Re-anchoring
O hi, he says as though it hadn’t been since September 16. A weekly, right? And yet.
I have missed you, though. Dug in over here, I will say, anchored. As in anchor dropped on milkweed trail, if you remember. Do click and check that old image, as the image you see above was taken from the exact same spot, October instead of July. I offer this not to prove that there are seasons, at least for the moment, but rather because when, while walking the trail, it occurred to me to take a picture and by some magic it was from the exact same spot looking the exact same way.
I went back in order to write, in the small writer’s cottage. Since last I saw it it had been outfitted with a Keurig coffeemaker and the k-cups that I remembered from my office job so many years ago, that I would brew into mason jars full of ice. This time it was cold outside so hot coffee ruled the day, and so did handwriting in a blank book. I had planned to write this note on that day from that spot, but instead I wrote about something I am finishing, a record, and how to share it. Whether to share it might be a better way to put it, and that writing session on that day made clear to me that feeling lousy about not sharing would be worse than feeling sheepish about sharing. No one is going to come to the door and ask if I have a record to share, so it will have to be by my own choice, volition, force of will.
The September 16 note, you may remember, was also about sharing, these notes specifically, as well as the Bandcamp store, with a publicity stunt embedded that yielded a nice surprise (hi, Ali, and thanks for being here). The sharing I wrote about in the cottage is different. Methodical, studied, strategized. Who writes about the kinds of things I make, and who reads that writing? What kinds of things do I, in fact, make? I have started thinking of it as (ready?) Experimental Electroacoustic Art Pop. I do this in full awareness that, at a Sō Percussion Summer Institute years ago, Steve Reich objected to calling one’s music “experimental.” Experimental is an approach, not a sound, he’d said. I agree, and that’s why I use the term. It pushes back on genre. It doesn’t sound like anything. But it also signals that the music will be weird, so you go in with a fastened seatbelt, at best, or a raised eyebrow, less good, or having already decided, like Reich, that I don’t know what I am talking about, at worst. Regardless, it might do something to select for a sympathetic set of ears.
The other thing I have been thinking about calling this music is Sung Word. There are so many words. I know this because I have written them down a million times, most recently during the writing/painting/staff-rolling session that yielded the cover art:
I wrote every word and then I underlined every word, and the color changes in quality because I didn’t rinse the previous paint before moving on to the next paint. I love these processes. I love that my hands get tired and that my mood transforms and that you can look at the paper and see effort, see a disquieted mind come into congruence, find its own anchor. But I also love that there are too many words in this, really that the sheer volume of words breaks the songs. They are structured like songs but there is too much there to really read as songs. Sung Word, then. We’ll see if it sticks. Experimental Electroacoustic Sung Word Art Pop. Now it is tagged and can be indexed or whatever. Or maybe you can find it in the metaverse if you have your goggles aimed in the right direction, i.e. backwards, I suppose.
Better still, I will run big prints of the art and then slice those big prints into squares and then hand-stamp and -number every square, and then I will hand one to you at a show or send one to you in the mail. Not the metaverse but the verse, which after all is in a song to begin with, even if the song is burdened by that much language. But maybe that weighing down could root you to the spot, like an anchor dropped on a milkweed trail as we head into winter.