I’m still working on that last track, both mixing and finessing. I’ve decided that synth and sampled strings just suck for this piece, so I’m looking to hire a string player. But otherwise, the piece is going really well. I keep thinking the best thing I can do is leave it alone, get some perspective on it, and come back to it with really fresh ears in a while.

To that end, I too a break this morning (after 2½ hours of work on it) and decided to make a first stab at setting the order of the tracks. Well… was that ever a revelation. Here, I thought there was only a very tenuous consistency between my seven little pieces. Turns out, they have much in common. Lots of drum kit and percussion, various basses, a lot of strings, guitars and subtle effects. The essential thing I took away from this first glancing listen, was that in all pieces, the groove is all important. Oh, and I like to fuck up the listener with polyrhythms. I love that delirious sensation of falling when you lose the downbeat and have to hunt for it.

Last week I called this stuff cinematic dark jazz. This week, I’m not so sure that’s what it is. It’ll probably get lumped in with IDM, but in no way is it dance music. Truth be told, there’s a vast gulf between the music I love to listen to and the music I love to create. How that happened, I don’t know. But I suspect it’s from the process of discovery that’s involved in the creation of every piece of music. Self-consistency is a sine qua non of every work of art. And because of that, the artist, to a certain extent, is just along for the ride. So today, I’m going to call this stuff fusion. (Yeah, there’s an F word for you.) There’s everything in the pot, and though you’ll be able to tell what I’ve loved over the years (classical , rock, jazz, world, electronica, etc), you’ll have to wonder what weird brain filter was in effect when these pieces were created. I’m happy wondering myself.