Naked Process Music

When I was asked to do this Saturday’s NAP post, I was in the middle of putting together some sound design for the play “One Flea Spare”, currently being produced by the Houston independent theatre company Mildred’s Umbrella, so I didn’t really give it much thought. I just said “sure, I’ll do it” and that was that. Fast-forward to a couple of days before it’s due, and now I’m wondering what to write about. I was considering an entire multi-page explicit dissection of British orgy porn, replete with lots of graphic descriptions, pictures for the illiterate, and Venn diagrams, but then I figured that wasn’t really related to music in any way, and frankly I don’t have it in me to deal with embedding images in text. Damn my laziness in learning HTML.

So, because it’s down to the wire and I’ve been lost in the world of sound design for the past several weeks, I figured I’d just write about my method of music-making. Yes, I know, this one’s all about me and I haven’t even posted here before to earn such solipsism, but give me a break, it’s all I can think of. Do you want the Venn diagrams? No. You don’t. And I wouldn’t know where to begin with that anyway.

When I first started making music under the name Charlie Naked, back in 1995, I was using this solo recording project as an aegis under which I could explore whatever musical experimentation I wanted that wasn’t already being covered by some other group I was playing with. Oddly enough, the first recordings I produced were actually kind of a pseudo-Free Jazz type thing, since the Democratic Art and the Defenestration Unit (my two earliest free improv groups) hadn’t come around yet. Of course, years later I realized this was ridiculous, as the whole point (for me anyway) of Free Jazz is the collaboration of musicians, and so one guy overdubbing drums, bass, horns, etc., was kind of inane. After I got over that phase, I just kind of bobbed around, trying this and that, with little direction or sense of unifying concept.

Now finally we get to the point: I finally got a computer and started to learn how to use it to make music. In doing so, over time, I developed a whole concept behind it that eventually became almost a sort of dogmatic approach that I continue to rely on to this day, though I keep it pretty much limited to this one solo home recording project. From early on, I called it Process Music. Which was pretty funny when, a few years later, I discovered Steve Reich and found out he used the same term to mean something totally different. Anyway.

To my mind, the vast majority of recorded music is what I might term Product Music. This is not to denigrate; I’m not referring to “product” in the consumerist sense. Basically what I mean is that the focus of recording the music is the final product. You know what the songs are supposed to sound like, so you record everything to make it sound that way. Certainly there’s a lot of leeway in this, but in the most general sense, you have some idea of what it’s supposed to sound like, and everything you do in the recording process is aimed at realizing this idea. Even when you’re dealing with something like free improvisation, the idea behind recording it is to serve a sort of documentary function: here is the music, as it was that day, in that room, with these musicians.

So maybe you can see where I’m going with this. Process Music is music where the focus of recording is on the process of creating it, and the final result is of secondary importance. I never know what my albums - and I’m just going to call the CDs I produce “albums” throughout, since that’s how they’re conceived - are going to sound like when I first begin one, because what they’re going to sound like is not the point at all. What matters is the question of what I’m going to do to produce that final result. Typically for me a recording project starts with the germ of an idea, and then that must be expanded upon. This germ of an idea is typically a sort of question… “What would it sound like if I made an album using nothing but overdubbed electric guitars, played in nontraditional ways and/or digitally processed beyond recognizability?” Then to hone this idea, I employ a series of “this-or-that” choices. I have a very strong belief in duality in music, and indeed in much of life. Loud/soft, bass/treble, slow/fast, ordered/chaotic: all involve determining or defining two polar focus points and the range of possibilities between them. Again, it’s not a black-or-white view, but rather a recognition that for every attribute or characteristic, there is an opposite (often several opposites, depending on how you look at it), and then there is everything between these two poles as well. So I might say the first decision is “one giant hour-long piece, or multiple parts”, and if I choose multiple parts, the next decision is “long or short”, etc. And as I said, these choices involve not just the two poles, but everything in between, so maybe I’ll say “not an hour long, but not short five-minute pieces either”, in which case I’ll probably end up with three 20-minute pieces, or two half-hour pieces or something like that. I like symmetry.

