May 23, 2004
more explanation / holding pattern
Couple of pictures here from our show, Speakeasy, at BATS in the Jazz Festival last year (the Wellington Word Collective with music by The Winter and Shakespeare's Bitch). Word Festival in July should be worth looking out for.
(excerpt from a correspondance follows - someone overseas finally bought my albums...)
...Scratched Surface I think has some good stuff and for the not-so-good parts I can plead that it was my first effort and I was 18 at the time. It has the most straightforward writing, with songs structured to have lyrical setups & payoffs. The musical content's pretty minimal. The other albums are more open-ended. If you listen to them in order you should be able to hear how each one is a reaction to & development from the one before. Loose Autumn Moans is the most recent and seems to be a fusion of all the other four (plus the 'string section' giving it a distinct sound of its own). So the next album should be something different.
Each album has a basic theme, I guess Scratched Surface's would be growing up. The Marion Flow's about the unconscious mind, I was working along the Carl Jung line of developing a 'personal mythology', and the move from a small town to the city (note that it's divided into 'pastoral' and 'urban' halves). Then Mantis Shaped & Worrying's about memory & morality, Parataxes about co-operation, and Loose Autumn Moans is just what the title says. All them have a kind of innocence vs experience dynamic that comes from William Blake.
Interesting that the music seems different from the writing. The good thing with writing short stories is that it's a way of getting across to people who won't listen to my music. This year I'm narrowing the gap a bit, doing more spoken word performances of stories with only a little musical backing. Could be because in 2003 I relied a lot on the other guys in the band and didn't do much new writing; it was great to be part of something bigger than myself but the next logical step in reaction to that is to reassert my own individuality a bit. The other factor though is that this year I'm busy so don't have as much time for music as before, but it's coming together. The gig the other week was great fun, I should do hopefully three more in June.
There's a Wellington guy Richard who I've spent a bit of time with. We had most of the same influences as teenagers - Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Will Oldham, free jazz etc but we took them in totally different directions. He got really into learning folk-style guitar techniques and developing a repertoire of blues and other old songs, whereas I was interested in taking elements from my different influences and putting them together to create something new. I always emphasised originality but don't have a lot of technique, whereas he became a classicist, and in the end we were unable to play together because of the different philosophical motives. The last recording of his I heard was pretty intriguing though - a live rock cover of 'Sara' by Bob Dylan, with Kurt Cobain sounding vocals and a Neil Young sounding guitar solo. He made a collage whereas I took the same people and put them through a blender?
Basically I'm a dabbler, I haven't chosen any one area to master. There are plenty of people who play way better guitar than I - I think of the guitar as one of my tools, along with pen & paper and my laptop, rather than a main focus. The short stories are kind of caricaturish distortions & selective misrepresentations of things from my life, while the music is maybe more my 'inner' thoughts & a direct experience. The other thing I'm doing a lot of this year is writing non-fiction which is totally externalised and only minimally subjective (though the choice of subject matter tells a bit about my interests). That has the advantage that the subject matter's provided, so all the angst & dithering around trying to think what to write about can be dispensed with. But overall the different writings are all 'me', and to work out who I am you just have to make a composite picture from all the different sources rather than focussing on one. I should even get back into making films one day.
http://fiffdimension.tripod.com