AK wrote:I dunno if you have ever had that, 'in the zone' thing? Like you get so absorbed in the creative moment that you are oblivious to everything, you glance at the clock and you realise that like 4hrs have just passed in the last 10 minutes. Software stole that from me and it took a lot of my creativity with it. I think if you feel like you have lost something, its important to look at all areas of your approach and set up, it might not be as drastic as mine where Im starting again from the ground up but if you know how youd rather be working, you can focus on removing the things that are getting in the way.
I think this is quite significant. (thought I'd take a break from just talking into thin air and respond properly to other people thoughts.. y'know, like conversation I think it's called?
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yeah. anyways. For me, this is quite crucial... I started using the artist name Diffuse, cos I like this concept. You could call it dissapearing, but also it's kind of like completing a circuit and you're part of a bigger machine humming away. No way to describe it without sounding corny, and in many ways trying to describe it takes it out of that connectivity.
In some ways I've grown to accept the human limitations in making music... I don't think you'll ever fully comprehend the full weight of a piece as it's "creator"... I think artists are humans too, and personally I find it hard to accept that an artist is responsible for every molecule of goodness perceived in their work. (Although I think you should strive to find methods that are conducive to good crceative work.)
I've had some reasonbly interesting results from pushing myself across sleep patterns and just jumping head first into making music. I can get kinda lost in the process, in a way that I find productive.
I have always been fascinated by other musicians, and their methods. It is really crucial, the space that you develop for allowing your music to grow. I like this excert from an interview with Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel who's last album is a majestic surreal tapestry of human experience. Lyrically and musically astonishing, gripping, alive, haunting.
"Pitchfork: Does your music stem from dreams and visions sometimes?
Jeff: Yes. I spend a lot of time practicing active imagination before I go to sleep. What I'm feeling will manifest as images through active imagination. And then I go to sleep and those play out even more in my dreams.
Pitchfork: What is "active imagination"?
Jeff: It's a Carl Jung term. It's sort of staying in that place between sleeping and waking. Just allowing your mind to completely begin to flow with images. Allowing it to become whatever it becomes. You know, you go to bed filled with worries and thoughts, caught up in that everyday kind of thing. With this, you try to concentrate on what you think is really important, or some type of interesting or mysterious image, and then allow your imagination to become like a stream. You can let the stream go, and just observe it to see what happens.
I've always been interested in recording other people's dreams. A lot of people are. You heard the montage piece. I'm trying to create a dream world with the montage. It's like when you look at a Dada or surrealist montage-- I just love taking fragments from everyday reality and recombining them. Everything in the natural world is so amazing, but because we're used to seeing it in one way we take it for granted. We can see an anthill or a roach or a flower or anything, but we have this frame where our mind recognizes an anthill and then moves on, without taking the opportunity to have the sense of awe that we could have if we really looked at it. The montage is about taking pieces of reality and rearranging them-- creating new frames to make you have to stop and look at things in a fresh way. It's basically taking pieces of everyday reality and rearranging them to show people the magic that is inherent in all of these things already.
Pitchfork: Is this reframing process something you use in your songwriting in general? Do the songs come out of fragments?
Jeff: Yeah, usually I create tunes that are fragmented. I think the biggest obstacle for people with their creativity is that they feel they have to sit down and create this finished, polished product. Especially nowadays, it's so easy to have a library of two thousand CDs, books and records. So many things. We're used to having all of these finished works of art in our life that seem to arise out of nothing. I think that so much of the creative process is a fragmentary one, and then it's about just allowing your intuition to put it together for you. It's funny how you create something and you think you're going in a million different directions, and then the thing you end up with is the thing that you wanted to create your whole life, but you're just as surprised by it as anybody else.
Pitchfork: The songs start out fragmented-- do they still feel fragmented at the end?
Jeff: No, typically there are little fragments of specific words and images swimming around in my mind, and then at some point, I'll sit down with the guitar and everything will fall into place. It's like your brain is a drain with a bunch of words and images dropping into it, swirling around. The drain is stopped up, but you can feel these things dropping into it. Then at some point, someone comes along and pulls the plug out of the drain and everything goes [loud slurping, sucking noise] and comes together in the song.
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