Monat: Juni 2023

2022/2023 Bandwork Recap

Summer 2022 – Discontinuation of „Night Voc“

October 2022 – Lost Without Band formed at Music School Linz

April 2023 – Rehearsals for the realization of the concept album „Life and Death of a Dream“ start

2023 – continuous solo experiments

November 2023 – planning EP with Lost Without

2024 – Premiering Life and Death of a Dream in concert

Night Voc

Among my reasons for not continuing within this project was that the songs I am writing usually ask for a variety of different genres, in short I was writing songs for 4, possibly 5 different bands. Compromising meant to realize all songs half-heartedly, stripping them from their concept and context. My interest in a purely modern Indie Rock Project grew, as well as my interest to found a more progressive, open art rock group. As a band, we did not manage to embrace either style fully and give up on at least half of the catalogue we had already established. Eventually the differences in vision caused us to split.

play w yourself

After seperating from the band I had worked with for 5 years, I felt sad and lost. The prospect of stepping up to become a band leader to the type of project I envisioned was too scary to face at the time, as I didn’t have much confidence in my abilities. I found creating an album completely on my own to be the ideal way to bridge the gap, where I got to be completely free of genre and marketing expectations, only realizing what I found within myself and understanding the level of my skills. Not knowing what I wasn’t doing well turned out to be scarier than knowing.

Lost Without and Prog Rock Project

I am currently singing and songwriting in two bands that represent exactly my main fields of interest. While Lost Without is a straight forward Indie Rock Project with other young musicians who are ambitious and learning, the Prog Rock Band is an ambitious conceptual project, bringing together different, very skilled and unique musicians to create something out of the ordinary. My guitar skills are too weak for this one, but so far the songwriting and singing is coming together nicely with the input of the rest of the band. I also still pursue my solo work as a way to deal with ideas that are not the right fit for either Group and with this I find myself fully occupied.

Education

Coming from an intuitive approach to making music, learning theory at music school really expanded my horizon in songwriting, arrangement as well as communication with other band members. I also profit from practical input in songwriting and arrangement.

Additionally, studying in the master of timebased media provides me with the insight I need to reimagine and contextualize my work in a deeper way. I always find myself looking for a new path to take, but when I lack the ideas it’s frustrating. As much as striving for musical professionalism takes away from my sense of my own perceived inventiveness (an important motivator), dealing with transmedia art feeds back into it. I am enjoying this dynamic.

Future

A band is a team, the team is comprised of individuals. There is no way to control what happens, but that is part of the appeal. Working alone really showed me how much I love working with others, while it also gave me solid ground to fall back to and a place to experience complete artistic freedom. Whatever happens, I’m hoping to continue expanding my horizon.

The story of an hour x Alien (1979)

This is an exercise for my first semester in the Master of Timebased Media.

I chose to work with a short story by Kate Chopin: The story of an hour.

It’s about a woman with a heart weakness who is told that her husband passed away. She cries among relatives and then withdraws to her room where she begins to ponder on the implications of her husbands untimely death. Although he had loved her very much and she knows she will be grieving him more once she sees his body, there is a joy that comes upon her – the joy of freedom. As she realizes that the years to come belonged entirely to her and she embraces this new chapter of her life with all her heart, it unfortunately gives in – she dies of heart failure.

To create a sound from this story, I put myself in her position and performed a vocal improvisation based on the feelings I was experiencing. I also read part of the story in the beginning to get into the mood. In the spirit of musical improvisation practice I added three layers of first take acoustic guitar improvisations, one layer of flute and one layer of maracas, aiming to accompany the vocals and react to different aspects of the improvisation.

While working on the murmuring task I accidentally created something that sounded like an alien, so I murmured over this scene from the movie Alien (1979). When I importet the files into Premiere I got curious to see what would happen if I added my soundtrack from the story to this completely unrelated scene from Alien and was pleasantly surprised how much these two pieces of media work together to create something completely new. Even though the only connection between them is death.

