Week 2 project (keep it simple)

I suffered this week from an overabundance of ideas.

I wrote guitar lines and chord structures without melodies and poems with plans for performance art.

The last one is worth elaborating upon as it will probably appear next week...

I've been thinking about the old phenomenon of topical songs- you know, you sing the way you feel, or whatever going on for you or the people that you know. It's above all else a catharsis. Alan Lomax covered this extensively in his accounts of "seriousness" and pathos of this fairly simple art- the cowboy singing lonesome in the desert, the black farm hand howling in the field.

The world changes but that NEED FOR CATHARSIS does not. And where is Catharsis now? It's in the tubes! The inter-tubes!

Blogs my friends! Blogs!

This is a type of folk song but we have forgotten and have no cultivated skill. We type in rhythms "free and rabid" (that is, not in rhythm) and do not stack our blogs into harmonies!

SO I wanted to do a performance piece about treating the act of writing as an act of music. The rhythm bit was easy enough to imagine (if difficult to perform.) You simply memorize a poem and type it in tempo. I'm gonna do a waltz time.

Interesting revelation: When you type in time (as I did in "hollds you to the sound of the vvvvvvaelley" bit,) the idiosyncrasies of singing begin to emerge naturally. The accent was unplanned, but something about the necessities of typing in time made a rhythm dialect occur.

Harmony is a little harder to imagine and I'm still trying to figure out how it could work.

Here's some text I wrote to go with it, but it's not my best (though I like the concept) and I'm waiting till this project is more complete before performing.

The bards don’t sing anymore or play the harp

The people don’t sing anymore…

They click and clack

Waltzing into blogs on fingers

That seem to float on rhythms unfree and rabid…

A bunch of fucking lobsters all

Hooked into macbook keys

And stumbling over the heat of cybernetic feet

Just a bunch of bumpkin lobsters

Trying to sing the songs of the day

Let me show you how to move

Hoioigbaaioegoiasiofwgn

Justin caase you lose your wway teher ies the tether

Thait hollds you to the sound of the vvvvvvaelley.

1… 2… 3… 1… 2… 3… 1… 2… 3…

Anyway, that was all too much, so instead I'm just going to do a cover of You Are My Sunshine, except inspired by broadsides, I'm just going to keep the tune and change the words. I thought about other forms of light, and immediately Moonshine came to mind, so I wrote the song from the perspective of an alcoholic to his Moonshine. I'll do it in class.


I'll record it and that poem from last week soon and post them online.