Because I have to write so much on social media, it feels redundant to come back here and say it all over again for the few people who read beyond FaceTwit. I should use this place to explain the thought that goes behind these announcements. Leave the short versions for the mass media.
Quite a few changes made to Bandcamp in the last week. My four albums Cuisine, Gigapus, Haul Ass and Under Gail Succubus all deleted and replaced by a single compilation called Focus. That sounds like a night of the long knives and some listeners were pretty vocal about it. It is drastic, and I actually have had sleepless nights about apparently destroying years of my music. But no one has bought those albums in a while. The people that are most upset had them decades ago, and the downloads have been available for about decade themselves. So these albums have ceased to be effective containers of my music.
Finding a clue in museology – the ‘Living Museum’ is an active place where visitors can examine historical materials as deeply or as playfully as they wish. I can’t quite do that on Bandcamp, but I can simplify and better present music I made 30 years ago. I need to address a new listener, one that has decades of music to wade through and not much time to do it. That might mean deleting the worst of my music and keeping only the good bits. Fair enough.
What stops it from just being 50 Million Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong (apart from me having about a millionth of that audience) is the documentation of process – something we keep demanding from media students but forget in our own careers. Tell people what went wrong, explain what the song means, put it in the year that it was written – that’s what makes Focus better than a bunch of albums. Focus is a story written about a creative journey that lost its focus – with sound illustrations.
I want to reduce the number of albums I have made. If Michael Jackson burned out in four albums and Kraftwerk maybe in six (that is, albums that the average listener would recognise) then I have been a fool to have put so many titles on the shelf. For example also combining Dead Eyes Opened 94 with Twister/Retread from 1992 creates a simplified, coherent unit of remixes from the 1990’s about which I can write another journey. Where else can I condense this corpus? Editing feels very creative.
And it leaves space for the younger albums to be heard – they are so much better than the old ones.
Look back – Look forward
I am back teaching at the university at the moment. It’s a complete mess – COVID keeps rearing up and the administration has been hit with mass sackings which make for disorganised madness. Just take the money and be amazed I have a job. Even so I am trying to plan ahead. I have to admit the Luna computer game is a ridiculously large project, but I hate the idea of trivialising it. I can’t keep 3D modelling in my head when doing music – I have to cull someting. There’s other storytelling technologies to look at. One is a variant on the Branching Manager used at Netflix to create interactive video. Could I tell the story that way first and then come back to a 3D universe? Will I be too old to do it by then? Should I just write a book … no actually that makes no sense at all.
Should I just get the next Solar Woodroach project complete … another album … that seems repugnant at the moment. Stephen M Jones is waiting for me to prepare a few music curios. An acetate. Maybe make a branching video for Woodroach. So much of my room is frantic white boards.
In looking back with Focus, I am reminded that I used to make an album only every two years or so. What is the big hurry? Death? Probably brain death. Every year I get a little less excited about creativity. That’s partly because there’s fewer people to talk to, it’s all on FaceTwit and people talk like elderly people at a dinner party. Remember this / remember that / wow I found an old thing.
I work with students, it’s true. They are young but the heavy hand of history squashes them into making ‘films’ and ‘albums’ and other ancient thoughts. That’s my old man brain fault. I should stir more trouble.
50 million Elvis Fans can be wrong.