Thoughts on Music in transmedia art

A transmedia approach towards music

„In the best case, this concept guarantees the greatest possible freedom beyond rigid boundaries of media, genres or disciplines.“

Wherever boundaries are accepted and reinforced, artistic monotony becomes a frightful possibility. Within music alone, the rigid genrefication meant to ease the discovery of what’s pleasurable endangers the worth of art which lies beyond pleasure. Whoever has attempted to master any skill is no stranger to that. Within art, we separate works according to form, content and relevance. At what point do we begin to take away from each of these properties by locking them with others of their kind? Polarization appears to have some sort of underlying spectrum, from useful / connective over product-oriented to disconnected. Transmedia art as a discipline is dedicated to an existence in between and misplaced. It seems impossible to grasp the essence of a person by viewing their existence through a variety of situations – how many does it take to perceive the transcendental? Yet, transcendence may not be achieved through what is but rather through what keeps being done.

„It is important to grasp each medium in the spectrum and history of its identity. Through such a practice – precise analyses instead of ‘anything goes’ – the best forms of expression and translation for the respective contents can be developed.“

Therefore, each aspect of live performance, music and the album as medium requires to be thoroughly examined to discover what has been lost in translation and make an informed decision on how to go about remixing and reintegrating them into a modern artistic context.

Music as a medium

What makes this undertaking so complex is that music as a medium appears in many more diverse forms than the static waveform. The phenomenon “music” exists across a plethora of contexts:

  • Musical Storytelling (being the oldest form)
  • Live Performance (the context in which it appears most classically)
  • Instrumentation (arrangement choices dictating the relevance of a piece)
  • Recordings (a context developing parallel to technical development in the field, but usually associated with a single, ep or album format)
  • Cultural (music is born out of and intensifies / creates cultural movements as an expression of shared experiences)
  • Artistic (there is an extended history of modern artists working with or being musicians, using instruments within their art or designing covers for albums)
  • Audience (their availability and responsibility influences the mutual experience)
  • Social (the musician is expected to stage their identity (or have it staged for them), through cross platform content creation; music can help others stage their identity)

Furthermore, there are already established methods for presenting certain art forms with music:

  • Music Video
  • Live performances at vernissage
  • Visuals at concerts
  • Reading and live music

While these are valid ways of connecting the art forms, it is arguable whether these constitute as the “best forms of expression and translation for the respective contents” – this has to be decided for the respective artwork and situation. Nevertheless, following conventions blindly is not a part of my personal definition of interesting art which serves as my main motivation to challenge my blindness in the matter.

Musical Storytelling

Music relays information. To tell a good story means relaying the information that is wanting to be understood in a memorable, engaging manner. It is challenging to memorize a short story word by word – summarized in rhythmical and possibly melodic form, it comes more easily. The mind finds rhythm in every sound, even in image. The passing of time itself induces a perceived rhythm of the experiences filling it. There is rhythm to a story, to the ways it expresses itself, which does not have to be accompanied, but, in theory, could be accompanied by anything suited to move or be moved. An artwork which has once existed in this way, will not stop moving as long as it has not been forgotten. That is the power of storytelling.

  • Concept albums

Contrary to the convention of letting the song tell its own story and filling an album with an outwardly not fully related collection of them, musicians sometimes choose to conceptualize and present a story within the course of an album. When and why did that first come about? Why did the prog movement cause such a conglomeration of them to make it into pop culture? What are the implications of choosing the album as the primary output of the message (f.e. The Wall Album vs Movie)?

About choice in media

How do you choose the best media for a message? What thoughts go into choosing a media? For me it tends to be the format that comes most naturally.

If cross media translations are possible, the choice of making an album does not weigh much more than choosing to write a book, a graphic novel or making a short movie.

Oftentimes, it is not the content which dictates the form, but rather the people involved and the skills they have. The work is tuned to the supposed reception by an audience. Some audiences are expected to be educated and do some work of their own to listen when hearing, to grasp when watching, to transcend when touching. The less work the audience is expected to do to understand, the more forward and skillful the execution of an idea needs to be in order to reach them nonetheless. This spectrum is three dimensional, too – for a skillful execution does not necessarily equate high quality, nor does it equate a general positive reception.