New Modern LoFi Folk Art

So turns the world. A month ago I completed the audio portion of this piece. But I sat on it because I was uncertain if I liked it enough to view it as a completed piece.

It requires time and listening to complete a piece in a manner that the reflects something that is in my mind a cohesive body of work that represents some perspective that god only knows why I feel compelled to wrench out of me and place it out in the world in front of me.

The amount of sound and iterative permutations of those sounds can over saturate my hearing in such a manner that I am unable to constructively listen to the results of those efforts. It is not from decibel volume I suffer but from iteration volume.

I tend to flood a lot of sound from various sequencers and samplers through the headphones when I am creating various aspects of audio. The effort will generally produce a number of individually recorded tracks. I’ve done one single track. I think I’ve done one that was over 60. Generally it is less than ten. More tracks require more time and listening.

I tend to record each track live, more or less. A track may include several samples, but they will follow a general structural pattern, theme, and tonal palette. It requires time and listening to create each sample. It requires time and listening to level the track and the adjacent effects in such a manner that they play nicely with one another.

I use a lot of word salad. It takes time and listening to structure it in a manner to permit it to work cohesively within a piece. It can also be oddly fun to do such.

I then layer several of these such tracks together to create a larger strucutre. The end resul ranges from fairly to barely cohesive. Regardless, there will be some element of cohesion in the final assembled piece.

Listening is a fatiguing process. Even when actively seeking to replace banal repetition with variations and permutations of repetitions so as to not be lulled into bored complacency, the ears will, over time, normalize all such sound and push it into the background.

When I become self aware that I am no loner able to listen constructively due to ear fatigue I realize I need to stop for a while and then reassess with fresh ears.

I actually find this is a life skill in general and it applies as much to people and arguments as it does to samples coming out of several pieces of hardware.

Once you are unable to listen for comprehension, a loss of focus becomes a companion along on the journey. One loses site of the goal. What were we trying to accomplish before I stopped listening well? A certain type of forgetfulness enters the bigger picture. Minor belligerence may smash into the doorway.

Best to just walk away for a while.

The best way to break the cycle and return our focus is to step back and address the root of the weed. Take a breath. Do other things. Write. Draw. Go for walks. Observe the art of others. Read. Rest. Recover. Come back fresh.

The root of my weed was simply a need to give the ears and brain some rest from audio.

So I decided to sit on the piece a for a few days. If the piece fails to remind me its purpose or simply sounds bad to my ears after a few days so be it. There is always the risk that I never go back to it. It happens.

Whatever, I walked away from it for a couple of days.

Which turned into a couple of weeks because I managed to catch some minor respiratory bug that wasn't an infamous bug, but some other never identified bug. I wasn't dying or anything. But I was entirely unable to do anything. Anything as in any thing. A weird lethargy took over me. I couldn't read, write, participate in audio creations or basically any of life. I couldn't even do idiot things like watch television or crawl what’s left of the internet looking at dipshittery. I pretty much could only lay about like a predator hiding in the shadows after eating too much of something foul.

Over this period of time I was also inadvertently reminded why I consciously choose to do things the way I do them. I attended a live abstract performance of sorts. Glenn Kotche, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Anders Petersen were commissioned to create something that was performed locally. That something was an abstract series of work that had drums and percussion from Kotche, some readings from Knausgaard's forthcoming book and some visuals in Petersen's known style.

I actually benefitted from seeing that performance. It was vague, it was unclear and it was unsettling at times. It is what I prefer in like minded abstract art. I"m sure it helped tame the cynicism I had developed over this piece in some vague but clear manner.

After a couple of weeks the symptoms disappeared and I relistened to the piece and determined it was complete. It was mostly as I intended. I was lucky I walked away because I likely would have begun twiddling and dialing knobs with no particular aim in mind. That’s happened before. Typically once that occurs the pieces fall apart as I recklessly overwrite various tracks or modify the structural order of the sequences in a manner I have removed the possibility to re-establish cohesion within the piece.

Fortunately I just needed to take a break from listening. I did so. All was good. All muss no fuss.

Of course, I then dilly dallied and wasted another week distractededly working on newer things. Things that did not require the stupid but entirely critical administrative wrangling I had left on the task list to make this completed.

To make matters worse, I also decided to create some visuals to accompany the audio. So I grabbed a potato peeler and made some potato soup. I then applied a few post effects to render that video into what is now before you. That added a few days. I question its necessity.

Still, I couldn’t press publish. For reasons beyond me, I chose to dilly dally another day away writing portions of the accompanying essay about listening that you read above. I also accidentally started writing an essay on abstractions from an artists perspective and third one regarding the concept of professionalism.

I carved those two essays out of this effort and archived them. Most of it anyways. I deleted a few paragraphs recklessly before I realized I was being rash cutting vast stretches of text from this bloated shipwreck of a piece. Maybe I’ll revisit them. Maybe I won’t. As for now I am dragging what‘s left of this verbal carcass across the line of done.

At least it made it.