Generally one decision will lead to another choice to be made, which is how these strings of choices build up momentum, defining the way the piece will ultimately be constructed. Often, these choices are dictated in some degree by whatever defining characteristics the last several albums I recorded have, so if the last several have been hour-long pieces, perhaps I’ll react to that and make the next album a series of shorter pieces. Or maybe I’ve had too many albums where all the pieces are linked conceptually, so I do an album where all the pieces are totally unlinked conceptually. (Except of course, they are conceptually linked by the fact that they were all designed to have nothing to do with one another.) Maybe the last several albums focused on one particular instrument, or one method of construction, so I’ll change it for the next album. This is an essential part of the process, deciding whether or not any new album will follow in a line established by preceding ones, or if it will go in the opposite direction and be a reaction against something I’ve already done. This not only ensures that the process remains interesting to me, but it also keeps the albums from sounding much like one another.

So the whole time I’m making an album, I’m deliberately and consciously making choices as to characteristics, sound qualities, processing, editing, recombination, etc., so that initial question, in this case, as above, our example is “What would it sound like if I made an album using nothing but overdubbed electric guitars, played in nontraditional ways and/or digitally processed beyond recognizability?” becomes more and more complicated: “What would it sound like if I made an album using nothing but overdubbed electric guitars, played in nontraditional ways such as hammering open-chord-tuned guitars with mallets or Sharpie markers, or using one or more E-bows, and/or digitally processed beyond recognizability by looping, pitch-shifting, and heavy use of over-compression, echo and/or reverb, with three shorter pieces (~10 minutes long) each exploring the same basic concept of multi-layered malleted guitar with some sort of focal line or lines on top with a tonal root of D, contrasted with a single 30-minute piece constructed with multiple repetitive parts each looping at a different rate?” (Basically this is describing an album I did called “Saturation”, which was third and last in a series of all-guitar recordings.)

Of course each piece of this has to be recorded separately, as I am only one guy working with a computer with only one input, so each part of each piece goes through a similar process of decision-making involving editing, pitch-shifting, effects, etc., and then the whole thing goes through a similar process in deciding how to put all these parts together to make a whole, keeping in mind that the construction of the whole piece from all these individually recorded and processed parts is being guided not by any burgeoning sense of what the album should ultimately sound like, but again, rather by the same series of choices and decisions, with each choice being a decision unto itself, since I have to decide what my choices are before I can choose between them and act accordingly. The only guiding principle I have to assist me in making these decisions is symmetry, which is in itself a manifestation of duality. For instance, one album I have (“Gorjus”) is almost entirely a single eight-minute organ solo, pitch-shifted down to where it stretches across a little over an hour. At that point, the sound becomes largely bass response, so for the sake of symmetry I balanced it out with a faint but perceptible loop of jinglebells to provide treble. And of course there’s also left/right symmetry with the stereo field and all that. Symmetry becomes invaluable with a project like this, because often times decision-making just gets down to “what do I do with this?” or “what comes next?” and a desire to maintain symmetry often answers those questions by causing me to go through the piece as it’s developing and look for asymmetrical places I can correct to make symmetrical. This is typically the last stage. After that, the recording is complete and I sit on it for awhile trying to think of a name and cover art, so I can upload it to Cafepress and have it be largely ignored except for, generously speaking, a handful of curious people.

So I hope you enjoyed reading this. I’ll totally understand if you did not. As I warned you, it was a bit solipsistic. I recognize that it seems overly intellect-based to approach music-making in this way, but again, that comes back to duality… most of the music I make with TDU and Linus is primarily from the gut or the emotions or from a sense of fun or whatever, so I balance that out with a project in which I endeavor to remove the gut response and the emotions and just approach it from an almost clinical point of view. Sometimes, I find that oddly satisfying.