There is the wider point of creativity always being a self portait in some way .. that's why I like randomness and free improvistions and chance and accident - even then, the you of 'you' shines through. Is life inescapably solipsistic?
Be hard to argue against that as the special pleading arguments are endless.
The sounds just seem to fly out of my hands!
The cosmos is using me to communicate with the earth - I'm pretty sure of that - otherwise, these notes would shoot up and away like that! But what's an old blues man to do?
I meant the note wouldn't go skywards if there wasn't a cosmic pull. Just as when I was a blues purist once upon a time, all my nights went downwards, somehow. I kind of envy those cats who lay down stone blues, but I can't do that now - I'm in space now - like one of those alien captives ...
I can only play blues, but no one who is into blues would see it as blues [and those who don't know blues wouldn't care]. I just can't stomach playing the familiar, which is what blues thrives on - but it is about how to be fresh and unusual with the familiar. But I always want to do something that I haven't heard before, and I don't want to use the familiar 'scales' and licks and so forth. I suppose, to be truthful, blues was the first form I got into - but I started out with free improvisation - it was always that which intrigued me. And that experience of making sounds completely unguided, without any attempt to be familiar. Blues is so much about feeling, but it uses conventions to point to those feelings. But music isn't the only vehicle for feelings ... music can be devoid of feeling and still be music. Music to me is the manipulation of sound. Blues is a starting place, a killing floor of learning - just as is classical.
One thing I found with self portraits - it is very difficult to make a convincing self-portait - much more difficult than portraying someone else. And that might be because we resist to the point of death getting to know ourselves. 'know Thyself' said the philosopher. But the problem is that we approach a self portrait with the known - that face we see in the shaving mirror every day. But music is more revealing because it is abstract - and because it is unfamiliar in that sense, our selves become more known to us. So we listen and say, Ah that is Johnathan, that is Robert, that is Bill, because each sound we make is ourselves. Cover versions often fail because they start with the known. great music starts with the unknown and keeps it there. But is great music ever captured in a recording? Does it not rather elude recording?
Usually the music comes first, then the title - last minute I try to write a [unheard] lyric. If I can't get a title and a lyric, then I won't upload the music. Similarly with the illustration. The sound, picture and poem all have to be there to form the whole.
lyrics
White sands drift,
through black Space.
Bleak crystals glist,
amidst Plutonian grace,
And Night's slaughter.
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