Madness and Music

Update 10/6/2013 –

Flibbedydoo

Citrus Firefly

 

10/5/2013

I’ve been wanting to keep updating with more writing, but every time I start, I find myself just wanting to spew jibberish out into the world, full of insanity and chaos and easily misinterpreted nonsense. Nothing I’d actually want to put my name on or ever even look at again. Which, considering, would probably make it rather unfair to make anyone else read it too. So I sit, I stare, I consider scattering meaningless ridiculousness onto paper, and eventually I get distracted and do something else because I can’t think of anything compelling or interesting.

I read through Zen Pencils recently, which is probably just about the most inspirational thing you can do ever, I highly recommend it. And a few relevant quotes have been sticking in my mind, such as This one from Charles Bukowski.

“If you’re going to create, you’re going to create whether you work 16 hours a day in a coal mine, or you’re going to create in a small room with 3 children while you’re on welfare. You’re going to create with part of your mind and body blown away. You’re going to create blind, crippled, demented. You’re going to create with a cat crawling up your back while the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment, flood and fire. Baby, air and light and time and space have NOTHING to do with it, and don’t create anything, except maybe a longer life to find new excuses for.”

I’ve been somewhat alternating, between thinking of that quote as meaning that I’m not really a creator, and wondering what in my life does fit that mold. I definitely don’t have any excuses for not creating, but I have in the past made things I’m quite proud of, such as these couple pages https://r0x0rk1tt3h.net/blog/category/stories/page/2/. I was re-reading them and was kind of shocked that they actually came from me, as I couldn’t at all imagine how to continue them. But I also had the same feeling shortly after writing them in the first place. There’s an unpublished couple lines following up a few days later wherein the title character explains that names are meaningless, and entirely optional to knowing a person, and that he never gives someone the same name twice, but I had nothing to keep going with …

There is something that I do though. I hum and sing random throwaway tunes, with random throwaway lyrics. Utterly meaningless nonsense that I do entirely without an audience and on a regular and consistent basis regardless of the state of my life or surroundings or emotional state, so long as I’m alone so no one else can possibly hear any of it 🙂

And it fits, my desire to write random nonsense that I haven’t been willing to subject anyone to.

I’ve always been really into situations where people mix multiple audio tracks of their own making to create full harmonics, complete with instruments and singing different parts. Like Malukah and Moosebutter that I’m hesitant to link since it will inevitably cause what I’ve actually made to share to be incredibly disappointing 🙂 However, I shall so you can click them later in order to guarantee a pleasant listening experience for you today.

I’ve known … vaguely how to put together such a thing for a long while now, but I’ve always been missing some critical component, a microphone, headphones, instruments, privacy, desire, actually having Audacity installed. Today, suddenly, I realized I had everything but instruments.

So screw instruments I said.

After some initial attempts to figure out how to make things work, I managed to set up a metronome track to sync up to and wrote a damn song….sort of.

Hey there what’s up
Don’t you know that
Everything is
made of fire
Hey there what’s up
Don’t you know that
No one will be
Here to save your life
And I know everything
Is going to be alright
But it is all a lie
and everyone
will find you in the
endless night

Hymn of Madness

So…yeah. I basically just sang to the metronome whatever the first thing that came into my head was, then wrote it down. So I could do it again, and again, and again. The melody sort of came afterward, after deleting a bunch of lesser tracks and redoing it several times. I’m still not really happy with it, but I’m sharing it anyway, because I wanted to start a new song. SO THERE.

I tried to speed up the beat to see what happened, but apparently as far as words were concerned all I could manage was gibberish.

So…I rolled with it.

Damn, that was fun….and…apparently I was entirely unconsciously trying to imitate Sburban Jungle the whole time. I wonder just how much of my soul is made up of Homestuck.

K, you can go up and click those far better songs now. Or you can go to http://www.moosebutter.com/ and http://www.malukah.com/.

Or http://zenpencils.com/ if you’d prefer to read comics based on inspirational quotes instead.