This is NOT from the essay -- unrelated post today.
I have been high on electronica all day. From the minute I woke up until now (it's nearly midnight, and I am ready to shower and then collapse into bed, so that I can wake up and go to university in the morning to teach all day tomorrow), I have been immersed in MUSIC: recording, mixing, arranging, playing back the mixes as I hung my laundry and made coffee, lunch at 2 p.m. (still listening), more tweaking, three hours in the studio, dinner at 9:30 p.m. (playing back some of the rehearsal video, from which the screenshots I'm sharing here were taken), then back home to tweak and retweak...
Awesome.
In addition to the beats and noisy electronica stuff, I also did a rather (I felt) cool improv combining ambient backing (well, there's the electronic stuff, after all!), piano (semi-electronic, since it's a synth/keyboard), and acoustic guitar (there's the NON-ELECTRONIC I was referring to!) that I am looking forward to trying out on Wednesday in some form. It's a somewhat new sound for me, maybe. I'm calling it TDS 2023 sound... An additional style to develop this year. You can hear something like it on a recent YouTube video for what was originally called "Bird," then changed to "Broken Wing" in 2021. This is this year's semi-improvisational style, with dark electronic backing tracks. It was recorded, as you see it, live in my room in one take, then later mixed in LOGIC with the backing tracks added in.
The beat-heavy stuff just feels so damn good, and I've been wanting to do a pure ELECTRONICA cover version of IAMX's "North Star,"* which I arranged acoustically last year (and very much enjoy playing it that way, still)...so, finally, now, I have, as well as (for fun) an unofficial remix of the original "single edit" version that is different, again, from my solo/cover version that features my own vocals. This stuff gets my adrenaline pumping in the right way. It's perfect music for this hot summer season. If I had a car (a Tesla? haha) I'd want to blast it with the roof off -- or maybe use it TO blast the roof off!! I'll maybe do straight "beat-less" Eno-ish** ambient stuff again, as well as looser acoustic tunes in the winter, when I am hibernating as I did last January/February, i.e. around the time I was turning 50 and did my "Triad," that has hardly any beats on it at all.
*The new version of "North Star" will be available in some form publicly soon. I have not shared it ANYWHERE yet, so hang tight, please. Ditto for the remix.
**Though honestly I much prefer Sakamoto/Alva Noto/Fennesz to Eno these days -- his stuff, frankly, is starting to sound to my ears very dated and "safe."
I am feeling a bit, perhaps, like Bowie must have felt when he made albums like Outside at around the same age as I now am, a year or two younger, actually... He was drawing much of his inspiration, as he says in the EPK from 1995 for "Outside," from his collection of previous work, his catalog/ouevre, to create something that was both new and also "in conversation" with what came before, all the sounds and themes and characters, those things he made when he was younger, and perhaps less wise (he was off the drugs/alcohol by '95, and taking life day by day, happily married and with his second child, etc.). I mean, as an artist, I feel an affinity with him, though I have never tasted even a hint of the fame he had, nor what it must be like to release something and have an instant audience for it (go ahead and argue with me... No, Outside didn't sell the way Let's Dance or Ziggy Stardust did, but he had fans and listeners and an audience), not to mention that a "world tour" (that made him money) would have been just as obvious as my waking up to teach classes or grade exams, and hooking up with the likes of Trent Reznor, too, was just as easy (pick up the phone, call, "Hey Trent, wanna do a tour together?"), etc.
But this is NOT my point here.
My point is that doing "Black Nail" now, doing "The Dial Is in the Bathroom" now, recording new versions of "Broken Glass" and "(The) Fleshy Air" this year and bringing the dark-techno of This Dark Shroud back again this year, after a 4-5 year hiatus from it (five since I did it solo, four since This Dark Shroud with my friend Joe as bassist played our last show, though that really was a separate project, despite using the name), whilst adding in more elements of ambient, noise, improvisation, and all of the other genres I've been doing in the intervening years... It just feels so RIGHT.
That no one around me now was there at the time to recall or see how things have progressed (well...not in Tokyo, anyway) or has knowledge per se of the history behind the material I am now doing in new arrangements and as, essentially, "new songs" is not important. What IS important is that this project feels like fire to me. I've got plenty of tinder here to burn, and each time I ignite it -- or it ignites me -- something is different and new and exciting (and when I say "tinder" I don't mean that s*** dating app that might come to mind when I use the word, I mean, you know...FIRE, baby!!!).
Long Live the Shroud.
The Shroud IS my band. It is my alter-ego, my Ziggy or Nathan Adler, maybe. Or, well...no.
It's my Muse. Not a character in a story. It's pure energy, both dark AND light.
I don't get recognition for any of this music. What I get, instead, is something much greater.
I get satisfaction.
Better than what Mick Jagger got, eh?
