I amazed that I don't get sick of my computer. I spend most of the daylight hours working on music stuff in front of it, and then at night, I bring it into the living room to sit by the fire and relax. And these days, relaxing means surfing, blogging, twitter, facebook, whatever. Maybe reading. I've been reading Sartre and Thoreau - page by page. And sometimes South Park comes on and I get sucked in. Tonight, Superbad was on, and, just like last week when Borat was on, I tried to get into it but just found it so disappointing. Not funny, not interesting. Granted, I was coming in in the middle. Still.

OK. before you go any further. Click on this and listen in the background. Assuming you have speakers. I'll explain later.

Today, I didn't leave the house and didn't see any people face-to-face in the flesh. I talked to my mom on the phone (Happy Birthday again!) and sent an email. I got a really exciting call from a recorded voice in Spanish telling me that I won a million dollars and that I should press one. I'm such a skeptic. Like today, my cousin invited me to be a part of some Starbucks group on facebook and win a $25 gift certificate. I don't believe it. (And I don't care enough to risk wasting my time.)

I mostly worked on an electronic piece, practicing putting it together live with loops and synths. But this one file keeps crashing. It's not using too much cpu, and I've tried several fixes. It got me down. But then, I switched to working on another file and made it work. I still don't quite know what to do about the other one. Best not to think about it till morning. What you're listening to now is the piece that I did get to work. Playing it in Ableton uses 35% of my CPU power. That's as high as I've gotten so far.



In the between times, I ate some food - nothing special - and imagined my orchestra piece. I got into a discussion about composition a couple of weeks ago with my cohort Amos. His point was that composing at the piano - or the computer - limits your imagination to what you can play. My point is that relying only on your mind's ear limits your imagination to what you've heard before. My new process is to imagine the sounds - where they should be, what instruments, the overall gesture - and then draw them. Nothing specific, just shapes. I get sucked into details way too quickly and forget about things like structure and shape. Then I end up having to tweak all sorts of details in the final "revision" process, which feels more like rewriting. I've never been one to use an outline (as you can tell by this blog) but I think it's time to start learning how with music.

Lastly, thanks for the comments! Both on and off the blog. Sometimes I forget that people are actually reading it. I'm not sure why sometimes; it feels pretty self-indulgent. But every now and then I come up with something interesting.

So you're probably still listening. I'm fairly happy with it: it's not too interesting but not too boring. Good for repetition, good for background. If you haven't gotten to the guitar solo at the end, that's my favorite part.

If it's still going, read this article in the nytimes about people (mostly artists) who live in cold spaces, like 50 degrees or below. It caught my eye because I've been keeping the temp at 58 during the day and 56 at night. I actually tried 55 last night and was plenty warm. I've always had trouble choosing comfort over energy. I'd rather put on multiple layers than use more energy. Now I've got myself trained so that 60 feels warm. Last weekend when I stayed at Darick's, his place was like 75, and I started overheating as soon as I walked in.