latte

yo. i got a latte today, which is out of character. It's always kind of wild when you got a coffee shop and they don't have coffee. I guess espresso counts as coffee.

I have very strange relationship with songwriting as an artform. On one hand, it's the on that I've made the most progress with! Making an album of songs is like actually a thing that I've done!! And I've written a few since then that I think are actually really cool and sort of get across something that I was trying to impart. When I was in high school, I got really invested in learning fingerpicking techniques from folk and emo music I liked. I remember sitting in the hallways at my high school learning 'don't think twice' on the guitar my band director kept in his office. I was really determined. I want to be able to everything I could with the guitar, totally max out what could be done with it on it's own. There's a bunch of videos online of arrangments that people have been able to make this the guitar.

Songwriting is a weird place to be experimental. People mostly just want to enjoy songs. I know I do. That's why I haven't gotten a lot into ambient or noise music. Emo and pop music is a lot better, just because it has an immediate effect. I'm not really interested in writing music if it isn't going to - or at least, if it isn't meant - to evoke that reaction. Like, what's the point? I want to create moments like the drop in Hard by Sophie, the breakdown of In SeeYouSpaceCowby's Misinterpreting Constellations, , or the last chorus in Elliot Smith's Ballad of Big Nothing. I guess the point I'm getting to hear is that for me the point of music is to evoke a strong catharsis.

Conceptually, there's certainly something interesting about ambient music, since the idea that it could be background music, that it doesn't demand your full attention is a part of the point. It invites you to see it as less something that could be something that you live with and immerse yourself in, rather than demanding everything from you like a stage play. Ambient isn't physical in the way that rock and pop music is. It's temporal and heady, like IDM. It doesn't ask as much of the listener - it doesn't inspire much, if any, movement. You're just supposed to listen and be impressed by the rhythems, I guess.

I love pop music and rock music, but that shit does not love me. As of now, my skillset is a lot more oriented towards folk music. AJJ type shit, essentially. I think I've tried to write songs like them in the past, and it's a recipe for disaster tbh. I guess trying to evoke the sad catharsis is sort of tricky business. You don't want to overdo it, otherwise it gets grating and sappy. It's easy to forget that when all your favorite bands are talking about how sad they are all the time, when that's part of why you love them so much. But when I did it myself, it didn't sit right.

not sure why i'm writing about music / there's not much to write about now. but hey, that's voidtext for you. I didn't make any promises. It's like an open mic where you didn't prepare an act, so you just tell the audience the whimsical story of how you came to be there and how such a strange situation possibly could have came to be.

Otherwise, the reading's been a little all over the place. Halfway through the Bob Dylan Biography, also reading Anthony Bordain's big book Kitchen Confidential. I just started Walter Kauffamn's book on Nietzsche, I'm think I might try get though a lot of his stuff this year.