It’s been almost three years since I moved to Montréal, and it feels like I am returning to creative equilibrium after a long detour. I started booking time at an hourly rehearsal space off and on to prepare for shows (there have been about 8 since the last time I wrote here, all in Montréal). It’s a bit annoying to carry gear on the metro each time, and it doesn’t feel like I’m doing much in the moment, but cumulatively, rehearsing makes me feel more connected to performing than I would if I was just working on my desk at home.
At the end of May, I played a show with my friend Sainerine from Vancouver, who I’d played with here last May, and local pals Girl Circles and Desolatum. I set myself the goal of creating an entirely new set, aiming for about 20 minutes of music. I had a 2 month lead time on this show, and I figured I would have enough time.
There were weeks where I worked almost every day on music, and weeks where I barely touched my gear. Around the time I set out on this quest, I was chatting with a musician friend and told her that I would probably need about 100 hours to make a new set from scratch, which would be a little over 12 hours a week. I didn’t record the hours I spent, but it was probably between 60 and 80 total over the 2 months.
I ended up with about 10 minutes of music, which fell short of my goal of 20 minutes. At the pace that I worked, my original estimate of 100 hours = 20 minutes was an underestimate: I would probably need about 150 hours to complete 20 minutes. So my new goal is finishing the rest of the set by the end of the summer, which should be adequate time wise.
It may go faster than that, because one of the self-imposed hurdles I created was to start fresh with a new Compact Flash card in my Octatrack (the brain of my live set). I’d been meaning to do this for awhile, because I’d been filling up the same CF card since I bought the machine in late 2018. That meant selecting/loading new samples, starting new projects, and setting all the settings from 0 once again.
Yes, there is such a thing as creating templates to speed up these things, but I wanted to actually hit the reset and manually select everything. So that contributed to the time it took.
As far as the artistic elements of the new stuff I’ve been working on, I’ve returned to creating more lyrical stuff after a long (6 years) period of making instrumental music. I started off as a singer/lyricist playing in bands as a teenager, and I always feel a strong emotional connection to this side of things. That’s actually the reason why I moved away from making music with my voice: it was too emotional and heavy feeling, and I wanted to just get into the other elements of sound and learn how to express myself through the production side of things.
Now I feel like I can combine both of these expressive ranges into something more effective/affective than before. In gathering the samples to load into the new set, I bounced out some elements from my old live sets (2018-ish era): atmospheric and melodic fragments that feel like musical ghosts from another time. There were a few songs from this time that got released on my 2018 EP Falling Star, but I was performing a number of others that never got recorded before I moved onto other things.
I brought in some of the unreleased lyrics from this time period as spoken word intros to new songs. (I did a whole album of poetry (Dematerialize, 2021), so I feel like I can put as much spoken material as I want into my sets now.) I don’t feel like I necessarily need to go back and finish every single thing from the past, but to me, bringing in these fragments from another time adds another dimension to the new material. It’s almost like echoes from the past reverberating into the future.
When I make music, I feel like I’m entering a space where time doesn’t exist, and I have a direct connection to memories and feelings that take place like a dream. I always felt this way about music and singing. It’s kind of a portal to another dimension, or a different layer of reality. In a way, these echoes from the past are like breadcrumbs, that help connect the past and present, and bring a different meaning to past events.
There were times in the past where I felt weak and disempowered, and to be in a stronger position now as an artist, I can bring in these fragments and create a whole that I wasn’t able to previously. I can draw together elements more consciously and I feel like I have a more receptive audience than before too. So there’s always been this theme of time travel to my lyrics and it feels very satisfying to connect the creative threads.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my “musical fingerprint”, these stylistic elements that I’ve always gravitated toward. I’ve never been good at emulating genres and it’s kind of put me on that precipice between being excitingly original and being lost in obscurity because there’s no pre-existing audience for my sound. I usually tell people I play “noise music”, but it’s because I play shows in the noise scene and that is where I feel appreciated.
Back in New York, I always felt the most supported by the experimental music lovers. No wave, industrial, and post-punk are core sounds that influenced me, and my tools and sound design approaches have been inspired by forms of techno and noise. My favorite band as a young teen was Suicide and I also grew up listening to a lot of Sonic Youth, which was adjacent to the noise scene, but also the New York avant garde/minimalist tradition. So these elements of drone, repetition, and abstraction as the underpinnings of songs.
I feel like this new stuff I’ve been writing is sort of industrial shoegaze vibes. There’s definitely a darkwave influence too, but I just can’t stay in the box enough to really claim it (although I did play Verboden, the Vancouver darkwave fest, a few years back). I’m more interested in the darkness than the wave.
I have plans to record, too, and that is a whole other post. It will be another shift from the way I’ve been working for more than half a decade, which has been very in the box and studio based, to a more live approach. Live, raw, and imperfect.
xx RV