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THURSDAY 27 DECEMBER
This piece is no good really and I'll probably delete it fairly soon. I have already started deleting some of my older Bandcamp albums here. It's always odd - immediately after making a piece of music I never realise how bad the bad ones are or how good the good ones are. It needs time. It needs surprise.
When I've forgotten what any particular album sounds like - that is the time to play it. Yes even in this world of streaming and free downloads I get embarrassed at the thought of people downloading and hearing some of my shittier stuff. And for example if you are one of the people who downloaded my second piano sonata I humbly apologise. In my head, when I pressed "export as WAV", it sounded terrific.
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And I refused to believe the evidence of my own ears until quite recently. I have half a mind to start my own Discogs page. Apparently it is very naff to do your own Discogs page - just as it is naff to do your own Wikipedia page or to review your own stuff on Amazon. You should leave these things to be done by your diehard fans. Ha - there's a thought.
If I don't do it then who the fuck will ? But it's all such a lot of work. And everything that has been done is always about people who are complete crap and you know that History will erase them from the picture one day. All the networking only works in the very short term. It skews things a lot - and people can be swayed into thinking it is all permanent.
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When people make music I often wonder what they want from it. The money - to make a living from it. The fame - to be liked by a lot of people and to feel affirmed. Many love playing in front of people. Many love the social side of being in a scene - it's like being a regular at the local golf club. For the lost people - they make music just to make music - to be lost in the moment of making music.
It is never over - never out of the system. As soon as one is done - it's on with the next one. If a muso has time to tweak her Discogs page then I don't think she's the kind of obsessive musician I'm talking about. If she's doing it for money or fame - again, ditto. I think most of the best music has been made for money and fame. Tamla Motown. David Bowie. The good stuff. The shit stuff - the lazy drones and tiresome noise - can't be excused just because they're made for divine reasons. Most of the music made by obsessives like myself is very selfish.
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I'm designing a flat that means a lot to me - full of me me me - and I am mad about it - its crazy purple ceiling and the whitewashed windows and the adorable snakes loose on the rough floorboards. But without the money and the fame and the gigs and the joy of the social scene all I am doing is making a cosy coffin.
That all sounds horribly teenage and melodramatic and actually I am having a ball - this is the closest to happiness I know - when I'm with others I want to be alone - when I'm doing the dishes I want to be making music - when I'm doing anything that isn't making music, I want to be making music - when I am on my deathbed I will want to be making music - incredibly I will think of pages like this with their little columns of pictures/titles/albums and they will be the only things that won't be a huge disappointment - and I don't want to leave too many shit ones - which is why this album will be deleted fairly soon - I just sat and, really, what I did was unforgivable - but in the moments that I did it I was timeless and complete like being Fred West or Rosemary or a guard in a gulag taking a prisoner into the snowy pine woods to be shot.
(January 10th - the great contrabassist Gregg Skloff has today remixed and vastly improved this piece of music and you can hear it here -
soundcloud.com/gregg-skloff/remix-of-sonja-berlin-jones
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released December 27, 2012
