It’s the last week of August and I’m back in Maine for a little under a week after an amazing weekend working with Raymond Pinto at Jonah Bokaer’s Hudson Eye fest.
Today I’m thinking about a post that my student Elijah made, after a lesson. It pertains to something we talked about, and a note that one of us made in our shared google doc (I maintain shared google docs with all of my students, where we collect ideas and take notes on our conversations).
It’s cool to see that things we’re talking about can get labeled as important.
This is connected to something that songwriter Damon Smith said in the workshop we did with him last spring:
I’d like to go back to the full conversation I had with Elijah and Riley and edit some shorts/videos out from it; there are some real gems there. But this is a major point.
In any sonic creative process which uses recording, it’s likely that some sounds we’re working with are placeholders. Sometimes we know that they’re placeholders at the beginning, and we forget. Other times, we really like the idea at first, but as we work on the track more and more, it starts to stick out from everything else.
When I was working on my first record, Torso, I’d spend months and months agonizing over small details of the music. I was attached to my placeholders without recognizing them as placeholders. I put in hours and hours and hours to solve “problems” around integrating the placeholder into the larger piece of music. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it just left tracks feeling, to my ears, clunky.
I think it’s a sign of maturity to be able to prune works-in-progress like gardeners prune plants. It’s not that the placeholder idea is bad; it’s that it’s served its role. It held the place as we built a stronger whole around it.
I titled this post ‘deletion’ as a sort of provocation. Shortly after I pointed this out to Elijah in our conversation, I tried to emphasize that it’s really not a punitive measure against the material. When we remove a sound from the whole, or we decide to change a melody, we can actually do so from a place of gratitude. Removing the scaffold from a building post-construction doesn’t mean that the scaffold is bad. And these odd sounds differ from scaffolds in that, if we want to, we can always bring them back as seeds for the next project.
There’s a video of David Lynch that frequently comes up on my various feeds where he talks about the editing process, especially (I believe) in relation to Mulholland Drive. He talks about adding a lot, and then clearing lots of space, and discovering new possibilities as a result of clearing that space. This back-and-forth process can be a useful way to open up new possibilities for an artwork.
Stopping here for now.
Create Interesting Music is opening up admissions for its Fall 2025 cohort on Tuesday, September 2nd. If you’re interested in joining the program, or know somebody that might be, please send an email to createinterestingmusic@gmail.com and we’ll be in touch. Here’s a short video talking about the program.
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