Timblr Exile

21 Again

Last Saturday I was here. It’s my magic hill, home of the Cherhill white horse and Lansdowne Monument http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lansdowne_Monument. In my late teens/early 20s I wandered up here almost daily and I could re-taste every drop of that same flavour. It all came back: wild and pure dreams of embodied sound-music, gestural performance machines, travels far and wide.

The last few months have been reflection zone. I’ve not really known where next and with so many more considerations than I had 10 years ago there are many more trees and a lot less wood. Going up my magic hill was fresh and vivid insight. On one hand I’ve done so much of what I dreamt and on the other I’ve been so distracted from it. 

I’m still transfixed by the idea of the ultimate music machine for making the ultimate music. Real, tangible, morphy, shapely, contoured and textural sound touched by skin. My mind quite singly wants to go there… and I don’t think permanent confusion will be evaded until I at least try.

So for now I’m 21 again… following this unadulterated dream. All other professional considerations can take their back seat until I’ve done this thing. Maybe it just needs 6 months (I’m quite far already)… maybe it will need 2 years or more. Either way the various distractions of doing gigs, releasing music or software, being someone etc can all wait patiently.

Permanent confusion

So the solution to the conundrum of how to be a musician and a developer remains elusive. Over the past few years I’ve tried a few approaches… from being completely anal and business minded about things (so dry… so graspy… so… soulless) to being completely chaotic and letting the process do the talking (nothing ever gets finished). I’ve learned the places that my mind tends to end up pretty well but there’s still no solution… maybe that’s the solution… my Koan.

Nonetheless as I slide down from the initial dream of the music growing machine into a fractally unfolding pit of complexity, created in response to just how dull it is to sit behind the brushed aluminium portal dragging boxes around, I realise I still have a pretty pure dream which hasn’t left me for a very long time… to make the ultimate instrument for writing and performing tracks in the way you might pick up a guitar, dick around and remember what you did in a natural alloy of muscle memory, endorphines and well-trodden neural pathways.

It seems I might have to drop the ‘ultimate’, but somehow it seems that dropping the ultimate might be the key to realisation. After all what I think this machine is going to be is never going to reflect what it is, only push my me in a direction which may or may not end up being similar to what I think it is now.

Can’t wait to get back out there playing though… really can’t… need some real body music.