How to set a table.

It would be good to have an image for every post, a la thank you campaign. Going back over that project, in order to move it here, reminded me what it was like to be attempting to communicate often, with people other than myself.

That process has always been a complicated one for me. And now, as I think about releasing this new record, it becomes even more urgent that I figure out why. Why does it feel like a problem to want others to hear the music? Why does it feel somehow disingenuous or ideologically impure?

I think about what I am doing, internally, when I am listening or at a show. How that communal experience makes sense of my own experience, brings me into contact with others who are similarly wired/weird, how completely unrelated to commerce the whole thing feels.

Writing here feels that way even if no one is reading it. Just saying "this is here for you if it might mean something" feels like performance, in the best way, feels like passing a note or writing a little inscription in a book you intend to give away. I did that recently and never checked up on it, whether it was ever noticed or read. But it's there, and that it is there matters to me. A link in a chain.

Everything about putting music into the world feels difficult and complicated. I mean the logistical armature, not the making and sharing. Certainly the latter--making and sharing--is difficult and complicated, but the good kind. The former, though, the logistics: you pay someone to ask someone who is paid to write about things like yours that they should write about your thing, and then that, I guess, turns into more of the same, so people play your tracks on spotify maybe? Or ask you to write something for them, so you can do it and then restart the whole process?

I suppose it's a matter of figuring out what you are after. What I am chasing is that feeling of suspension in a web of ideas and sounds and people, a corroboration by other human beings. An "I felt it, too," whether we are the makers of the things or the beholders of them. What's the straightest shot to that?

​I expect that it's a lot simpler and more direct than it feels when you are thinking about a press campaign or a tenure prospectus. I also expect that said campaign/prospectus would benefit from that line of best fit, from boiling this down to something a bit more essential and less full of interior noise.

The thing about noise is that signal and not-signal get equal weight.

Chasing signal these days. Chasing? Sounds noisy. Letting it emerge. Waiting for it. Or allowing it in. Inviting it in. Setting the table. I am trying to make my home hospitable. Other analogies abound. Antennae. Resonant frequencies. Holding the right light up to invisible ink, like in "where it lands," a new song that, come to think of it, did eventually find its way home. I'll share it. Soon.