brettworks

(Photo: Namroud Gorguis)

When you’re working on a piece of music that feels like it isn’t going anywhere, turn it into an art project. Get conceptual with it: embrace not going anywhere, or explore the nature of goings and destinations. Turning it into an art project changes our focus from the pressure of having to make an artful thing to the pleasure of discovering the concepts that guide our making processes. In other words, an art project proposes the going as the destination. “The idea” Sol LeWitt once said, “becomes a machine that makes the art.” To find ideas pay attention to what you might have ignored in work that isn’t going anywhere: amplify the music’s shortcomings, turn fragments into panoramas, treat a single gesture as the source of everything that will happen. Turning a track into an art project reframes the compositional-production game in that when we’re free from having to be expressive we empower our works to be expression machines.