why should i like bad music?

I don't think there is such a thing as "bad music."

Sure, there is music you don't like, poorly executed music, music you don't understand, there are people you don't like who make music, genres of "noise," music you are embarrased to admit you that you listen to, music in complex time signatures that you can't dance to, screaming, poorly recorded, formulaic, overproduced, scary, silly, unfinished, boring, ear wormy............

But, none of that is "bad." Bad music would imply harm, psychological torture, physical sickness, not just unappealing but harmful. People are harmful, music is not.

It's a made up ratio, but i'd say music is a 15 to 1 ratio. For every 1 thing you like, there are 15 things you don't. That's not bad. That's just you. Your distaste should not translate to other people.  Some people don't have the time, energy, desire, to experience what they don't like in search of a moment of enjoyment. Some people think being a musician is not a valid job. I would argue that a musician is the real life embodiment of the political spectrum. Someone who must compromise their own likes and desires with the world at large to reach a stable relationship. Musicians must play what you say you want, even if they themselves don't like it, and even when it turns out that you didn't really want it. If you abandon them, they must keep going in seach of a new patron.

Some people don't like or think of music as an art form. For some people, music is the disposable paper plate of on the go entertainment. Yet, it seems wrong to deny the lovers of music their pleasure as well. If it's all about money we all lose, but if it's not about money at all we all still lose.

Art and science are two of the many things that don't mesh well with market based capitalism. They require a large degree of blind investment and an understanding of the small but vital return on that investment. An idea is only as powerful or good as the people who turn that idea into a reality, and a lot of people favor immediate pleasure over philosophical investigation.

There is no such thing as bad music, only music that you don't like. That's my opinion, for what it's worth.

Cheers

the anarchist musical cookbook: a made up faq

You: Hey paul i've got some questions...
Me: Have at it.

Q: Can i enter zero for the price when i download your music from bandcamp without feeling any sense of shame or embarrasment?
   
A: Yes. I don't know about the embarrasment, though.

Q: Can i burn that downloaded music to a cd and play it in my car, or on my stereo?

A: Absolutely.

Q: Can i burn 100 cds and try to sell them to my friends?

A: That seems like a whole lot of work, and i'd be willing to bet that you don't make any money at all.

Q: But, let's say i did. Are you going to sue me?

A: Let's just say, i can't afford a lawyer, so probably not. Can i have 30%?

Q: I work for a record label. Could i download your music, give it to a transcriptionist, have a studio band rerecord it, file for copyright, claim it as our own, and sue you for copyright infringement?

A: I guess you could. Again, that seems like a lot of work, and i don't have lawyer money, so whatever. Can i have 30%?

Q: how would you like a recording contract?

A: Do i have to live in a van, get yelled at by strangers, or spend a significant amount of time outside of my basement? If so, no thank you.

Q: Do you want to be famous?

A: Holy hell, no.

Q: Are you a member of ascap, bmi, sesac, etc.?

A: Please go away, and leave me alone.

Q: Do you want to be in my band?

A: My minimum fee is $40 an hour. If i have to put up with bullshit, it's $75 an hour. If i have to live in a van, it's $350 per day, cash, no exceptions. So, probably not.

Q: You suck.

A: Not a question, but thanks for noticing i guess. Please go away.

Q: Can i give you some money without demanding anything more from you?

A: Absolutely, we're friends now.

Q: Do you play live?

A: Only for a lot of money, so no. I play for free in my basement every night, record the non-terrible stuff, and give you the option to download it for free on bandcamp. I think that's a pretty sweet deal, considering i make no money.

Q: Do you shred?

A: No. I think we can all agree that what i do is the opposite of shred. My solos are known to induce narcolepsy.

Q: Why are your videos pieced together from stock footage, or focused on your fingers?

A: Because A) i don't have a decent video camera, B) i like syncronizing small gestures to music, and 3) i think it's funny.

Q: Are you serious?

A: Rarely, and always.

Hope that clears up anything you weren't sure about.

