jamuary 7, 2025 - one week in

I have made a little bit of music every day for the past seven days in service of Jamuary. This is the first time I have attempted to take on the challenge, in which you make music for 31 days in a row. The music can be complete or slight, well-arranged or half-ideas. Today’s is the latter:

The general layout of instruments and effects is similar to that of previous days. Fugue Machine sends some midi to some sampled instruments, and Rymdigare turns it into a weird mush. At 1:50 I turned a knob and everything kind of fell apart. I’d like to say the result was interesting, but it’s really more jarring.

The music I wrote today is not my favorite piece of music, nor is it in the top 100 pieces of music I’ve written. But it serves a purpose. When I listen to the seven pieces I’ve made in the past seven days, my “sound” appears, surprisingly clearly. Repetition breeds familiarity, I guess, but it also breeds knowledge about the tools I reach for, the ideas I explore, the language I speak.

When I write music for myself, I generally write two kinds of music: semi-generative ambient kind of like the above, where pianos and strings and synths asynchronously flit around in space, creating a kind of stillness for minutes on end; and crescendo-core post-rock with an eye toward the cathartic excess of blackgaze. The latter ain’t happening when I have to write something every day, but even as ambient has reigned, I find myself stretching toward the heavier.

Thousands of thoughts pass through my mind ambivalently every few minutes, and the ambient music I make feels like things passing through. But there’s anger and frustration in the empty space between those thoughts.

My entry on jamuary 4, 2025 feels like one of the first pieces of music I’ve written that captures both the quiet and the anger. It’s super unpolished, but I’m looking forward to finishing it. Imagine that — during a challenge that’s mostly about making stuff every day, I find the one-of-a-kind thing I want to make.

// tags: making music jamuary

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