venn you have time
I may change my mind, but, over the last 10 years, or so, I've come to believe the most rewarding work is simply whatever allows me to have interesting conversations with good people.
I was reminded of this a few days after talking with a friend (Hi M!) who is working on a show about how we care for one another (health) and I said something to the effect of: I'm not interested in the truth as a product, I'm interested in the truth as a process.
I was arguing that jokes, hyperbole and other fantastical things (i.e., the unreal) open us up to seeing the world as it really is: a result of chance as much as consequence.
Television is not especially suited for delivering facts (this humble newsletter is more efficient than a recording of me reading same.)
But television is excellent at making people question what they take to be fact and fiction. A medium that inspires the suspension of disbelief is ripe for taking on what we believe, how we came to believe it, and why.
The purpose of television, then, is not to inform but rather to make information meaningful.
As the saying goes: you can give a person a fish, but better to teach them that in Spanish there are two words for the same: pez y pescado; the former as it lives free and the latter after it has been caught.
Words confer meaning, categories create structure, how we talk about reality impacts reality as surely as the laws of physics. In fact, those laws are themselves subject to intense debates based on incredible experiments. (That physicists were able to convince governments to pay for the Large Hadron Collider is almost as astonishing as any findings that emerge from it.)
This is quite a windup for a basic pitch: take time to find the handles that open the drawers that contain the tools that will help you build what you need.
I spent a perfect hour this weekend doing just that, moving through every single permutation of this matrix:
What happens when I connect A to B? A to C? A to D? etc.
Synthesizers, like other complicated devices (e.g., society!) require us to create mental handles so that we can manipulate them. It's only by manipulating (tweaking, joining, separating) that we understand how they work and what we can do with them.
In this case, the question I am learning to ask is:
How do you combine two distinct genres – and all that they contain?
Bad combinations are always very possible.
In fact, they are more likely than not because it's only through the process of adding and subtracting, of copying and mutating, that we establish what is essential or, at least, desirable, in each.
So, this past week, before work, after work, I patiently copied salsa basslines and piano montunos and multitimbral synth lines and looping envelopes, and...
Most of it sounds like someone rifling through drawers. :-)
But when I made this synth line, I LOL'ed.
The 1980s!
Enjoy!
take care,
Jose