The Inevitable String of Failure

Throughout my time of making music, I have come up with numerous hair brained ideas that I thought were fantastic, but ultimately did not come to fruitition. Chances are most artists have these crazy ideas floating around, but we are mostly to scared to tell people about them. I would safely bet that they are just as crazy as the ideas that I am about to type about here.

My first crazy idea came a few years ago when I was trying to find new and creative ways to make music. At the time I was beginning to stumble upon different forms of algorithmic music and I thought making an algorithmic album would be fun. For those who do not know what algorithmic music is, it is essentially music created by the computer from some parameters set by the user. The artist does not really create the music and the results are largely random each time.

While this seemed like a good idea at the time, the implementation of the idea was extremely difficult. I really could not develop anything beyond crazy noise.

My second crazy idea was to develop an art show where I showcased fractal artwork that I dabbled in while playing live music to the fractals. Again, while this idea sounded really cool, the actual execution was hard. As I began to create more and more fractal artwork I found that the costs of printing art for display was extremely expensive. When I initially researched it, the costs were around $100.00 per piece.

The third crazy idea was to develop my livepa act into a storytelling session. If any of you out there reading this are familiar with livepa shows or electronic music events, video and visuals are a common theme. The thing that was bothering me at the time however is that no matter where you seem to go the visuals are largely the same; abstract, random images that randomly or partially sync to the music.

My idea was to develop something with a little more meaning, where the music and the visuals were more closely connected and had direction. What I planned on doing was developing a shadow puppetry show where the music told a story. After again researching these ideas the difficulties of telling a story like this live without the feel of it being pre-recorded was extremely difficult. If I planned on doing live visuals and music then it would take many people to successfully execute the project. On the other if either the music or visuals were pre-recorded then the show would lose its live feel and ability for improvisation.

That brings us up to our forth and final crazy project. This one is actually still on my to do list, but we will see if this ever happens.....

This final project was initially designed to be a computer animated movie that chronicled the diary entries of a soldier in a future war. In this story no one knew the identity of the solder or which side he was on. The war would be one that had no inherent good or evil and the reader in this case would be able to take sides with either aprty of the war. To what this topic is exactly I don't know. (Ideas would be great.)

As the years sort of rolled by the idea has slightly changed. I have now modified it into a blog book format where the journal entries are posted on a blog and audio clips in the form of podcasts act as supplementals in forms ranging from music, to news broadcasts, to whatever. While this current idea seems a little more feasible, my excitement for the project grows while my realization for the project dwindles.

It seems every time I want to begin it I have another reason to push it off.

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