i'm just looking at listening stats for some of the stuff i've been posting recently and, god, people have short attention spans nowadays. a desire for instant gratification.

pro-tip: when a song is five, ten, fifteen minutes long, it's hard to get an understanding of it from listening to the first 10-20% of it. that's just the introduction. i mean, we don't usually judge books by covers do we? with a large piece of music like this, there's usually a process in listening to it. the music has a shape: a start, a middle and an end. often, the song shifts dramatically through those ten minutes, incorporating radically different genres throughout it's length. sometimes the climax comes halfway through, and sometimes you've actually gotta even listen to the whole thing to get to the high point.

and, no, a solution is not to cut out the atmospherics and just focus on the intense sections. music that is meant to be digested as an art form cannot be reduced to an advertisement jingle. a cat is not a dog. when music is written with a process, the climax often *doesn't make sense* without the process that leads up to it.

i mean, if somebody wants to accuse me of not being an exciting rock artist, or a viable pop musician, i'll plead guilty to that. i'm not trying to be that, and never have been (except maybe for a few delusional moments around '97/'98). people that are looking for that kind of thing are going to be disappointed. but, that's why i'm not tagging any of this stuff with 'miley cyrus'. i'm tagging it with 'kosmische', 'post rock', 'glitch' - genres that generally attract people with longer listening spans.

i guess what i don't understand is why people bother pressing play at all if they don't intend to actually listen to it. i mean, what are they really doing? looking for something they've already heard? rejecting it the moment they don't recognize it?

grargh.

the flip side is that it seems to be that when somebody actually does listen to a full song, they listen to several. i'll go two or three days with nothing but partials, then get 30 full listens in a row - clearly all by the same person. that's encouraging...

i just wish i understood the psychology behind the partials. it doesn't make sense to me.

i mean, i sort of get that some people are going to grow bored of a four minute ambient intro. fine. they're not going to enjoy my music. that's ok.

what i don't get is why they'd click through the progressive rock tag to get there, notice the song is seventeen minutes long and then expect to understand what's going to happen at 12:37 after listening to the first four minutes.

am i being presumptuous to think that clicking on the prog tag, noticing the lengthy track length and then pressing play anyways pre-supposes an understanding that one needs to let the track finish before judging it?

i'm hoping this might help.

the music here has shifted dramatically over many years, from roots in punk/grunge through to experimental synth pop and into a type of kitchen sink post-rock with heavy electronics. the only consistency throughout is a lack of consistency, guitars and an impressionist aesthetic. "blender rock"

blender rock is what i've been calling myself for a while (check page description). no google hits except me. i like that.

"kitchen sink post-rock" brings up an article about trans am, who were a pretty neat 90s act. could have worse company.

publishing warning (inri029)

this was my grade 12 final project in electronic music design. the assignment was something along the lines of creating a piece of music with a social message.

the message is part dystopian, but focuses more on the idea of identifying certain threats that would become a problem in the upcoming century. remember that this was the end of 1999. how close was i?

1) intro
2) war
3) noise pollution, or pollution in general
4) conformity (or the collapse of individualism)*
5) chemical warfare
6) global warming
7) outro

*i was thinking in terms of personality/uniqueness, rather than something political. and i think the extreme conformity underlying gen y social attitudes have played this out frighteningly well, actually. it's a reaction to the radical mindset of anti-conformity that dominated gen x, but it's still a very real thing that will have very real ramifications in the upcoming decades. if you thought the 50s were creepy, wait until you see what these kids grow up into!

i should have included something about inequality. i also removed a vegan track, partly due to time restraints. besides that, i think i got all of the broad ideas right.

most of the tracks are slightly remixed/resequenced versions of tracks from inri or inriched. track 5 is brand new, and recorded on the school's synthesizer (part of the project requirements).

noting that this contains a section i've title "symphony #0", i'm going to label this piece of music my zeroth symphony.

recorded over 1997-1999. constructed in this form in june, 1999. as always, please use headphones.

credits
j - guitars, effects, bass, synthesizers, drum programming, sequencing, sampling, digital wave editing, cool edit synthesis, tapes, production, found sounds, strategies

released june 20, 1999



1) this is track 1 from the original inri cd demo.

2) this is a combination of tracks 5 & 11 from the original inri cd demo.

3) this is a combination of tracks 3 & 7 from the original inriched cd demo.

4) this is track 19 from the original inriched cd demo.

5) this was an original track recorded on the school's synthesizer to fulfill the requirements of the project, but becomes track 7 on the original inridiculous cd demo.

6) this is track 19 from the original inri cd demo.

7) this is track 1 from the original inriched cd demo.

jack and the bean...

psyche.

life there is..........?

*crickets*

life's been weird here. haven't been drinking or smoking basically at all. that's been good for me; my head seems clear. but kind of empty.

i dunno. i'm swinging wildly between "life is perfect" and "life is meaningless".

perfectly meaningless. meaninglessly perfect. both, maybe, even.

still thinking of you. strangely. still a loose end. a splayed wire. a loose thread. a hair out of place.

a noodle hanging off the plate. yes, one of those long ones that just won't follow proper table etiquette. grrrrr.

i'm 10 hours away. in a different clime, even. consider this: there's no snow here yet. that's how far away i am. so it's safe to talk...

if you'd like.

j

got those funky levin stick lines on my mind...

(robert fripp does not want his music on the internet; i initially posted a link to king crimson's sleepless in this space that i have not been able to find, since.)