Big Man Hold Me

 

Inspired by my friend Clancy Baxter, who is a fantastic perfumer and musician who makes electronic music under the name Clamore.  He is big and holds me well.  This track in particular:
https://soundcloud.com/clancybaxter/earth-wp

A Vision

I know most of you are doing one of these too! Here's mine.

With an optional 2nd part:

A very quickly-recorded demo:

Intermezzo: The Gay Mortician

This one follows directly on from the story of 'Margery.' The title doesn't really have much to do with this piece, but it's a lead in for tomorrow's (and the final) cabaret song, The Gay Mortician. 

chuck a liss - there's no soprano part, so you'll have to speak along.

Horse Shoes

These words came out very quickly and didn't seem to need much editing but I'm really not sure what I think of them. By the end it feels silly.  Maybe it should be chopped in half. The music is an unrelated fun messy snippet of goof.  

Horse Shoes

Things I smelt and saw

I work the past into fine articles

horse shoes and chain mail

protection worn in other times

and while i work, I smell and see

not just my tools, the pen and paper of now

but duh the bits of the past i am working

the articles i wish to transform 

and as the day passes, I see them in a new light

and a new light, and another

forevery light of day is new

and i start to see the object-to-be

and to know it better than any other friend

you cannot know a person like a horse shoe

predict every surface and lump

but even a horse shoe may surprise you

the way it glints or sounds when dropped in a certain way

on a certain surface

you cannot know the world like you know a horse-shoe

it is just too big

you can try to predict its movements

and sometimes you will be right

it is the same with people

people are worlds

worlds are enormous

people are enormous

they just don’t fill much space

some take up more in the hope of proving their invisible bigness, absorbing houses and SUV’s

even a horse-shoe can keep whispering to you for weeks and years

“remember who made me? 

how hard I was to pay for? 

how stubbornly i refused to become what i am now?”

a song contains words, lessons:

“This is how it feels to be lonely; 

this is how it feels to find yourself on the ground and not know how you got there; 

this is how it feels to be unalone and inspired!”

It is no surprise, then,

that people, who make words, meaning, whispers, lessons constantly 

and live long, re-regenerated lives 

are impossible to know the way you know a horse-shoe  

But it is also no surprise that they are such fun to try to know:

to learn with through failure and play

appeteaser

These are some of the melodic ideas I plan to use in tomorrow's piece. This is just... as far as I've got.
Score in C.

what dis

I'm so sorry, I'm in such a fuckery mood these last couple of days

there are things in here I want to expand into larger work but I was too blaALHLHGHhh to do them today

MoM Guest: Christine Elise Chen

Andrew here: I definitely need a day off, and my friend in NY Christine is working on a super interesting project at the moment. I asked if she'd share what it's all about and she went and made a video! (below the text) Anyone who likes max patches/female empowerment should get a kick out of this.

- - -

So basically this video is just a video of my max patch running (not the most interesting thing in the world to watch if you’re not trying to learn max).

Here’s a pic of the sensors that I’m using to trigger files at random from three separate banks of sound files:

                                                                                                                                              

And a stupid-grainy close up of my Arduino:

Each sensor is attached to a different object—a Barbie (with flex sensor), a Bible (with motion sensor), and a Vanity (with motion sensor). The overlap of sounds that you hear in the patch video is actually not totally representative of the sound design of the piece. In the final version of this piece there will be a performative element—I have a narrative of gestures/actions/events that I will perform. These include cutting Barbie’s hair, reading from the bible, putting on makeup, and cutting my own hair (if I have the balls!) As I move from station to station, the sounds that will be heard will be only sounds attached to that individual station.

There will also be a projected video component—a four channel surveillance-style live feed with close video of each object station and one wide angle camera.