Cheers

the independent artist (why most bands average less than 2 records)

I am an independent/diy recording artist. Usually when you hear those terms it means "not a subsidiary of a major record company," but i mean not a part of the business side of music at all. I don't have an agent, or a pr person, or a bar where i can play my weird music regularly, or friends who like to hang out and jam with me, or money to go to a real recording studio, or money to pay other musicians, or money to buy better gear, or a video camera to make regular youtube videos, or any people i don't know visiting my websites. I am literally a guy in his basement making music because i like to do so. I have to physically burn cds from my laptop, watch the progress bar progress while music uploads, buy one 100 dollar piece of gear at a time.

None of that should be taken as sounding bitter, or pitiful. I'm happy and productive, and have zero control over whether or not anybody cares. I don't beg for money, or expect anybody to do my work for me. What i do want is to expess what i dislike about the "music business," and tell people where their money really goes when they buy a cd or record (which i myself do quite often, hypocritical though it may seem).

What does your 16.99 really pay for? It pays for the record company's investment, the recording engineers, the manufacturers, the truck drivers, and the arbitration of taste. When you buy a shrink wrapped, bar coded, security tagged album, you are not really supporting the artist, you are supporting the assembly line that brought that artist to your attention. Is that necessarily bad? No, i don't think so. The bad part comes from believing that that's automatically better than going to a bar to hear a local band, or listening to your neighbor's kid practice in the garage, or spending an afternoon sifting through bandcamp/soundcloud pages. The bad part comes from thinking that record companies, tv, radio, etc. are a legitimizing force in the musical world. It's the "call me when you're famous" syndrome.

That mentality costs way more than mere money. It means that perfectly normal people have to travel from city to city in a van that keeps breaking down, never knowing if they will actually get paid at the next gig. It means that there is no middle ground between shitty bar (no offense to your bar), and 1000+ capacity arena (and the opening band still makes no money). There's no middle ground between hauling your own gear while eating peanut butter sandwiches and full on travelling show company. It means that a guy in his basement recording his own music because he loves it can't make any money at all. It means that you can't play your favorite cd over the intercom at work, that you can't hire a cover band without fear of ascap/bmi trying to take money from you, that there are no real djs on commercial radio anymore, that every other commercial on tv features a cover version of a famous song.

Now, the complicated part. Your 16.99 was vitally important to the store. People stopped buying cds and real record stores folded. But, they weren't replaced by diving back into the real world of music that surrounds you. Instead, they were replaced by streaming subscriptions and digital downloads. Tower, hastings, etc. were replaced by amazon, apple, and spotify. And, this only served to devalue the act of making music even further. That band you like no longer has physical shelf space; they may or may not randomly appear on an ever changing list of things to click on; they might get a front page feature for as little as 3 hours before whatever new thing catches the eyes and ears of the general public. More than ever it is vitally important for an artist to flood you with advertisements, and facebook posts, and crap interviews, because he or she who shouts loudest generates the most clicks. All because you have no physical engagement with the music they produce (who among you still buys actual recordings, plays an instrument, reads notated music?).

The arbiters of taste were not originally the bad guys, but we let them become the bad guys. The music business is now the business of keeping the machine alive. A record company can't produce physical music without investing huge amounts of money, and they can't invest that money without making an even larger amount of money first. That's how the machine works.

Which brings me back to the basement where i create music because i enjoy it. I'm not begging for your money, but i am saying that 10 bucks means a whole lot more to me than it does to the machine. It doesn't mean that i deserve it more than anyone else, but it does mean that i appreciate it more. If you're in the market to "support the artist," consider handing your money directly to them, rather than handing it to 300 other people and hoping that some of it makes its way to the artist. If you like physical cds/records, go to a store and buy them (they do still exist, and i myself do so when possible). If you like filtered mainstream music, pay the subscription fee. Just stop thinking that you're not allowed to like "amateur" musicians, and are prohibited from spending a small amount of money to buy them a better brand of peanut butter, or maybe a hamburger...

... feel free to comment or say i'm an idiot.

Cheers

the question i can't answer - artistic narcissism

I actually do get asked this question about my music: "what are you most proud of?"

I can't answer that question; i usually say whichever of my albums pops into my head first, or try to guage what the questioner would be interested in hearing. But, that is not a real answer.

