My friend Dan Haab did a remix for the first song I posted on this blog. Unfortunately when I was trying to send him the individual tracks I did something really stupid in Ableton, and the upshot is he only really had the guitar tracks to work with. So he transformed the guitars into distant sonic glaciers, and reimagined everything else, adding some appealing Gas-like atmospherics. All of this is pretty fantastic. One of my favorite cards in the Oblique Strategies set suggests to remove whatever you feel is most important about the piece. Creative destruction creates room for richer growth.
César Aira’s novel An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter wrestles with the sort of questions facing an artist in an alien and unfamiliar environment: What is the best way to render this environment intelligible? What does one perspective eliminate from another perspective? How much detail can be sacrificed before there is a critical loss to the total picture? Can an artist do justice to his/her subject material, and simultaneously fulfill the demand of a fickle marketplace?
As the digital world accelerates social transformations everything is thrown into crisis (opportunity and danger); no looking back.
Tags: avicenna, literature, mp3s