It’s been little over a year at the time of this post actually. I am unfortunately less affected by the sparse contact with people than I think is healthy. My natural affinity towards being alone is being nurtured by lockdowns and social screen fatigue. A few hours teaching can be handled, but a few hours at an online party is a crush of low-grade vision, distorted sound, and half spoken thoughts.
Brains!
Building
I sit at the studio desk making sounds all the time. Granulating with the newest updates, stretching fft bins and looping them apart from their internal bits and bytes. I don’t finish actual pieces too much. I had thought that I’d be doing some online improvisation with John English, but I think it might be too oblique for him. The one time we tried it was a predictable failure, but the subsequent attempts never came.
I did just finish a long term project. At least I finished what one might consider an overture, or a preamble to the big paper, bark and leaves piece. Nothing significant can be done with it now, so it’s named Silver Birch, for it’s sources and shuffled it off to Montpellier to be forgotten under an avalanche of submissions from all over the rock.
Guitar
The Bach 2-Part Invention #8 is starting to be musical. It’s comedically slow on guitar, but hey, I have half as many fingers to play it than a pianist would. It sounds quite open and the counterpoint is very clear. I’ll be happy with it I imagine. I would like to use it as a source for something.
New strings coming and a new way to record it is available. I’d really like to get an outdoor version, maybe up in Cademan Wood.
Trumpet
Nothing happening here. I was progressing really well with the circular breathing multiphonics, but Tak rarely leaves the house for more than two hours in a week. I don’t ‘explore’ well with other ears in range. Every time I pick up the horn and play, I can hear ‘the other’. I really don’t have a clue as to how to handle this. So far the answer has been not to handle it at all.