The truth is that i am proud of everything and nothing all at the same time. I'm proud of every single piece of music i create, because so much is thrown into the garbage during the creative process. Every piece you see in my discography represents the abandonment of countless takes and other projects. Everything that makes it throught my self editing process is me, exactly the way it is supposed to be. The frequency of my creation is at odds with what i'm doing; i have music running through my head all day every day, unused music from 20+ years sitting on my hard drive/written on faded manuscript paper/lurking in the back of my mind, waiting patiently for a context in which to manifest.

Yet, the feeling of pointlessness sits there too. The vast majority of all music and art is mindless filler. Sure, we can aim for supposed pleasure or intellectual fulfillment, but there is ultimately  no clear reason for what catches our imagination or gives us pleasure. Fame is simply the coincidental appreciation of many people all at once. It makes no difference if others love/hate/ignore what i create, i have an impulsion to make whatever music flows from my fingers.

I suppose i could point out 4 albums that i feel best represent who i am: the slumlord ep, the uncollected, feeble, and album of death. I could imagine being happy if those 4 albums were my entire discography, considering that alone is more output than most bands get the chance to produce. Some musicians don't have any tangible recordings at all.

Thus, the narcissism and deprecation live side by side; i am immensely proud of realizing my goals, but ultimately uncertain about their validity.

aleatoric music - a treatise...

The full title: aleatoric music - a treatise on compositional techniques and procedures for the practicable realization of indeterminate aural experience.

Aleatoric music is commonly defined as music in which one or more parameters of the composition remained undetermined by the composer; that is, ultimately left for the performer to decide. However, from the viewpoint of the audience, the auditory experience is fully at the determination of the performer, as the average listener has little or no basis for comparison on issues of expression, tuning, tempo, orchestration, mistakes, etc. Outside the realm of rigid integral serialism realized by computational methods. Thus, this definition of aleatory falls short of the artistic goal of various indeterminate musics.

It would therefore be better to define aleatoric music in terms of its opposition to traditional art musics. Whereas traditional art music historically seeks to converge toward the total realization of accurate performamce (oral tradition to notation to serialism, to integral serialism to computer music), aleatoric music seeks to pull back from such determinacy such that a given performance is objectively indeterminate is some way. Yet, at the same time, there must be an opposite boundary, beyond which lies fully indeterminate, chance, chaos, and meta-compositional philosophy.

Furthermore, a piece must have some recognizable identity for the average listener in spite of it's aleatory in order to be "a piece" in the traditional sense. A lack of all coherence between various performances would call the nature of the piece into question, and ultimately lack credibilty as a repeatble performance. Therefore, aleatoric music requires a written or potentially writable score that reliably documents at least 1 "unbreakable rule." That is not to say that failure to obey this rule  is anachronistic to a particular piece, but that the rule must be in effect (known to both performer and listener) such that "disobedience," or better failure, are recognizable as such, if desired by either participant.

Several potential procedures come to mind immediately: what i call "music for sight reading" in which the performer must perform at sight some notated score. Such a procedure produces a satisfactory aleatoric experience for the listener by containing only one known unbreakable rule: "attempt to perform this piece of music." Even if not immediately tangible, the listener can accept the presence of consistent source material among various performances. A second category can be defined by the blatant removal of traditional performance instruction: no notated dynamics, articulations, rhythms, pitch, insttumentation, etc.

This is not a new concept, works like Bach's Art of The Fugue are defined by their lack of instrumentation, many of the piano works by Liszt and Chopin (among others) bear the marks of favoring physical/visual observable performative gestures over strict adherence to standard notated articulation. Yet, the distinction must be drawn between these proto-examples and a distinct class of aleatoric music in which the uncertainty is an intended component of the performance.