Basically this piece is about girlhood and how fucked up it is. My basic thesis is that through commercials, toys marketed toward girls, and religion, we as a society actively groom girls to be pleasing objects for men. And this piece couldn’t exist without Freud, that fucker. The way girls are encouraged to interact with their fathers provides a nice fucked up model of how they’ll be encouraged to interact with their sexual partners later in life. The “good girl,” obedient, slender, pleasant to look at and hear, feminine, innocent yet sexual, normative, a pleasing object in appearance, personality, interests, etc. is a commodity and narrative that was actively marketed to me throughout my childhood. The big question then is this: do I actually want to be a “good girl” and do I even have any choice in the matter?

Nice cheerful thoughts for your day.

Christine's website

the heck

the actual heck

Watching

Just a poem today. Written for Andrew.

Watching

As a little girl, in my little-girl room

I had two mirrors.

One for my face, one for my body

The first, large and wide 

At my dressing table

The second, long and slender

On a swinging door

I would pull the door until they showed each other

but they were never face to face

And I would watch myself, with her head turned away

Watching herself, with her head turned away

Watching me

Watch her watch her watch me

None of us could catch the one who watched her watching her.

Margery

Another happy love song where everything is just fine at the end

Also, it's Pi day here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mMeEKGyngM

Somewhere Over The Painbow (It's So Hard)

(Harmonic) Theme and Variations

Harking back to last MoM's 'Theme and Scariations' a little more than first intended. Every time I write something in 3 it ends up being perfect haunted merry-go-round music. Branching out of the harmonic comfort zone a bit which has been rewarding. Lusting after some of the harmony in Tabakova's 'Suite in the Old Style.'

MIDI below

Nicotine

More weird cabaret/ yet (pronounce the et in yet like cabaret)

Ugh. Love and death. Shocked? Haven’t you figured out yet that that’s what this is all about? Cigarettes, alcohol, more… Margery taught me to smoke. She taught me the rush, as it rushed, the silky smooth, the heat, the rush… she taught me more than that. If love is a toxin, it might be nicotine. It takes root inside you and hungers for itself, and to satisfy that hunger… well, we’ve all seen the commercials. But we do it anyway. But sometimes, a cigarette is just a cigarette.
Margery wore a suit, long after the days when a woman in a suit meant vaudeville. She wore them unironically, seriously - for she knew that a suit on a man looks smart, and she knew that she was as smart as any man, if not smarter.

weird dirge(slow death)

I set a timer and wrote this whole thing in twenty minutes
I love prolation canons
I want to do more
better ones

instruments with a hard attack manage to sound not awful on sibelius?

sleepynonsense–for piano

submission no.2 for today

it is called sleepynonsense partly because I've been up for 18 hours, and because it's forming a larger piece I want to give to some very dear and queer and sad and beautiful friends of mine, and they are known for often speaking in sleepy nonsense.

some silly piano midi

Sitting Rhythms

Fun with hanging metal (so metal)

Yesterday I made a sample library from this piece of metal. I recorded it being hit four times and transposed it to lots of pitches so it could be played on the keyboard. Thank you Toby for the company and for supplying your hair for it to hang off. Mine was too fine and snapped. #toofine

II cold rain

another haiku! this time for alto/tenor duet
it is coincidentally spontaneously raining as I upload this, obvs I am the weather queen

cold rain–we dance in
cold rain; and God strikes down with
killing flash in vain.

here's a crappy midi ft. clarinet and cor anglais

Little Lady

Today's is a bit of a Bolcom-esque cabaret song. The setting is so straight-forward, I didn't want to copy out the lyrics... also laziness? I'm going to try and record this today, but no promises

Also pls help with page 7 - In his hands were a knife, and a fist -or- In his hands was a knife, and a fist. I've psyched myself out of having any idea whatsoever

yindyamarra

it took me so long to find a poem in wiradjuri - this is an excerpt from a longer poem from a film still on the website of an art gallery in albury
I can't even tell you who wrote this or why, which is INFURIATING and problematic
but I needed something to workshop writing melodies in language for children to sing

(starting tomorrow, I'm gonna post two a day to make up for my week off)