Wednesday, May 13, 2015

i'm looking ahead to the next phase a little, to try and order it and it's very clear where i lost myself. up to the middle of 2003, everything is carefully ordered and meticulously laid out. from 2003 to 2007, all i have is an unordered mess.

but that's why i'm doing this.

as mentioned repeatedly, 46-48 will be done shortly. 46 is the piano piece. 47 and 48 are both 2xcd electronic music compilations. 49 is up.

after 49, i disappeared to bc for a few months.

when i came back, i was pretty shaky. 50 is a short ep of downright disturbing material; i've never released this, and i still find it difficult to listen to. i actually need to conquer this for myself. it won't be altered, except maybe to have an instrumental mix.

51 will need to be put aside momentarily, as it's really the only thing in this batch that is going to need recording attention. it was only a few weeks after i got back from bc that i got thrown out. i guess my stepmother liked it better when i was gone. i ended up staying with sarah for a few weeks and recording with a 4-track for a little while rather than with a computer. one of these tracks, specifically, needs to be completed as the second half of my eighth symphony, but the fact that i have a tape of it indicates that this is the proper place to put it. so, this will collect those cassette demos.

i eventually ended up at my mom's for a few months. 52 is a protest single about afghanistan, whereas 53 is a demo i put together for an art show sarah was doing - and collects material recorded over the second half of 2003.

sarah and i then got a place for a few more months. 54 was put together out of spare parts as a part of a basement record label; it's stuck as my seventh disc, although i'm going to expand it to a double, here. i'm also going to compile an ep of material that was edited at this point, and call it 55.

56 and 57 are going to be related to the sixth symphony, although it's not clear to me yet how. 58 is going to be my still unfinished seventh symphony. it needs vocals and sound design attention. 59 is going to be a slice of matlab generated noise, and probably exist as a standalone for now - when i come back to this and finish it, i will date it to 2016 or 2017. this is not written material, so it would be weird to date it to 2004 or 2005. it's the first time i've come across this issue [my classical guitar project is not possible to finish].

that actually takes me to early 2005, which is when a brick wall hits. i wrote a number of more conventional jazz-pop-punk type pieces over 2004 that i was hoping to get sarah to drum on. sarah had a type of add that made her unable to do anything but dad rock and screamo, which stripped her of any use to me as a musical collaborator. thankfully, i at least have a demo tape of some of these songs - as many have been forgotten. but, it's not dated until 2005, after i'd moved out and moved on. at this point, i was still trying to record material that i'd written as far back as mid 2003. what that means is that there's an entire record - and probably closer to three - that got lost in the shuffle.

worse, it left me with the painful task of trying to artistically document a failed relationship while it was raw. i kept putting it all off to working on something else, then going back to it, then doing something else; it wasn't until mid 2007 that i drew a line in the sand and said "i'm working on material after 2005".

what that leaves me with is a lot of songs written over 2004-2005, essentially none of which have anything close to a proper recording. most of them exist solely in the form of very rough demoes.

i'm thinking i probably want to split this group of demos in half and put the first half into a record dated to very early 2005. the reason is that the period shift in 2005 came with frances the mute, which i found very inspiring. i hadn't heard a solid rock record in a long time at that point. it kicked me into more dynamic, almost metal pieces - which became the proverbs era. this is period 4 and defines my main project from 2005 all the way to 2011, complete with long periods of inactivity and some depression over an inability to find a drummer. so, i've walked you through basically all of period 3, here. it's not clear how this will be numbered.

2005 also needs to find space for a throatmotor demo that i wrote, a couple of compilations and the eventual trivial group double lp, which will be made up of symphonies 5,6,7 and 8 - once 7 is finished and 8 is recorded.

i ended up back in my parents basement at the beginning of 2006 to finish my math degree. i only needed to finish my honours project, and some breadth requirements. i used the breadth requirement as an electronic music course, which allowed me to finish my second symphony. i'll be releasing something in that space to document this - likely a compilation of all academic musical projects. i also started an unrelated electronic symphony that i'll need to finish.

period 4 recording began seriously in mid 2007, after i'd found a job with microsoft and got my own apartment with a small studio in it. unfortunately, it took two years to finish the song i started working on next and i stopped writing due to the backlog of material...

25,000 views & 300 subscribers


google is of course mostly interested in finding ways to show you ads. and, they've consequently erected this ridiculous theoretical idea of subs as the best way to get ads across, under the idea that it ensures a level of regular brainwashing. they've then managed to enforce this theory from the top down through their company, with the expectation that people will just do what they expect.

of course, the reality is rather different. youtube feeds are not like facebook feeds, because videos take time to watch. you can scroll through a feed of pictures. you can't scroll through a feed of videos. the result is that almost nobody really uses their youtube feed, rendering subscribers almost entirely pointless.

i don't expect google to ever understand this. it's too engrained in their corporate culture; it's an article of faith that building subscribers is the way to success. it's a good example of why any entity should base their theories on observations, rather than projected realities. really, it's sort of depressing that it's 2015 and influential organizations are still confused on this point. and it could very well be their unraveling. if some other company is able to use research tools to find out ways that people want to interact - rather than decide how we should interact based on the perceived ideal advertising arrangement - it could very well leave youtube a ghost town.

in the meantime? yeah. people will sub to you without having any interest in your channel, and without watching any of your videos. then they'll miss your uploads because they don't read their feed, and not care because they weren't interested in the first place. it's still a mystery to me why they subscribe, but i think it is generally seen as an act of solidarity.
yesterday was weird. i meant to put aside a few hours to fill in track details at bandcamp, and ended up sidetracked at youtube. i got about halfway done the intended purpose and then crashed. that needs to be the focus, today. it's hopefully done by lunch time.

i think i've worked out a plan to overnight in pontiac. there's an all night mcdonalds a short walk south down woodward. there's also an all night diner in the area, but it's only open weekends. this is 120 stops up woodward - an almost two hour bus ride. it would be hours and hours walking back. i think i'm going to go. should be a nice tour into the rotting suburbs of michigan, at least. once i do it the first time, it won't be scary any more.

if the show runs close to two, i could conceivably only have to wait two hours....