"Inspiration" in Chinese = "Spirit Feeling"

No, really. I can't just make this stuff up. Well, I could, and you'd probably believe me--but I'm a little more conscientious than that.

Last night my roommate found me in my room hunched over a toy glockenspiel sitting in my lap with a microphone pointed at it. He smirked and backed out while I yelled, "what? This is serious!" I was working on a remix for a band about town who are somewhat friends of mine. (On a side note, while big acts are big for a reason and it's often exciting to listen to the zeitgeist hype music everyone is amped up about, it's very lovely to like bands small enough that you can talk about day jobs with them before and give congratulatory hugs to them after their sets.) I've got the overall song arrangement and pretty much all the percussion done; it will probably end up something like a combination of Four Tet (he and Apparat really inspire me a lot these days) and Kevin Shields' remix of Mogwai Fear Satan.

This is really the first time I've worked on music with a deadline and the expectation that someone else is going to hear it, respond to it, judge it. But I'm beginning to realize how different working on music alone and in a vacuum is. There's no pressure and no limitation, but sometimes that can be a bad thing. I used to think J Mascis' maxim of, "if anything's possible, why do anything" was a load of nonsense; now I'm beginning to think of restrictions and impositions as more of a nucleation site where reactions begin, as the point where pen first meets paper and one says, "this starts here."

I played a semi-gig on Tuesday with Jess' friend Forrest who'd come down from Vermont with a $25 acoustic to sing rustic folk songs, most his own, some by Leonard Cohen and Michael Hurley, in Steffi's candle-lit living room to an audience of about 10 kids, all of whom I knew, as Victor and I accompanied, he on violin and I armed with guitar, distortion, delay, and reverse reverb. I had never heard any of the songs, save one, before playing; the goal, as in most group improvisation, was to respond to what Forrest played in whatever way I could with whatever I had. Unlike jamming to write songs with my old band, however, here we had definite songs to play along to--nucleation sites around which Victor and I played, giving us a direction so we could figure out how to get everyone there. It ended up being one of the most fun and relaxing musical experiences I've had; I did a lot of crazy stuff, such as bending echoing, dissonant tones with the whammy bar, bowing with a drumstick, etc. Such immersive textures are what I live for, but one needs a catalyst to give it coherence.

Of course, in the absence of collaboration with other musicians, one needs to impose one's own restrictions in order to be productive. Possibly the most counterproductive freedom of all in a solo situation is the freedom to let oneself off the hook: to abandon an idea when one feels unable to develop it further, or when one decides to hold out to see if a "better" (often actually meaning "more easily workable") idea comes along. This is the same thing as when I find myself unable to start writing a paper or a poem, I think. To get back to the remix, for the first couple of days I was working on it, I was troubled with the feeling that it could sound like anything, really--I made a beat, but I could've made another, and so on. In the end, I forced myself to decide on a basic rhythm, and arrange all the essential verses and choruses in order first, then layer everything else on after that. It's working pretty well so far; I still don't know what the end textures will sound like, exactly, but now I know I need a quiet thing here, a loud wash of noise there, and so on.

In summary, I guess this is not the sort of divine-inspiration, fully-formed-piece-pops-into-mind kind of route one might think creation takes. Rather, it's like waiting for a tiny scintillating shard of inspiration to emerge semi-spontaneously from the primordial muck of possibility, then latching onto it for dear life with full knowledge its trajectory might lead nowhere and leave one hanging in a void. It's a little absurd, much like most endeavors in this life seem at the outset. Call it existentialist inspiration.