Category: Creativity
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Do a Field Recording Meditation
When I meditate, I like to have something keep me accountable to the time I’m setting aside, be that a timer, beads, a walk. But I’ve grown a bit annoyed with timers actually, waiting for them to go off, dealing with cheesy alarm sounds. Then it occurred to me, why not use my field recorder…
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Disidentification and Christianity in Queer Art
I learned a new word recently: disidentification. The word comes from José Esteban Muñoz’s foundational work Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. I learned this from a book on James Baldwin by Christoper Hunt called Jimmy’s Faith. Disidentification, in Muñoz’s theory, according to Hunt, is a way of repurposing cultural texts that…
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Lessons on the Importance of Trying to Share Each Good Idea
I don’t believe like some do that ideas are out there floating in the ether—that if you don’t use an idea that comes to you, someone else will. Sure, multiple discovery is a thing, but it seems to be a rare phenomenon. That being said, I have had ideas that I slept on, and songs…
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Imperfection Makes Radical Creativity
Imperfection makes radical creativity. It takes the creativity and makes it radical. The world of “good taste” is riddled with classism. Stodgy vocal pedagogues, early detractors from recorded popular and folk music would say (and still do), “You shouldn’t sing like that. You can’t.” They would rather people learn the “right” way to make music.…
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Random MIDI Mutes and Semi-Generative Drums
I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of silence in music, and I dreamed up this technique, using a sequencer to more-or-less randomly mute a signal. The idea was to program a beat but then have the sequence be periodically interrupted by silence. I was partly inspired by this tai hirose track. Now you…