I am going on a world tour with my new album BABES! The music is happening at all places and at all times, touring the web universe in packets of code. Each show is happening now, or whenever you want, in your own space. Consult this map.




For Babes I wanted to make songs that friends could enjoy and listen to over and over. I kept ten or twenty friends in mind while I was working. It is really hard to make a good fun song because of the balance of simplicity and complexity needed. The simplicity will get you inside, and the complexity will keep you in. The simplicity will please your body, but the complexity will please your mind. Without both there isn't enough.

I worked very slowly on these songs, writing them down carefully, coming back to them month after month, living with them for a year or two before sealing them off and uploading them to the web.




Most of the work was done in a small room off of my kitchen in Austin Texas. The songs started out as sketches on scraps of paper, then moved to staff paper, then were refined and arranged more specifically inside the Protools session. Some seem sad and some seem silly and fun and unimportant, but there is a foundation of toil behind them to prop up the sillyness.




My favorite composers labored for months and years over their scores. Although their songs were actually slowly and carefully refined, they seem to have been conceived of in one unwavering thought. Many musicians today are so seduced by the complexity of their tools that they spend just one or two evenings on a song and consider that to be enough. Since my favorite music has lived in me for longer than just a few days, I feel my own work deserves more than a few hours of fidgeting with software. I try to have patience and stamina. I have very little time in this world and I want to spend my time amazed.



Patience is not very popular. Patience sounds like an old word on its way to retirement. All the compression put on recordings now squeezes the dynamics into an impatient flatness, destroying the space and subtlety. This tendency towards flatness can also be seen in current design, painting, architecture, and fashion. Flatness is immediate and democratic: everything now and equal. You can't use patience or love to feel the beauty of compressed pop music. You have to allow yourself to be smacked in the face by the flat wall, to be as brutal and direct as the algorithm.

A flat wall has its own majesty, but a flat wall is easily ignored and becomes boring over time, inseparable from all the other walls you've been forced up against. I put defaults in all of these songs. The defaults are general MIDI sounds and samples taken from audio search results on the web. They are sonicly flat but conceptually deep. People often use ineffective words like "cheesy" or "ironic" to describe the defaults. Really I am trying to make sense of the defaults through their arrangements, and I am doing this earnestly.



The default is so powerful that it can only be wrangled through great struggle. As long as thinking and making are still separate, there is no way to avoid the struggle of making and the struggle of overcoming the default. You can think about music all you want, but thinking isn't making and thinking isn't struggling. At some point in the future I imagine that making will be thinking. Once that happens, fine, merely the act of thinking will be making and I won't have to worry about my struggle anymore. But for now my days are filled with struggle.

Struggle is not very popular. Struggle sounds like an old word on its way to retirement. Much art still seems like a financial or collaborative struggle, but hardly anything seems like a profound inner struggle. When music has effected me most I have stood in awe of how much the composer gave - the years of floundering, flowering, then floundering again. I hear my favorite composers trying to survive their music. I hear how they almost didn't get it out of their bodies in the right way. The composer's loss is the gift given, and nothing is asked in return.

I do not expect anything in regard to Babes. The music has no copyright, and I do not expect that anyone should pay for it, pay attention to it, or share it with anyone else. I have given and lost so much in making this music that I am simply thankful for surviving it.