Sum II.1: Human In The Loop

The first album in the Sum series, based on entries 6/24, 4/4, 11/10, 6/1, 6/2, 6/21, 8/29, 4/26.

I can trace the Songdays idea back to around 2001 when I started to write a series of essays that I was going to put into a book about boundaries. The working title was Cusp, The Beauty of the Boundary, about physical boundaries and about boundaries between the domains, primarily the boundary between music and language. The other aspect of that was 911. 911 made us all reflective in some way. I was thinking about the boundary of the ocean and how it had been breached on 911. Since that point, I've been interested in how the rhythms of language can drive the song. The process for the Songdays involves going through my diaries and cherry-picking phrases that sound musical, then notating the core rhythms and later going back and adding a melody and chord changes, sometimes an orchestral arrangement.  

I had always been interested in music and language from a very early age, generating rhythmic lines as a form of poetry, which then evolved into a greater interest in music. I was also interested in architecture, which to this day is one of the primary metaphors I use for all my creative work. I'm always working from some type of "blueprint" or top-level concept. It creates the structure, even before you start decorating it.  

The Songdays this past year have been slow in coming because of production logjams. In the production phase the raw musical ideas have to be fleshed out in some way--figuring out what the drums sound like, whether you're going to use guitars or not, and it really slows things down for me because you have to make decisions along the way--and once you start developing a vibe for the album, you have to follow it. With Human In The Loop, I went with an electronic sound because it's easier for me. I don't have to have live drums, I don't have to find a guitar player. I can play guitar, but my guitar skills and sounds don't work in a typical production environment so I was kind of stuck with that as a production vibe.

The plan is to release other albums in the series, similar to what I have done with my art series, and released like software (Sum 2.1, 2.2, 2.3), and will all be shorter EPs, and released initially as video albums--a cross between album art and a music video. The schema for the Sum series is by month (Sum I), by day (Sum II), by the hour (Sum III--which will probably be an hour-long soundwalk of some kind), and Sum IV, an album of music where the pieces are exactly a minute long. The current plan for IV is to compose a series of string quartets that are a minute long (String Shortets). If I wanted to continue the series to Sum V it would be sounds a second in length, perhaps chained together in some way as something purely conceptual. I have already begun to use AI in my work, so that could be used as well. My current use of AI is to create the "canvas" or block of "stone" that I work against, with me as the human-in-the-loop, playing a bass or guitar part against it, or dropping in a string arrangement that I manually compose. I did this on The Loop.

Ideally, the Songday series would be a collective project where people writing songs about days (or a song every day) would be released as a playlist, and perhaps released as albums in the future.

The other aspect would be visual, where I'd make one artwork for each month that will be accumulations--working on the same painting in each month every year, adding or removing elements--similar to the work of On Kawara, who made paintings with just a date on them.  "Accumulation" is an interesting concept because we accumulate everything in life: we accumulate objects and memories, which either become persistent or fade away. The operative metaphor is going to be geological, a revisiting of Rifts.

October 11, 2024