I’m doing a solo set of some of the songs from this finally-now-done album today, Wed., January 8th around 6:30pm at the Kate Werble Gallery (83 Vandam St., NYC), as part of the closing party for the artist Beth Campbell's own solo show, How Do You Know I Am Not A Liar, (Beth’s show runs through this Friday, 1/10/20). I went on&on the other day HERE about the first time I saw Beth’s work, a piece called House: (A Standardized Affectation for Telepresence) about 20 years ago. It was amazing.
So a bit about my dumb art ideas, how I got to know Beth, originals vs copies, and our still-coming-together plan to collaborate related to this new album…:
Over those last 20 or so years then, since I’d begun thinking more about the art (and I guess, conceptual) end of making music, and into the making of this record (construction begun 2010), I had been thinking a lot about the idea of originals vs copies, for a bunch of reasons (among them the way that, going into this century, practically speaking esp. for musicians, the internet inverted distribution, of say music/news/press etc., where instead of getting copies to people, you now brought people to you to make their own ‘copies'. A given now so mundane it’s invisible but 20 years ago was a slow-dawning revelation for me).
(I also have a much broader theory (any time I soberly begin to trot out one of my theories, run. But here you are…) that in part, at an animal level, what we’re wired to work on, evolutionarily, is patterns (all of these things I see are trees and so are ’safe') and repetition, esp. with variations (these are discernibly human faces, as opposed to say owls, but with variation that makes some known & identifiable & important to me) but also the interruption to the pattern (spotting the predator in the backdrop of bushes, say) etc. etc. And I think this continued unfurling and variation and digression from patterns is a large part of what works for us in art. So like Warhol’s repeated silkscreens that are the same image varied only by color but also the "boiled-down to just verses & chorus" cycling that modern popular song has evolved to.)
But I’d also been thinking about the ‘originals vs copies’ thing because in trad. visual/installation arts etc. there’s usually an actual singular physical work of art that, if everything goes swimmingly from a show (the equivalent in music of releasing a record), the piece is sold, the original, and the artist is only left with photos, documentation, etc., i.e. copies. A problem, to the extent that it is a problem (I think so) that artists have always had to deal with (see early 20th c. Picassos et al having to document sold paintings w/ photos taken before the original was shipped off to a buyer etc.).
Whereas with music, it’s ALL copies, there seemingly is no original - seemingly. I work on the album here at home, in Logic, Apple’s recording platform. When a song is done, Logic renders what it calls a ‘bounce’, a stereo copy of the one-to-two-hundred-track Logic ‘project’ I’ve been working on the song in. I make copies of all that for back-up, send that file (possibly the ‘original’ bounce file from Logic but that’s almost meaningless) to mastering, they import that, change eq, levels etc., spit out another copy (this one altered, for the better, by mastering). That is sent to the label, who send out copies/files to manufacturing where other copies are rendered from that copy-of-a-copy-of-a-etc. to press vinyl etc., itself a copy-upon-copies etc.
Meanwhile, before all that copying, I’ve been sitting in the room off the kitchen, every night, working on…something. Something that definitely isn’t a copy of anything. And I came to see/think of that, the whole thing, the whole effort, as the “original”: the song in it’s finished “original” form in Logic on that exact hard drive over there [pointing to desk], sure, but I realized what I was making was really this dedicated room, the whole thing, full of the books I read (about art partly) that informed the lyrics (and provided nifty, attractive and inexpensive acoustic diffusion in the “studio”), the instruments I bought/used to record, the mic’s, the acoustic panels I handmade and suspended from the ceiling (and that probably gave me myeloma doing so - ha), the preamps that took hours-to-weeks of research to get etc., etc….all that etc. to build this weird walk-in music-box of a room that when you fired it up and walked up to & tapped the space bar, would generate this song, there in that room and that room only, that existed nowhere else, i.e. the ”original”. That’s what I’d been working on. And any files I sent off for manufacturing were pretty much equivalent to museum-giftshop postcards of the real piece here in the house.
So - and trying to make an already-too-long story manageably shorter here - when I was winding up what was sorta v.1 of the album about 5 years ago, I had the notion of putting on a show, some sorta art show, going into all the various ‘copies vs originals’ things, the focus of which would be the ‘original’ - the 15-song music-box of a studio, cut out of our house, the walls/sheetrock, the bookshelves etc., (sorta Gordon Matta-Clark-style but intact so really...Beth Campbell-style!) all the equipment (guitars, hundreds of pedals on the floor), the hard drives with all backup & variations of all the hundreds upon hundreds of versions of songs over 10 years etc. etc. All for sale, gallery-style, as the original, leaving me, like most visual artists, with just the copies (documentation) of the final rendered versions, which I’d be only too happy about.
So to that end, I wrote to Beth, out of the blue, to see if she had any remote possible interest in doing something related to that (I had originally thought that the idea of her doing another House sorta thing, i.e. some sort of copy of my studio/room, and found the notion that the first copy of the “album”, in this digital day, would be an entirely analog ‘real’ one, to be hilarious (if to me only)). Super flatteringly, Beth replied, we got together and talked about stuff and even off-the-cuff her thoughts on the whole thing were better than the simple room copy I was first picturing.
Then a couple things happened, one is I got sick and was sorta outta commission for a couple years and then really only had the motivation to work on finishing the most-dread music itself. And the other is that around the same time, I think, Wu Tang Clan did their now-famous ‘only one copy of the record’ conceptual piece, which was just so great, also inevitable and I admit I was fervently envious for quite a while, partially in that I felt trapped, mundanely stuck doing the grueling music part of a dumb rock record while other good ideas were perpetually put on hold (if you don’t know the story of Wu Tang’s "one copy of the album” and who bought it, it’s very worth googling).
(It’s also worth noting, I guess, that conceptually, Wu Tang’s idea is slightly different - they made an album of which they sold the only generated copy, keeping the original for themselves, I’m looking at putting up (and sure, ideally selling,) the original and all its related files etc., leaving me with just the copy. A distinction that might fly in the art world (might) but I could already foresee I’d be explaining for the next millennium (and prob. at length, like this) in the indie rock world, understandably. So that took the remaining wind of my whatevers.
But now, with the record done and stuff, Beth was back in touch with a SUPER cool idea, related to what she does so well (as well as to ‘copies/orig’ and to this record), which I’m just super excited about and so..more on that later in the year, I guess!
This, prob. longest post I’ve made on-site yet hopefully gives a little background on what’s also been going on in part the last few years too, as the band has just completed its 30th anniversrary (2019), and also to say, hopefully see you at tonight’s show w/ Beth’s show (see above).
Thanks, single reader who made it this far, as always.