Some thoughts

Retracing my creative process

In November, when I was still writing my thesis, I was always dreaming of having the time to play and write music again. Then December came around, I finished my thesis and had some tasks to do before Christmas. During the holidays all I could think about was, how I was going to start to 'really' work on 'my projects' in January 2025 when I got home. January came around and I tried to work, but it didn't really come naturally to me. Some plans I realized: I did record a version of 'Candle Song' that I released and got some really nice feedback from some people on reddit. I read all about music promotion, got a distributor, got onto SubmitHub and so on. But I didn't really feel like I was inside the creative process. I had paused that in order to write the thesis and to finish my studies. I think that pause lasted one and a half years! I guess, the last time, I really felt inside the creative process must have been September 2023. That's when I wrote my (unreleased and partly unfinished) Song 'The Famous Kyrie by G.P. da P.' Now that I've got time again, I will try to record all those songs and write new ones. By the time someone reads this, maybe the songs named here will be recorded and published and one can make sense of them.


I really want to get back to being more creative again.


In order to do that I am trying to recreate as much information about this time as possible. While I'm writing this, I am scrolling through the daily pictures I took - September and earlier. They show me mostly being with friends or reading (Hermann Hesse - Siddhartha, Walter Moers - The City of Dreaming Books, newspapers, Christoph Hein - Trutz). I was studying also, but that is only about 15-20% of the pictures. Many pictures show me traveling from one place to another with my guitar - from my home to my practice room or the other way round. I see pictures of recording equipment, sketches of my songs, experiments with my DAW (even though I concentrate on making acoustic music mostly) and many, many pictures with friends. End of July 2023 I was on holiday with some friends and took a lyrics sketchbook with me. I remember being somewhat stuck in my creative process but still content and relaxed overall. July 18th, there is a selfie of me in a practice room, showing thumbs up. What did I do? How did I do it? What was I happy about? July 10th shows me working on my (unreleased) song 'K1736' that seems to not have been finished at the time. There's more pictures of me studying.


Maybe I wasn't as creative that time, as I think now?


June 26th is the picture that is the cover art of 'Candle Song'. There are more pictures of me, working on my studies and also my first publication in a journal. I remember working really hard and only focusing on the publication.


Could it be, that I'm idealizing or stretching out the time span in my memory that I actually was inside the creative process?


In June I read 'The Perfume'. There are pictures of me in my practice room on June 1st and me trying out some compressors in my DAW on June 2nd. On May 28th I was working on 'Cave Dwellers'. I have actually had some really interesting new ideas for that song today or yesterday. May 24th shows a project in my DAW that I remember very well. I was layering and layering guitar tracks. I was inspired by Young Fathers and their non-pop song structures. I tried doing something with that idea.

23rd I was re-reading 'The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy'.

May 22nd shows a project for uni that I spent way to much time on.

May 21nd I was reading Raymond Carver's short stories, visiting a friend and an exhibition of some of Picasso's work. He's always been very inspiring to me. You can really see every layer of his creative process. There's so much simplification and abstraction. That's how I want my music to be. That's why I was writing 'Cave Dwellers' based on fifths and 'The Famous Kyrie by G.P. da P.' based on the pentatonic and the overtone series (this last one is a little bit more complicated though). I was tossing all these ideas around and they were really baked into my everyday life, but of course, you can't see that on the pictures. I was thinking about everything. Like: I want my music to be explicitly showing the music theory of the writing process (the 'material'), I want my lyrics to be universal and topical at the same time. What else? I want my music to be abstract - with similar objects as the basic shapes and lines in early 20th century art. Musical objects, I mean. It was (and is) a metaphor that really worked for me. A fifth, a pentatonic scale, a forth, the overtone series, a triplet, a Tresillo rhythm (332), a syncopation -


I wanted to show these musical 'objects'. And I was thinking constantly about how to do it.


But maybe not so actively. I was just tossing these ideas around. They were so natural to me. Because I could really envision/feel that aesthetic as a whole. It was part of my being. Now I feel creatively empty. I don't see these patterns in everything anymore. And they don't come as naturally to me anymore.