In order to build such a body of work, a composer may choose to work from small experiments toward larger solo and ensemble works, such that both the works themselves, and the repertoire built from them form an aleatoric evolution with the composer as the only unifying force. Or multiple works may take the same predetermined material as the starting point for radically different performance settings. In any case, the overreaching goal would be a more engaged audience for both live performance and recoded media. Such a project may very well help to reinvigorate the financial and creative support we as artist frequently lack.

notes on my 12-tone works

I have a fondness for 12-tone (not necessarily serial) composition, and there are several such pieces scattered throughout my discography. I don't follow a strict academic approach (the historical arguments for and against Schoenberg's techniques and "rules" have always seemed childish and non-productive to me). For me, given my interest in improvisation and non-rigid tonal/harmonic structures, the unique characteristics of composing from a tone row allow greater focus on gesture and sequence, as opposed to "correct" voice leading or harmonic structure. In other words, tone rows are one way to avoid getting bogged down with questions of tonal coherence and note/pitch choice; the notes simply ARE and one can focus on how to best express them.

A list:
Variations on a Tone-row
Piano Music Volume 1
     Scenes from a Row
     Haiku for the Seasons
     Sym12 (#4 from 5 Little Pieces for Piano)
Album of Death
     No More Daisies Down
NCLASP Vol. 2
     Sonatina for violin and piano

I don't want to go into minute detail, but i do want to generalize how they relate to each other.

No More Daisies Down, Sonatina, and Sym12 all use the same row (57t0123468e) in various forms. Sonatina uses Sym12 as it primary section. Daisies is the first (but not the last) truly improvised piece based on a row. Each of the other pieces uses its own row in various creative and non-standard ways. I was known to use them in teaching analysis to show students how to recognize when a particular analytical procedure/system stops working and requires a different approach, but does not invalidate the original analysis (i.e. the "rules" can change without warning as a feature of the piece).

Some day i will find a simple way to make scores available without having to invest in costly self publishing or data storage.

my approach to ambient looped guitar

In my last post, i mentioned that the individual pieces are often improvised during the recording process. But, i also want to preserve a similarity between pieces composed with the same "recipe." If you've listened to multiple albums, you most likely thought that, for example, save us from someone, dreaming down a half-step, and the whole sounds you can make album all sound very similar. Part of that similarity is harmonic, but part of it is also their shared method of construction. I use a lot of variation within the process, but the overall recipe is always the same:

1 - choose a complex sonority (a chord, or a cluster of notes that form a harmonic backdrop), and a scale or mode to work from over that sonority

2 - create a looped background (usually non-metrical and impossible to tell where the loop point actuall is; unless there is a consistent rhythmic phrase like morning coffee or girl with the pearl)

3 - improvise one or more lead parts over that background loop.

If you opened most any of my ardour sessions you would most often find only 2 tracks: "rhythm" and "lead." Some of the looped pieces are 1 continuous take (built from the ground up all in one go), but that can be really frustrating on bad days, so i generally build a "rhythm track" then solo over it.

For me at least, i find the first thing that comes out of my head and fingers is the most interesting/pleasing/creative thing to work with, whereas laboring over an idea or structure in a more traditional way produces boring predictable music that i am less likely to actually finish. If nothing is flowing, i just walk away and come back later.

All of this is not to say that i sit down at the computer and noodle around for 45 minutes and mix every sound i produce down into a mindless 3 minute track. Rather, i compose and edit the same way anyone would, i just try to condense that process into a short and efficient workflow that eliminates all of the second guessing or needless sound tweaking. Sometimes the results are mediocre, terrible, or fantastic, but my goal is to finish the piece as quickly as possible, not to be the most awesome artist/guitar player/composer ever.
I make a plan, i execute it as best as i can, and i let the end result be what it is: eventually everything finds or inspires a suitable context for itself.

Some tracks come together right away, some take multiple sessions, or mulriple days. I've found myself in the middle of recording 8 or 9 different things at the same time, and feeling very lost. So, my only goal is to try to finish 1 thing every session (i could have anywhere from 1 to 8 or 12 sessions in a single day). The "thing" could be coming up with a catchy riff, creating a looped background, recording two bars of a solo line, mixing two or three parts, whatever. Once that thing is finished i either walk away, or move on to another thing i know i can finish. I never waste time on sething that just isn't clicking, and it lets me get a lot more done. Whether it's "good" or other people like it isn't really the point.