All jokes aside, you might be wondering what my actual goal is with all the silliness i produce. To be blunt, i am fascinated by "badness." What makes a piece of music bad? What makes a performance bad? Can an artist cultivate a world where "bad" can function without any sense of irony? In short, is it possible to document the mundanity of failure as an intrinsic part of the work itself?
Such an endeavor would require a lack of pretense. I would have to tell you that i'm trying to let myself be bad, point out the places where i am actively "not trying," and explicitly show you when and where other artists would stop and try again, or "fix" it.
I would have to search for new ways to screw up, or recontextualize these failures: introduce some chaotic mechanism, consistently do things the wrong way, sing songs i have no business singing, use sub optimal equipment, etc.
The downside, quite obviously, is that you might not believe me. You might confuse my performance for reality, imagine that i am in some way delusional, or lazy. Yet, that would also seem perfectly acceptable to my goal. I'm not demanding that you find me clever, or funny, or anything else. I am simply inviting you to observe and/or participate in the performance. I am after all, simply amusing myself in my spare time. You could tell me to stop, but i would just respond by asking which part annoys you.
"But WHY?," i hear your brain scream. Well, because it's a form of rebellion, a confrontation of prejudices, a rebuke of the capitalization of artistic value, a big middle-finger to everyone who thinks that they are better at being human. The value of art is not in how much some group of unnecessarily rich people pay each other to pass it back and forth amongst themselves, but in how it affects your personal engagement with the world around you. The older i get, the more different i want to be. I want to show the world that success or failure is an illusion, a false recognition of patterns in the chaos of reality. Quite literally, i want you to decide whether or not your opinions are true or false or fair or important, and act accordingly.
Now, if you'll excuse me, i've got 360 more chorales to record in a perfunctory manner wink, wink.....
Tuesday, May 28, 2019
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
Why improvisation?
When i dove head first into the swimming pool of p(nmi)t, my goal was simple: make as much music as physically/mentally possible. It quickly became apparent that the process of making music is much more interesting to me than being able to play a particular piece again, or caring if people like it, or trying to trick people into giving me money.
It occurs to me that the act of composition is itself improvisation. We conceive of an idea and attempt to realize it; the process of refining and rearranging that idea is simply reimprovising upon that idea, performing that piece differently each time. If i were to attempt to capture this act of composing, i would of course be improvising but i would also be building a catalog of ephemeral musical thought. In essence, i would be recording the actual creation of music, and that is terrifically exciting to me.
There are, of course, some logical sticking points in this way of thinking. To refine the recordings would be anathema to my goal, but there is a limit to how terrible i am willing to let the finished piece be. So, some compromise is necessary: "good enough" is the motto. Over production would also be unacceptable; let the music be, let whatever timbre i'm using be the music, let normal mistakes stay, favor feeling over perfection. More to the point, let the process itself be my autobiography. Take whatever i'm thinking or feeling or reading or whatever and make a musical statement about it. It doesn't matter if anyone else understands it; i've been told many times that i am a difficult person to understand.
The p(nmi)t discography is me. I think all those gloomy, silly, garbled thoughts, i make those mistakes, i hear those "unwanted" sounds (that hiss, those thumps, those mechanical glitches are part of my engagement with music), i spew out 2 hours of music then dry up for a few weeks, i make jokes about myself, i don't want to SELL anything, i just want to be mentally stimulated and watch the images flash on the back of my eyelids. It is both intensely personal and completely foreign to the me that walks out the front door into the world.
That is why i can say take my music and do whatever you want with it. I have already given it away. You aren't stealing anything from me. I would love to make money from it, but it requires you wanting to give me money; you placing some value on getting to experience what i've chosen to do with my life; financially supporting me the person instead of just buying some intangible product of dubious merit. That is what i do, i give other musicians as much money as i can afford simply for having created something i find valuable. If that has no value for you don't feel guilty, but if it does then feel free to give me as much or as little as you can afford. Either way, thanks for interacting with me and cheers.
https://paypal.me/pnmit
It occurs to me that the act of composition is itself improvisation. We conceive of an idea and attempt to realize it; the process of refining and rearranging that idea is simply reimprovising upon that idea, performing that piece differently each time. If i were to attempt to capture this act of composing, i would of course be improvising but i would also be building a catalog of ephemeral musical thought. In essence, i would be recording the actual creation of music, and that is terrifically exciting to me.
There are, of course, some logical sticking points in this way of thinking. To refine the recordings would be anathema to my goal, but there is a limit to how terrible i am willing to let the finished piece be. So, some compromise is necessary: "good enough" is the motto. Over production would also be unacceptable; let the music be, let whatever timbre i'm using be the music, let normal mistakes stay, favor feeling over perfection. More to the point, let the process itself be my autobiography. Take whatever i'm thinking or feeling or reading or whatever and make a musical statement about it. It doesn't matter if anyone else understands it; i've been told many times that i am a difficult person to understand.
The p(nmi)t discography is me. I think all those gloomy, silly, garbled thoughts, i make those mistakes, i hear those "unwanted" sounds (that hiss, those thumps, those mechanical glitches are part of my engagement with music), i spew out 2 hours of music then dry up for a few weeks, i make jokes about myself, i don't want to SELL anything, i just want to be mentally stimulated and watch the images flash on the back of my eyelids. It is both intensely personal and completely foreign to the me that walks out the front door into the world.
That is why i can say take my music and do whatever you want with it. I have already given it away. You aren't stealing anything from me. I would love to make money from it, but it requires you wanting to give me money; you placing some value on getting to experience what i've chosen to do with my life; financially supporting me the person instead of just buying some intangible product of dubious merit. That is what i do, i give other musicians as much money as i can afford simply for having created something i find valuable. If that has no value for you don't feel guilty, but if it does then feel free to give me as much or as little as you can afford. Either way, thanks for interacting with me and cheers.
https://paypal.me/pnmit
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