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.