Yes, I realize it’s now March, no longer February – the past month went by so fast!
I continued working from home, often finding myself sitting in front of my gear in my pyjamas after midnight. Some nights I spent far too long fruitlessly poring over the Octatrack manual looking for a simple command I wanted to use. I did learn a few new things, though.
I made some progress with my recording adventures as well. Local electronic musician Sara Gold very kindly invited me to visit their studio and play with a vintage 909 they’d been loaned. We recorded some patterns and I showed them how to use the 909 as an external midi clock in Ableton so the clips were recorded at its actual tempo. This was especially important because the 909’s tempo (controlled by a rotary dial!) didn’t seem to be shown with great accuracy on its LED screen.
As you might have guessed, this was my first encounter with a 909. I had fun programming patterns using its buttons, which were reminiscent of an old Apple computer (like we used to play Oregon Trail during lunch break in elementary school). It was satisfyingly solid and tactile, and the sounds that came out of it were great. Sara also gave me a tip on recording kicks: pan with reverb left and right, and dry in the middle. I tried this on the new track I’d been recording and it sounded pretty good.
For me, mixing and recording my own audio is such a different beast than mixing stems made entirely in Ableton. There are endless technical considerations (which are all well-documented on Youtube, a constant distraction for me), but, perhaps more importantly, creative and aesthetic ones as well. Not knowing a lot of the finer points of sound engineering, I’ve been trying to avoid getting lost in the details and instead focus on the overall vision and vibe.
“Vision and vibe” are obviously foundational, but I struggled to think in those terms sometimes when I was writing music in the past. I found the writing process itself to be so challenging that I often couldn’t really spread my creative wings and consider the overall concept, or feel a sense of competence when it came to fine-tuning certain elements. I don’t want to get too bogged down writing about the past, but I’ve been noticing lately how far I’ve come.
In a recent post about how Reliquary V came to be, I talked about how my solo music career began as a form of performance art, and how I slowly learned to actually write music after having performed onstage for several years. Performance and music were tied together as a form of extreme vulnerability, almost to a masochistic level, and the act of writing music used to feel quite difficult and painful for me. There was a gulf between where I wanted to be in terms of skills and artistry, but it was especially difficult to cross because I was doing it in front of audiences the whole time.
Being a performer who was rather naive about music production was a certain position, and I inhabited that for several years, performing exclusively in the art world and positioning myself as something other than a mere musician. Over a decade ago now, I remember having a conversation with my roommate, a veteran of the DIY scene, who very gently suggested that I should start performing at, you know, actual shows on lineups with other musicians. I wasn’t sold on the idea at the time, but that conversation opened up the question of it.
Ultimately, I did start doing that, but it took me several years, and the years following that were difficult. Looking back, I was moving from a comfortable position to an uncomfortable position. I wanted to grow as an artist, to become fluent in music production, and to perform my own productions onstage rather than just sing to a backing track made of loops I slapped together in Garageband (bless my former self, lol). But I encountered a lot of internal resistance to this process due to the shifts it caused in my identity.
One could just call it ego, but it was also a sense of self and my place in the world as an artist. I essentially had to slowly let that former version of myself die away, but I resisted, needing to remain somehow legible as the same person while I tried to change. So it was a long few years of inner conflict and creative struggle as I began to learn to write in Ableton. I actually started gaining a lot of momentum eventually, and objectively was making some cool stuff, but internally, I was living somewhere in between that old self and the new one I was creating.
It was the beginning of 2018 that this new self really started to emerge, and I found the spaces – underground queer raves – where people didn’t know me from before and embraced the person I was becoming. In public and career-wise, I was theoretically the same person I had been. But I found an escape hatch to a place where I could throw that off if I wanted to.
This was the place that I began creating from, which led me to a new creative persona and self. The journey was difficult. I dealt with a lot of internal resistance and conflict that didn’t disappear overnight, and it took me years to gain the courage to do the things and go to the places that now bring me so much joy.
I’ve strayed pretty far from the studio diary here. But I wanted to talk about this again because I’ve been thinking about how I had to move on from a comfortable position in my art and life way back in the day in order to fulfil my creative desires. While I’ve been having some creative breakthroughs lately, I’ve also been aware of how much discomfort – uncertainty, challenges, slow progress – is a part of my day to day of working on music.
I’m actually currently in a position that I used to dream of: having my own studio, with the gear and time that I need to work on music. The rest of my life isn’t what it once was in New York: there aren’t a lot of exciting events or a constant flow of new faces, or a ton of great places to spend money (if I had it). I’m again in that position of having left an excellent situation in exchange for the unknown. This particular journey wasn’t a conscious plan, but rather a series of events that unfolded due to circumstance. However, I can’t help but see how things have conspired to move my creative work forward more than ever, in spite of the loss of so many things.
So I’m continuing to forge into the unknown, in life and music. Til next time…
xx RV