A quick update from the busy avalanche of stuff I’m stuck in at the moment: Remixta 5 is now up! It features the mmd_as track Saint Santa, please a heap of good Renoise musics.
Still working hard on Hunz mixes and the final results will be out next month.
Iain MacKay has recently got his creative video gears going again and finished a lovely video matched to my music. The song he chose is called Sub Conscious and is from last year’s album 3 Smargaid Maerd. The dark moody music give Iain’s images a doomed nostalgia filtered through a montaged dream consciousness. The work, I believe, will be on display this Friday at Armidale’s NERAM gallery as part of a new media exhibition. It’s quite exciting to finally have one of my songs have a proper video to it and to finally get on YouTube. Iain has a whole stack of other works that are well worth checking out, as well as more in the pipeline.
Iain and I will be playing live as Ghost Inputs again this year too, so stay tuned for dates.
I have done some work to set up a little website to serve as a front end for my low-key business project ‘mmd mastering’. You can visit the site here. The service I am offering is mixing and mastering of audio material, negotiated per project with each client. If you would like to use this service check out the site’s FAQ and use the contact form to get in touch.
It’s early days at the moment with the site’s design and function, but there’s enough blurb to let you know the ins and outs of the service. I’ll also be using that site to feature some of the finished work I’ve done for clients – covering all sorts of unexpected styles of music. In terms of a business it’s baby steps for me seeing that I’ll be doing the work in my spare time outside of my day job. I’ll be initially focusing on a Renoise-clientel to inject some sonic love into that community. If things go steady I’ll evolve from there.
The new mmd_as album has made its way around the wide world of web 2.0 and made its sounds available for free where it went. Probably only two places of note are mmd_as – last.fm and here on the Renoise Forum where some people have given comment. Everything else out there is either too minor or so messy that it’s un-presentable. However, if any discussion of note appears I shall share it here. If I were more the virtual-social-butterfly my reach may have generated more of an impact, but no use in pretending to be something I’m not. One place that I’ll be endeavouring to polish up for networking purposes is a new Facebook Page that at the moment just barely features the mmd_as material.
The good news is that I’ve added the new album to the mmd shop, available as a high quality FLAC download for a realistic $10AUD via paypal. Again, we wish that this could be a physical copy of a CD with cool artwork and such, but for now a FLAC version will have to do. Think of your purchase as a ’show of support’ as any donations are halved between Alex and I. I don’t expect a heap of interested (my last album only sold about 5-6 copies), but we’ll put the option there for you just in case.
And of course, any comments and reactions from yourselves to the album would be most welcome to us. Please lets us know what you think of what we have done!
I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve heard in recent years someone saying “there’s too much music”. Just how does one understand that? How do you explain it? What do you do about it? What is the most sane course of action in reaction for someone who still has got the creative bug and is going to make music anyway? This is something I have been thinking about.
A recent trip to the coast and Brisbane to throw myself into the middle of ‘normal consumer culture’ of malls, record shops, party music and listening to radio like Triple J has produced the following vague realizations for me. It does indeed feel like music saturation is at an all time high yet in line with this the depth of appreciation of music is respectively shallow. More hasn’t equated to a ‘better experience’ nor has it led to an improvement socially or culturally with noticeable outcomes. Now more than ever you can easily access, via live music or music media, whatever taste you want to explore from classic over-played hits to the most obscure avant garde curiosities on the bleeding edge of whatever. But somehow our experiences don’t cumulatively flourish into vibrant rainbows but instead into a gray haze of blandness. When asked what do we REALLY want to hear that will inspire, invigorate and move us forward we really can’t qualify an answer of any use. To compound the situation we now have more people on the planet meaning more people making music easily with the accessible enhancements of consumer technology; add global dramas of economic, environmental and violent natures to the mix; add the chaos and instant gratification of the internet; add the crumbling certainties of the music industry and capitalism with it; add finally plain cultural confusion in western identity and purpose – and you have a situation that pumps out music like never before that we collectively greet with a drawn out yawn. True silence becomes priceless.
How do people stop themselves from being cynical in such circumstances save from being sheltered in self absorbed naivety? Worse still, how does a composer move forward with their own urges in the face of everything? Are you part of the solution or part of the problem? It’s hard to know and objectivity in this situation is quite slippery. Personally I press on because I’ve got no choice, the music has decided for me to express it – but that doesn’t prevent me from pumping out albums worth of bland stuff with only hints of personalized character, causing more yawns. I used to think ’soul’ would win people over, but is there such thing as too much ’soul’? There is no proper answer to that question. Any possible absolute negativity negates the possibility for unexpected surprises in music, which underground sources produce occasionally above the dilution. Such gems are rare, but I guess they are to be treasured and understood none the less. That point emphasizes that music isn’t about results, it’s about a journey of consciousness: for both composer and listener. And it is far more subtle than we think it is, far more humble and private.
A wine connoisseur doesn’t get excited over any old vintage: they have to look far, wide and deep for that special experience. So it is for music. And thus it validates all stations of music, from shallow corporate pop to the weirdest most buried oddities – they all have their place for the journey of the respective composers and respective audiences. Those of us suffering from ’saturation sickness’ could find comfort in this realization – that their own methods for finding those gems is a different challenge than one on the easy avenues of mass culture and mass consumerism. Don’t stand in the surf and be pummeled by the onslaught of the waves: go to shallows and look closely at the shells and stones. The energy you save doing this allows you to better spend you time enjoying things and thus better dealing with the dramas of the world.
