Still working on that piece. Yesterday I edited the bass every which way from Sunday and it just did not come together. So I turfed it entirely this morning. And lo and behold, that dang thing came alive. It now sounds like a a bunch of classically trained Cuban vampires playing a dirge for a fallen buddy. Yikes. It started out as a psy-trance piece, believe it or not. How the hell it ended up here, I’ll never know.

Having a tough time with good new music lately. Ott, Entheogenic and Banco de Gaia, my musical heroes, all came out with middling new works this year. Have they all eaten the same stupid pill? One edgy piece each per album isn’t good enough, guys. I keep poking the WWW for good new music – like a monkey with anant stick – and coming up with zeroes. Goa-trance? Let me puke in your kick drum and short circuit it for you. Trust me, I’ll be doing you a favor. Lounge? Holy fuck… how many years are you going to yarp the same shite? Lounge died five decades ago because it put people to sleep. No edge? Suck this. Ambient? You know, there is a limit to glitching, a limit to slow-mo pads. No dynamics? Fuck off.

Ok, rant over. Shoved off this plateau of musical mediocrity, I feel like I’m clinging to a dozen great albums on my way down. What’s to blame? Do I have that short an attention span? Naw… It’s like rich food. You can’t eat that much at once. But you can trick yourself into eating more by having a great variety of it. Trouble is, if you listen to all of your favorite tracks in one day, and do the same the next day and the next, you a) expect all new stuff to be just as great and b) are going to wear out your welcome with those great tracks if you keep it up. Do I listen to shite? Yup, all the time. Deliberately. It’s my palate cleanser. It’s just real sad to have nothing great OR new for the entree.

Yesterday I spent coring tons of apples and pitting a ton of prune plums, all for sauce. Yesterday. Yes, the whole day. When I woke up this morning the last thing I wanted to see was fruit of any sort. There was one day left of this long weekend and I was determined to spend the better part of it completing the structure of this crazy-assed piece of music. I woke up this morning with the thought, OK, just start at the end and work back. Lame as the idea was, it worked. I knew immediately what the ending was going to be. After about two and a half or three hours, I did it. I did what I’d been striving to do for over a month now. The only substantial thing I added was a right hand piano part. It’s this very simple, almost lullaby-ish tune, and I tempered the naivete of it by playing it with sevenths and ninths throughout.

Halle-freakin-lujah. The piece is still in the construction stage. Most of the instruments and wavs are temp files. When it’s done, it’s going to be a piece that any modern ballet company would find well-worth dancing to. It’s going to find a real comfy home with the rest of the tracks on my CD. This is the seventh piece. Two or three more, and I’ll be content.