It’s a wonderful world - it’s a real crying shame croons David Sylvian as I begin the short journey from one end of a dense thicket to another. The thicket, or, in other words, this entry, is as yet only vaguely known, as it should be. The process reminds me of my compositional strategy over the last three years.
What strategy is that, Herr Underling?
Like a savage thicket, or woods if you are of the more civilized ilk, pieces of music appear in my mental landscape amorphous and untamed. Initially, entrances into the morass are simply dents into its wild tangles. I begin to hack a path, uprooting and pruning until it is navigable, or at least navigable to an extent. I retreat and begin from another point on the parameter.
Were I to ascend in a dirigible from somewhere in the outskirts from time to time to observe my cuttings, splicing and replantings, I’d see the thatch slowly transforming from an abstraction of overlapping greens and browns into something that resembles one of those hedge labyrinths you learned about from those naughty intellectual books your parents had squirreled away in one of their recessed shelving assemblies.
Every time I’d gaze down from my sleek, agile dirigible, I’d have to accustom myself to a the new configuration of slightly repostured paths and recoulored floral arrangements. I am victim to familiarity’s bane. What I hear (or see) again and again begins to be correct. I make my notes as I listen (or see), regardless. I DIE, regardless, or perhaps a portion of me dies when the correctness of the form is torsioned. I finally move on to the new correctness.
Fuck um.
For a specific example, I rerecorded the second hump in Dobruška and her Piglet during the last few days. I call it the second hump because Dobruška is certainly not a dromedary. Though the original branches, twigs, twisting paths and scattered leaves of this part was played sloppily, my obdurate mind still held to its essence as I observed my new cuttings. Perceiving the vague line between the familiarity bane and personal quality is no task for a ploughless peasant.
