56 second flick starring our fascinating neighbor we like to call the Sun (or, if youre religious you can call him the god Ra) from the friendly folks over at nasa. i made the soundtrack here in my hovel.

figuratively speaking, every year the holidays make me at least a little sick, but this year it was also in the literal sense. whilst mostly lying around on the couch, watching mostly bad english tv shows and generally feeling sorry for myself i was only able to get in a little musical tinkering. not nearly as much as i wanted and my record did not get finished by the end of the year, as i had hoped, but so it goes sometimes.

this isnt technically a momentary music because that would be a misnomer. i did not do it in one day. i did it over a few. it started as a one day thing but then i got caught up in trying a bunch of technical things. eq-ing and compression blah dee blah. i was trying a few different things with a drum machine with ultrabeat, synths with basses etc. and this astonishing line came to mind from an anne sexton poem " my father lives in a machine built by my mother and well oiled by his job". i misremembered it and the actual lines are better still. from the poem "the touch":

"my father wont do it.
he comes with the house and even at night
he lives in a machine made by my mother
and well oiled by his job, his job."

'he comes with the house...' fuck. how good is that. anyway, overall this musical number has an eighties feel to me. the vocal sound reminded me of gibby haynes ala early 1990's. a man who will always make me feel sort of tingly all over. so have at it. one minute and forty seconds of listening joy. another free hit single to add to your collection for your next sleep over dance party.

Lemonade (momentary 4...sort of) by ericavery

anyone get to either xenakis performances in la this weekend? if so can you give me a report? im bothered that i missed both the downtown recreation of persepolis and this afternoons performance of oresteia. let me know.

thought i would make some noise with alessandros little module. his suonoio. thought for this momentary music i would limit my self to only this module. so for those keeping score at home, i recorded only this module into ableton live wherein i used two plugins, one instance of soundtoys echoboy and one audio damage eos reverb. that is all. i was going to dig into the mix but i got tired and tinkering too long undoes the spirit of what im trying to do with 'momentary' music anyway.

its a cool gadget. dont judge its capabilities only on what i did here. i am currently a synth dilettante. in better qualified hands it could do a great deal more. but i did what i did. here is a few minutes of noise to bounce your pigtails to. momentary music 3- suonoio.

Momentary 3 - SuonoIo by ericavery

i have great affection for janes addiction 1.0. not only the music but all it represented and all it has done for me personally. i owe it a great deal. i have never been one to say, like musicians often do, that i didnt want to talk about it because i had moved on. ive been happy to answer questions about my experience in interviews or conversations with folks or friends. but i have always tried to stay on my own side of street, so to speak. i tried, not always successfully, not to just talk shit. but in so doing i think that the truth has at times gotten an incomplete presentation. so this time around, as i left, i decided not to let all the half truths, mischaracterizations and misunderstandings to go unaddressed. i decided that i wanted to create a small record of my story while dispensing with concerns about stepping on toes, hurting feelings, disillusioning, disparaging etc. i just wanted to answer some questions candidly as if i was just talking privately to a friend. i wanted it to be on camera so that anyone interested could have access to the source material. no editing. no quotes taken out of context. i reached out to sonny at xiola.org. an unofficial janes addiction site that has maintained the conversation about all things janes for many years. because of the net i was able to directly read/hear the feelings of people like them and i carried those voices with me throughout the past couple of years. in most ways i failed creatively this time around. but i take small solace in the fact that i know i made all my decisions based on what i thought would produce the best quality work, that would challenge and best represent the wild spirit of janes 1.0. living is a messy business. we do what we can. so be it.

so i now take a large step, personally, toward placing janes back into a box and putting it back onto its shelf in the hall closet. now i need my coffee. sonny has posted the first installment here. he will be dropping more. each week i believe.

yesterday i had an interesting conversation with chris kallmyer at the little william theater. i generally do. he said something thats been resonating with me. he said that he thought contemporary composing was beginning to cycle back to the days when composers like mozart not only wrote the music but they brought it all the way through to production and finally also conducted and performed the work. we were talking at the time about "classical" contemporary (whatever that really means) but i think that the same thing applies to music in general. through the confluence of a few different things, artists do alot more these days than just write or perform music. and this applies to bands and djs and solo artists et cetera. the rise in frequency of the multi instrumentalists, the rise of home studio recording, the increased quality of the affordable home studio, the drop in available recording budgets large enough to live and produce on with the accompanying drop in royalty monies; the list goes on. whether or not that is a good thing i dont know. thats a discussion topic for another day but i do think we can all agree that artists are increasingly more involved in most parts of the process. there will of course still be big acts, christina aguilera or some other mouseketeer types, that are performers in the previous sense. but the rest of us in the creative middle and lower classes are clearly wearing many more hats. personally, it was a conscious decision, a few years ago, to learn more about the technical side of music making. i couldnt make mortgage payments waiting for bands in need of a bass player to come calling. i had a really good run of that but it was neither interesting nor sustainable. then more recently my goal became even more refined and ambitious, i wanted to see if i could get to the point that i could record my work well enough to drop it directly onto the net. i think it was survival instinct that brought this about but thankfully i have ultimately found it fascinating and inspiring. it intersects nicely between my interests in science, tech, design and art. so in summation, i have no summation. i will disregard the dictates of formal essay form and just end a damn post. thats what i was thinking about. have a nice day.

todays labor. did some synth homework this afternoon. im learning. i give you momentary music number two:

Momentary2 by ericavery