that already choke this planet.
One terrible thing about addiction is no matter how many years go by, a stray thought can come along and start up that whole old way of thinking. Albums. Releases. Egods. It’s been less than a year since I swore off that bottle. I hear from alcoholics that 30 years later they are still taking precautions. How long will this take?
I know a fair few web logs that have albums for download. Some are legit net labels, most are just some prick who thinks his tastes need to be advertised with other people’s labour. But even though it’s all there for the taking (oo-er sorry starry eyed dweebs – sharing) I simply cannot be arsed going through the motions. I actually don’t want to hear all these albums. I don’t have the time to listen to the folder full I downloaded months ago. Quit with the goddamn albums already.
It’s got to the point that my heart sinks when I see a square picture with a blurry art photograph and a bit of text in the corner. Let alone a page of them.
This is an individual choice and I am sure there’s a happy kid out there filling his 1TB drive with everything recorded by Gefiltefishe666 in FLAC format and lots of luck to you. Me, I can sense the easy way falls back into old thinking and while I feel the anxiety and challenge of new ways of working – the hard road is the road that leads out of this place.
- We admitted we were powerless over recording – that we were pumping out shitty CDRs.
- Came to believe that it was time to grow the hell up.
- Made a decision to stop that lazy ass shit.
- Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
- Blogged about the exact nature of our wrongs.
- Were ready to try something that hadn’t already been done decades ago.
- Humbly realised that no one really wants yet another net label.
- Made a list of all persons we had bored, and became willing to make amends to them all.
- Shut down the Blogger site with all the ripped music.
- Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
- Sought through sharp and detailed self criticism to develop new and more self challenging ways to entertain ourselves and others.
- Having got a clue as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to musicians and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Word.