Monday 8 September 2008

The end, part one

Part one of this project is now done, if not quite dusted. I've written and recorded the basics of over twenty new songs, and the next step after mixing will be to release them, which I don't think is going to happen in any conventional sense - these songs are not going online, at least not at the moment. If anyone wants to hear them now they are welcome to email me (click here for the address) and I'll send them a CD with as many songs as are ready at that time in whatever state they are in. I'll do this until I run out of blank CDs.

Beyond that my plan is to print 224 CDs, which will be left around London (and hopefully in other cities around the world) to be discovered by whoever discovers them. Each CD will have a quote from one of the songs printed on the front, and this will link in some way to the location it gets left/hidden in.

I'm doing it this way for a few reasons, one of which is that I think music is getting too easy. It's great in some ways that most of us can now download any song at any time to listen to whenever we feel like it, but in other ways I think this just makes us think of music as disposable and a little meaningless. Why pay any deep attention to one particular piece of music when there are millions more that you can listen to? It might sound precious, but I want these songs to be something more than that to the people who hear them, because they're more than that to me.

I also want to have fun with it, I want to do something that makes people curious, and the hiding CDs plan ties in with the theme of unreality that runs through a lot of the songs. I've also been influenced by the Paul Auster book I was reading, the idea of the film-maker who destroys his own work before anyone can see it. I'm not willing to go that far (yet), but I do like the idea of scarcity in an age where we expect everything to be available to us whenever we want it.

One CD (with the 11 songs that I've mixed so far) has already been hidden away outside London thanks to my friend Seb. Kudos to anyone who finds it, all I'll say is that it's in some woods...

Anyway, for now, it's over and out.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

how intriguing!