June 9, 2012

• Reflection: My Art So Far

  where am i at?  i am in the midst of pinnacling in many areas, way beyond where i was 3 years ago.  it's like i finally figured out who i was and all the time i put into writing, singing, drawing, suddenly came together in one fail swoop.  I am almost complete with my first solo record I've been piecing together as I learned more about production and my own song writing.  About 3 years ago, I decided to randomly get some vocal lessons, as I was referred from a professor from my school.  she said this guy was legit and had gotten some results.  i had been performing at school functions and writing a few records with my brother for the last few years.  

   

  After the summer 2006, I had started collaborating with various other artists I would run into and on my own, but I basically only lived inside a dream world, a foggy haze of life and death. i would write and write, filling tape recorders with every development of every phrase I could muster from my soul. The truth was my father was going to die, and death became heir apparent to all things.  it became the motivator of this idea of keep;ing every idea available to me, to hone it, to spend weeks crafting melody after melody. i started branching out from my years writing a sort of free form poetry and translated that to melody and sound.  I also had begun to draw in notebook after notebook on public transit, in gG Park, etc. and this started to craft my visual art development.  Just drawing and painting was a process that translated to how i approached music, like how jazz is basically approaching each song new every time, an evolution over time of inspiration from the same old melody.  

  This 2006-2008 period radicalized my creative process and made me see art for what it is, the most valuable, spiritual beacon of light that i could not ignore or fail to follow.

  So when I stumbled into my friend Gregory's apartment room with the beaten down piano, I had no idea that the comfortability I learned in signing, would really explode and ignite this foundation I had ought through from 2006-2009.  I totally unlocked myself, I gave into the arms of instinctual creative inspirations put to any medium i could crawl through.

  We spent weeks using various techniques to tweak the body just write to be available to make sound.  It's not just relaxing the diaphragm.  It's opening up the throat, creating a pressure gradient allowing the lungs to recycle air and stay open for a sustained period of time.  the trick is to make the least effort.  to not think about pitches as high or low, but fast or slow.  just the psychological focus on this distinction prevents one from "blowing" out their voice.  Hand movements when singing, strangely, can just flip a switch giving you a robust, full sound.  Breathing is also important.  I learned that when I take a full breath I need to start to sing on the exhale, you open up your lungs via using a movement resembling eating an apple, it opens the back of the throat, this allows the breath to move freely without impediment.  Thinking of the actual body as an actual instrument and not that the voice creates song by some sort of magic.  I think before, singing was so sacred, that knowing nothing, made it like some sort of alien power.  But i learned that I needed to know how a body produces a sound, and that their are no limitations, only those that you shackle to yourself.  At one point, I took in all his instruction and was mindful of my entire physical presence, and I sang like i never had before.  I mean it was like full on opera, a sound I never thought I was capable of doing.  At the beginning, he said I had a great voice but that he knew exactly what I was doing that was preventing me from developing more.  Instead of sacrifice a song because I couldn't sing it, I can sing on any song and never worry.  Before I worried, worried, about how it sounded, was frustrated that i couldn't "hit" that a note, yet another destructive phrase in my mind that made me attack the song, instead of letting the body physically produce what I want.  It's like your voice is a huge beam of light coming from your mouth, and you open it, and it just leaps out unimpaired.  

  Mix all of this with my continued efforts to mix songs and music, and write and write and write, and suddenly i had like 15-20 songs to choose from and decided to go with 10.  There are about 4 that are instrumentals from various producers and bands, that I wrote vocals over.  I was compelled to over the last 3 years.  I would hear something, and because of my vocal instruction I would go for it and know I could take into class and hone it or see what was preventing me from singing a certain way.  So I had about 7-8 of these, songs with my vocals over then, full songs interpreted by me, and cut it down to 4.  The other six I put together myself using all the techniques from mixing, and the melodies are now flowing out.  It's the most amazing period of artistic exploration I never knew possible.

   

  I'm just so happy with it, and need to do more of it.  Time is the issue.  I am going to LA this wknd to start writing on a new record I am doing with my brother.  We are actually working with some musicians from the band The Melvins from Seattle, now out in LA.  If we turn the songs we did with them into gold, then we have a chance for an actual indie label distributing it.  I am going to use everything I have learned from the last 6 years, 2006-2012, and make it happen artistically.  I want my daughter to see what I am made of and that you can do everything you could ever dream of by working your ass off, loving yourself, being open to everything, to break down old selves and forge new ones, and that love is central to this development.  My wife who supports me, it is my art side she fell in love with or made her see what was inside me, what beauty i yearned to create, I want to create something magical to better understand myself and each other.

   

  • 11:50 am
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