1323 Sunday 20 August 2023
I’m squeezing the metal prongs on an 1/8 inch audio jack against an instrument cable that is too large for it. I’m testing for size and fitment before I solder the ends together. A handful of cables drape over my neck like jewelry.
I pull the aluminum jack cover over the cable, but it’s already evident the cable is too thick.
I curse softly, attempting to force the issue with a pair of pliers.
Behind me, the LEDs on my modular synth blink patiently. It’s waiting for the cables to resume its programming.
I turn back around to see if there is another way to route the audio, to reuse the existing cables more creatively.
The conclusion is heavy and blunt: I need thinner cable.
I’m reminded of an interview with a famous musician in a book on modular synths who described the process of using the gear as not so much an intentional act, but one that is guided by the machine through a wilderness of possibility.
This is now resonating with me on a very personal level.
It starts with a hike through through the (creative) wilderness; confident in one’s abilities. It proceeds — always — with a tinge of regret, second-guessing, and the tendency to turn back to more familiar territory: tonality and harmony. Finally, as the enthusiasm recedes, a crisis of faith and existential dread: it’s all just noise and atonal bullshit: an impoverished sonic landscape with an absence of mood and emotional undertow.
This is usually the nadir of the whole process.
Eventually it ends, in a hole deep in the creative dirt, knuckles bloody, wild-eyed from the obsession that something worth all of this is down here, it’s just deeper still. If only, if only…
At this point, I wonder if I need more and better tools, or, if I should be more creative with the tools I have.
Today, the conclusion is: I need more tools. Specifically, more cables to plug into more holes, in order to follow Virgil — the modular synth in this story of a lost Paradise of musicality waiting to be found — deeper still.
All weekend I have been digging. Hours.
Soberly, I realize this is what it means to “show up”.
And it’s been dirt the whole way. Virgil pulling me along through the stages of grief and creative penury.
To “show up” in order to put the time in.
To “show up” as a signal of static transmitted into the ether, against the dead air of “not”. Against the nihilism of the act, even.
To “show up” and be counted even if the results are more noise than music.
And it is nihilism: because who in their right mind would choose — or better yet — prefer to do something useless, or, value-less, just for the sake of it? That’s madness.
It’s all so very Camus. Or, more likely, so very Ippolit, miming the crucial scene on the verandah in The Idiot.
I wonder if this is what he meant when he wrote “Myth…”.
I doubt he had cable thickness in mind. Neither, I am absolutely sure, did Dostoevsky…
1810 Monday 21 August 2023
I like “Guns ‘N Roses”.
My thumb is frozen over the remote control as I parse this confession from Mother.
The television is summarizing the career and historical significance of the band in order to draw attention to the tour they are planning, along with a few other early-90’s acts. And good for them: why shouldn’t they tour. They were never really my taste; but, I respected the music anyway.
Really?
Yes.
Since when?
Oh for a long time. I used to listen to them in the office, but Papa would always tell me to turn it off. I like all of those bands.
I’m at a loss for words. My teenage experience is rearranging itself like a scene from Nolan’s Inception with this new information. Music was not an important aspect of the household growing up. Although, with this new information, I can see glimmers of her desire and appreciation for it.
The mismatched cable jacks of it all.
1805 Tuesday 22 August 2023
I’m eating dinner in the dining room with Mother and Charli Sometimes, my partner.
Mother is telling us a story about hitchhiking to Vienna with her two girl friends on a Friday afternoon, after work, from Salzburg. I believe this to be true rather than confabulation because a few years earlier, on a trip to Salzburg to visit family, my brother brought work documents that showed her address there in 1963. She was 20 years old.
Salzburg being Salzburg, of course the address was still valid and not far from the hotel. Time has a different quality there. It’s in the name: Salt City. Salt being the mineral one uses to preserve and prolong time. Sometimes, if you can quiet yourself, you can feel the pillowy touch of it slowing you down by degrees. The whiplash of going to Vienna afterwards is real.
So this group of girls hitchhiked to Vienna to go clubbing. And why not? Vienna is a hip town not burdened by Time. They met guys, etc etc, and then hitched a ride back to Salzburg on Saturday.
I asked why they didn’t take the train — after all, the Bahnhoff was literally 10 minutes from where they worked.
She says no, they wanted the adventure of it, laughing about it sentimentally.
An act of resistance, no doubt — to put it in Camus’ terms.
Then she looks into the distance, as if reliving the memory… The falafel wrap cooling on the plate in front of her becoming the soft ellipses of the moment.
I ask her if it was the first time she went to the big city. She returns to the moment, and says, No. My first year of school was in Vienna. You lived in Vienna? Yes. But I don’t remember how long. I only remember walking to school; my first day. She describes wearing a backpack for books, and a metal mess kit attached to it, that clanged rhythmically, as she walked.
I don’t remember how we ended up in Salzburg…, she says quietly.
The falafel wrap still cooling on the plate front of her.
1350 Thursday 24 August 2023
I’m squeezing the metal prongs on an 1/8 inch audio jack against an instrument cable that is now the correct size. Screwing on the cover, it’s obvious this will work.
This is good news for the upcoming weekend plan. Digging in the creative dirt, excavating the shape of something musical out of the noise.
I have some ideas for how to move things forward with the piece I’m working on. I have a title, too, finally: An Ocean’s Embrace.
It’s a clean, clear piece, I think. Not so much about the shoegaze-like distortion. Desaturated; monochromatic. The rhythm will be incidental. It’s a moody piece.
The cables will be plugged into various guitar pedals; maybe even a guitar amp. Maybe I’ll record the sound with an SM57 mic in my little studio here. It’ll be rough enough without the need for more texture.
I’m not sure where “there” is; the destination, the end result, the product of all this effort. To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: I’ll know it when I [hear] it.
Patching the cables in, making the connections for signal flow; that’s as far as I’ve gotten. I have a piano part already recorded, but it’s really just the seed for the rest of it.
“showing up” and digging in the dirt, the machine blinks in anticipation as i start soldering the cable