brettworks

Composing is a kind of cobbling together of disparate things to make a coherent whole, but in music production especially we want to dwell among those disparate things for as long as possible and not obsess over when and where coherence will emerge. (It always does if you stick around long enough.) The more disparate our things are the better, because we aim for maximum idea generation, electric contrast, and optionality before the music congeals into a finished form. One way to spur ideas is to think of music-in-progress as a Frankensteinian object. Invention as Mary Shelley noted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos. So try out ad hoc and crazy combinations of sounds to hear what surprises and compels: copy the chords to trigger many different sounds, swap out the drums one by one until you have a Frankenkit that bears no relation to what it was, fill out the high frequency spectrum with pointilistic bits, effect and re-sample the foreground to create a textured composite ambiance to weave back into the background. Work fast, withhold judgment, and be adventurous in cobbling and connecting things together to invent out of chaos, to make unfashioned creatures, but half made up. A piece of music is like a person: each has a presence, thus strangely are our souls constructed.