It has been called into question, my willingness to be public and seen. The question is not so simple as stay or go since there is a prickly why that burrows into the low pitch before the high one. I'm known to overthink, and why is my loyal friend. She brings me nowhere, but brings me....
Under this umbrella, I am wearing one hundred hats.
The one I like the most is a dream. Buying a second hand camera that works only in theory, capturing a vision, not an image. Reality and dream smudging. Labyrinths of this and that, it only exists in our minds anyway. Who really cares to know what it is or isn't. As I reduce myself to "public figure", I think about being seen in high fidelity and so what if I don't really? I am a painting that I have finger painted myself and belong to a magnet and a fridge door.
you don't have to hide
you have nothing to hide
The hiding is where the art happens- for me. I take one image and I layer it onto itself. I move it slightly so the edges don't line up, I smudge it. I blend it differently until my desired colour appears. Once it does, an undesirable colour also enters the frame, but that one is there to stay. SURPRISES! MIRACLES! I enter a state of flow and focus when I do this. I push it too far, then reel it in, or leave it if my attention is called elsewhere. Who cares what it is or isn't, anyway. Self-portraits, that's what they are in the end. Half songs and songs halved like DNA with every reproduction. I am creating a world one frame and one cell and one atom at a time.
Lately, it has been my voice you hear croaking. Something over the last three months has kept my voice chained, maybe a paywall. Free trial is over.
I can sing and it doesn't hurt, but there is a strain. As if maybe it's not my voice, but the songs that refuse to come out. My poor songs, I have been putting them on trial every day. I knew there'd come a day when they'd revolt. They are tired and I dress them up all pretty for the pageant.
Is it me who has little capacity to do this. This which we're all supposed to do? I only want to make beautiful ugly things. Ugly beautiful things. I want to make them slowly and chaotically and with all the wrong materials because in trying to make something beautiful out of something ugly come all sorts of magical visions. Revealer.
calcified in my hands I
twist the knife you
understand that I'm
fool's gold.
When I sat down to write Centre, in my final few months of college, it began as a small idea in 7/8. It was quite fun to sing and play but deeply unlistenable. I'd just gotten my pink guitar and was very into Madison Cunningham. I wish I had a demo of it from that time, I might somewhere on a hard-drive. The song is slowly descending into a spiral. You love me even though you are good and I am fool's gold. You don't love me so I must assert that I am a being worthy of being loved at all.
By the end, picture a dog who has misbehaved whimpering down at your feet. Forgiveness. Closeness.
I wanna be where you be...
Words start losing coherence and become purely for savouring with lip, tongue, and teeth.
That last part was written much after the initial idea and it was inspired by Atoms for Peace by Thom Yorke.
I'm so happy that we're putting out these songs and wish I felt as connected to them as I once did. With every show, every take of a recording, every video, I halve the song and the person who wrote it. In an effort to bring the song to the present, I painted it again. Dug my fingers into its body and kneaded it to new form. I recorded the audio on a tiny cassette recorder and blended it with the sound from my computer, The cassette records at a slightly different pace, so I had to chop the computer microphone every minute or so for it to line up with the cassette. All the sounds are from those two sound sources of the same thing. No overdubs, just a bit of delay and modulation madness from the Crystallizer plug-in by Soundtoys.
I halved it.
I have it.
I don't think this kind of thing is very marketable and the marketing hat has a weird fit among the ninety-nine others, but I made it in hopes of inching back to my creative self who has gotten lost in the...sauce.
Last thing I'll say is that I don't know that I have an aptitude for long-form writing, but I have always wanted to have a blog! It won't always be this grave, and maybe this will be my first and last post. But welcome, hope you like my performance and video, and thank you to the internet for letting me have this outlet.
I leave you with this song by Björk:
Surrender
Give yourself in
You're trying too hard
You're trying too hard
It's not meant to be a strife
It's not meant to be a struggle uphill
Listen to Centre for real here
-gurlina
loved this
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