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Just went through another year's worth of song ideas, which I (like last year) record often in the Mac Photobooth app, just for the sake of accessibility. Here's an inside view of the quirky process. Carpe Diem, L
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(ON VIDEO ABOVE)
i am pretty lo-fi when it comes to recording song ideas.... and if they're not recorded on my phone and added later to an often forgotten-about folder on my computer desktop, then they're often recorded impromptu into the app photo-booth. like many, my being is a cumulation of patterns and habits (seen and un-seen), and thus- i must believe every time i record an idea that i will actually return to it- and finish the composition. reflecting in the last months on how the use of technology has affected my brain's previously singular tendency for retaining and hyper-focusing on musical ideas, and reflecting on days past when my pencil and paper where the totality of recording musical memories... i "flipped" through last year's compositional ideas, which i never typically go back to and review. not only was it sort of embarrassing and funny to see this process, to see myself....the bizarre ego and music's perseverance to exist through it and beyond it... but it also made me churn, again, and chew on the many sonic ideas of 2014, and often returning to the same feeling of discarding them as "unfinished", for the second time. here they briefly are, i kept each clip only 1-3 seconds long for those (all) of us who cannot bare to watch anything that hasn't been polished and designed for utter attention seduction. so the music is not really affectively the point of this short, but the idea of how many pieces begin---to never find their whole place in the sonic world. sound and song is churning through all of us, all of the time. the narrative and frequency is simply our dna. and rosalind franklin knew that. love.  i want to tell You the story of The Pet Blue Fish
The last record I made, WHEN SMART GIRLS DO STUPID THINGS, was, in many ways, a self-parody, an embodiment of my process around failed relationship. The ultimate super-ego character of the record was personified as a Pet Blue Fish. During my process of writing the music for the album I'd wanted, symbolically, to buy a pet blue fish. I'd realized that I needed some practice in how to let something go after it had been "mine", so I arrived with a plan: I was going to get a glass bowl and nothing would be inside it but the Fish and water. I'd name the fish "I Don't Care If You Leave Me." So I could say "Hello, I Don't care If you leave Me" and "I'm going to feed you, I Don't Care If You Leave Me." etc. And then I would feed it (probably overly-much, as my hands are strong and messy, likely moving too fast, spilling the parallelogram-shaped flakes irretrievably into the lukewarm water). One day the Blue Fish would randomly die, and I'd simply flush it down the toilet, and that would be that. No sadness, no attachment. The Blue Fish was going to be a practice on How To Feed Something Too Much and Not Care When It Dies. But I couldn't find the exact right kind of plain blue fish in the pet stores in Barcelona, where I was living. One of the last times I met an ex-boyfriend at a cafe, after uncomfortable, poetically-suspended minutes, after I'd melted into a wooden chair, with gluey tears like sap on my cheeks, unable to drink my latte, or to say anything that bore weight--- I managed to leave, asking him to walk me to the Pet Shop, so I could buy a Blue Fish. For the record, I wrote a simple dialogue of the moment I'd asked the ex-man to walk me to the Pet Store to buy The Blue Fish, as a brief scene in some sort of Film Noire-like movie. I had a few of my favorite Barcelona-residing couples who were in partnerships where each person spoke a different native language read the dialogue, each in their individual mother tongue, but as though they were having a conversation. I wanted to portray how two people can emotionally be apparently so close but nowhere near the other. There is this version where you can listen/buy the track PET BLUE FISH: http://music.lesliehelpert.com/track/the-blue-fish-pet You can buy it for a dollar. & At the top right of this blog post, you can find Marc Friedman's re-mix/version, one of my very favorite musicians: |