With the release of my first album, and more projects and ideas coming I wanted to do a bit of a word vomit on the subject of what my plans are and what’s next on this new venture for me.
I have always had plans to create a solo music project with my own ideas, something that I have kind of already been doing just haven’t really released anything before. So what is it that I want to do with this project? Do I have goals, an agenda? Not really, I want this to be a project that I can come and go from if need be, currently all of my focus creatively will be to this project and to my current business venture that I am partnering up with my wife, White Owl Productions. I say not really cause I do have an ambiguous goal, that is to make interesting music, but let me expand.
Firstly, I want to release music. I am currently focusing on modular synthesis as the primary instrument but this can and probably will change in the future. This first album, VicMod, is entirely composed using a small 3 module Eurorack synth, and I plan on releasing more albums using similar setups, maybe not as small. Secondly, outside of making music I want to continue to refine my ability to create electronics, be it analog or digital, in order to continue to expand my arsenal of electronic instruments and controllers. This has been taking a decent amount of my time with prototyping 3d printed faceplates, and more recently in developing a 9u Eurorack case for my studio set up. Currently I have refined my faceplate designs and have streamlined the process of creating and printing them with little waste (I will have a post about this soon with a Github for others to use and create these modules). Lastly, I want to continue to make social media posts and content; I have been posting on my Instagram and have been learning to make YouTube videos. I come from the audio world so video editing, album art, and pretty much anything visual I never liked to do or was really good at doing; I gravitated to music and audio because I had a stronger affinity for sound. Looking back at myself never giving any of the visual arts even a try to learn how to do it at an amateur level does kind of sting because I could be way more proficient, but hindsight is 20/20.
Those are the three main concepts I plan on doing for this project, make music, make sound making stuff, and make content. After this post goes live I will be making a video about this post, well the content. I hope to make a bit of an impact with my music, as esoteric as it may be, but also with my writing about my music. The last 2 points are pretty self explanatory, but the first point, composition style and where I get my inspirations from for the musical decisions I make are not.
Music to many is a solved art form, but it is constantly evolving and changing. It is easy to notice this when you study the evolution of musical form over the last century. Comparing music from 1920 to 2020 was a huge change, and I am not just talking about popular music but music in general. Currently , we are on the precipice of a major change, Post-Modernism is ending and we are entering an era of music. What this will mean is still unknown. My aesthetics for music creation is primarily derived from Modernism; Shaeffer, Cage, Xanakis, Feldman, and Stockhausen to name a few inspirational composers/thinkers of the mid 1900s. Closing myself off based on genre is not something I care to do, instead focusing on an idea or concept that I can expand on with underlying constraints. To give an example of this, my first album, VicMod, I constrained myself with only using 3 selected synth modules and recording that to a stereo file. I could not do any editing to the recorded music but instead building off of what I had, such as adding effects and automating parameters within the DAW. From this point idk what the genre will be of the music, will it be ambient or dance, it does not matter in this format. Only thing that matters in this process is that I hold the initial constraints true.
What can one expect from me and this project? I am planning on releasing new music every 2 months, with an initial release on bandcamp and then a release on streaming services after the fact. The reason for the bandcamp release first is because I absolutely dislike streaming services, they are not beneficial to the artists and musicians who create and instead suck all the money from those individuals. Also, I am planning on releasing Youtube videos on a semi-regular basis, I would like to release a video every week. Currently, the planned videos will be Jam/practice videos (just jamming out on the modular synth), Discussion/chatting videos (something like a vlog where I just talk about a topic), and Making videos (a video talking about something new that I have created). The latter 2 videos will probably be accompanied with blog posts on my website here.
I appreciate everyone who came by and read the post, and I hope you continue to follow my progress. I have new music and content coming that I can’t wait to share with everyone. If there is anything you can think of or want to say or discuss or recommend, please leave a comment, I will read and reply to everything!