Forgery League

There is a sort of ‘tyranny of originality’ in this society.

The way I see it, there’s no dishonor in doing something that’s been done before. The great early epics and myths came about through telling and retelling, and evolved over time - probably becoming more resonant with their audiences all the while. Vernacular building ‘architecture’ works because its patterns contain the accumulated wisdom of generations.

Culture doesn’t grow through everyone holing up in bunkers and doing everything they can to avoid repeating themselves, or anyone else. It grows by people building on one another’s work, taking existing ideas and using them to new ends.

(All the same, I run into these kinds of internal objections a lot, for example, when I do music - crap, I don’t want it to sound too much like (whatever). One of the ways I’m getting around it is through things like the Song-A-Day? project - challenging myself to work fast, so as to shut up a lot of those internal censors.)

J wrote a while back about ‘genius’ and how elevating someone (van Gogh was his example) to the level of genius subtly forbids everyone else from participating. “Oh, you can’t be an artist! You’re not a genius like him!” ...bollocks, and too widespread an attitude altogether.

In contrast, Brian Eno came up with the idea of “scenius”:

“I was fed up with the old art-history idea of genius - the notion that gifted individuals turn up out of nowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow. I became (and still am) more and more convinced that the important changes in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. I call this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’. It is the communal form of the concept of genius.”
— from a letter to Dave Stewart, in A Year With Swollen Appendices

(The term ‘tyranny of originality’ is used sometimes in business to refer to what’s called the “Not Invented Here” syndrome.)

I figured it was time I wrote some freakin’ music. To that end I’ve started a “song-a-day” project (inspired by a similar thing I saw on someone’s web site).

Ground rules: A piece of about a minute in length, every day; more, if time allows. Anything goes, from pop song to noise collage. If unable to make quota, finish a song, or get to the studio, for that matter, don’t sweat it. Also, rehearsing or jamming with other musicians counts as points toward Song-a-day quota.

What I hope to do is combine the best things from all the other methods of composing that I’ve used in the past. In particular, I’m thinking of the Frequent Mutilations I did at the radio station where I volunteered - hour-long soundscapes for a weekly program; I was one of about five regular contributors. The combination of deadline, limited sound sources (I had next to no instruments and effects; my chief weapons were DAT feedback, tape delay, hand-spliced loops and playing things at half- and quarter-speed) and limited time in a dedicated environment (four-hour blocks reserved in the production studio) seemed to be a real boost for my resourcefulness. Yeah, there were plenty of pretty dull moments in my Mutes, but there were enough cool bits that I compiled a CD of ‘em.

Doing a song every day means I have to work fast, and toss out the rules I tend to set myself otherwise - no recognizable samples, synth patches must be original-sounding, avoid clichés at all costs, and so forth. It also just plain gets me off my duff and writing. Scouring my piles of field recordings, my MP3 collection, my vinyl, for sounds to use. Browsing through the Cubase plugins for things I haven’t yet tried. Sounding out song melodies the way I used to do, singing nonsense words as placeholders and then forming them into something more cohesive. Probably most important: Working in broad strokes and leaving the finicky detail work for later.