Metronomica.blog
jamuary 12, 2025
When I shared today’s piece on lines, I said that it’s coloring in the picture I’ve been drawing this month. There’s a comfort in knowing that I have a musical place I can easily and happily revisit, and when I get there, I can make something that fits inside:
I didn’t always feel that way, and I’m happy that Jamuary has allowed me to find some solace in microloops and pianos and strings and reverbs, all coalescing into the kind of music you listen to while watching a stream bubble through a snowy forest. Maybe there’s an album in these similar pieces that all conjure similar moods. There’s enough variety, I think, even if all these rooms are in the same house. Sometimes, like today, I let prettiness and aimlessness be just that. Sometimes I’m willing to collapse the whole thing into noisy excess.
Sometimes I want to explore the outer limits of the property, though, and I’m hoping that in the second half of the month I can play more with new techniques and sounds. I’d like to find noise in feedback — to create noise that can fight the calmness — instead of slathering the calmness with noise. I did that often when I still owned my modular synth, patching synths back into themselves and figuring out how to manage interesting noises by playing with screaming, oscillating filters, but I haven’t done it much since selling the machine.
I’ve said before that my voice probably lies somewhere in between the twinkly ambient stillness and the full-throated cathartic aggression of blackgaze and post-rock, but I haven’t really found the Goldilocks zone. I’m learning that I can pretty easily find the former, and with some work, I can find the latter. Now my goal is the plumb the depths of both and find where they meet.
// tags: making music jamuary