May 18th shows me, writing some 12 tone classical music for my studies. They didn't have anything to do with my songwriting projects. But still I based the piece solely on fifths and the major second (as two fifths stacked on top of each other - minus an octave).


My professor called it a 'Panopticon of fifths'. They just were so essential to me, to my being. I associated everything good with these abstractions and with that simplicity. I even told my friends, that to me they were part of the solution to climate change.


May 15th shows me transcribing some of Duo Ruut's music (Kost Laaluq Saaduq).

May 13th shows me reading Frank Schätzing's 'The Swarm'.

April 30th I was checking out an open stage - thinking of singing there at some point. I actually did sing at one. I think that was in 2024.

April 28th I was at a Jose Gonzalez show in Berlin.

There are many pictures of me at my kitchen table. I remember times, when I joked with my flatmates how I was having breakfast, when they were done with lunch.

April 22nd I was reading the first Harry Potter book.

There are more pictures of me meeting friends.

April 15th shows me playing guitar, while Murakami's 'Norwegian Wood' is laying before me.

April 10th I was reading 'The Dawn of Everything' by the Davids - Wengrow and Graeber.

April 1st I was reading 'Desolation Row'.


Seeing this, I remember, how I used to analyze music. I tried analyzing every part of my favorite music. I should write a whole text on it. I did it with my network metaphor that I got from my very own reading of Robert Gjerdingens 'A Classic Turn of Phrase'.


I actually used a tree structure kind of metaphor here. Where I thought: songs are made up of music and lyrics. Music is made up of xyz and lyrics are made up of topic, meter, form and so on. Then there were some interconnections that didn't fit into the tree structure: lyrical form and musical form. It was actually a big part of my songwriting - this analysis based on my network metaphor.

March 29th I was reading 'The Prague Cemetery' by Umberto Eco. It didn't get me that much though.

March 29th: a picture of a yoga mat on the floor, my guitar on the bed.

March 11th: a theater play that I saw when I visited my friend that really moved me emotionally. I remember, I was writing lyrics on the train ride before I saw my friend for the few days (maybe a week?). I was watching some videos by 3brown1blue in the train and writing lyrics about those patterns. The theater piece mentioned someone collecting driftwood. I later used that idea in a song idea about my own creative process as a metaphor.

When I visited my friend, it was the first time, that I showed him some lyrics. I showed him: Toba, K1736, maybe Candle Song and maybe others. He didn't like K1736 because it was too abstract and he liked Toba because it was so clear. He studies literature.

March 4th shows me recording music in my practice space. I look happy but as if I'm not having success.

March 3rd: demonstration.

March 2nd: with recording equipment again.

Feb. 28th: making pizza.

Feb. 23rd: covering/transcribing 'Sour Times' by Portishead for guitar.

Feb. 22nd: reading my favorite book for a long time (2022-2024?): 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' in English. I'd read it in my native language (German) before.

Feb. 19th: visiting a friend in Berlin. I was at an Young Fathers concert the day before. I was a little sick with the flue, but played it down and lied to myself to be able to travel to see them and not feel bad about infecting others. When I came back, Karma hit me and I was tied to my bed for a week.

Am I learning anything about my creative process, writing this? Well, I noticed, how much free time I had and how many moments, meeting friends there were. But also I see traces of my rich inner world, that can't be shown on the photos. I had some memories of that though: the different aesthetic choices I made and the aesthetic rules that were part of my being and felt like an extension of my political stance; the many different projects of creative work and uni work; the transcriptions and analyses of other music; and of course the network metaphor. But that's not everything! How can I progress creatively again? Writing a text on network metaphors might be a next step?

New Chapter -

Okay. So I just finished my studies and now have got some months, where I can chill and don't really have to worry about financials. I guess it will be at least two months but probably more. I guess, I can do this for half a year maybe. It won't be a good life, but I can keep on living my student's life for that time.
But I don't want to waste that time. I want to learn things that I felt, I couldn't really learn in university, because of the structure of the courses. I studied classical music history and theory. The theory had some composition in it but I want to learn that better. Here's one goal.

  • Learn how to compose in the style of Beethoven's contemporaries.

Maybe I'll expand on that more later and write down some steps and tasks that could get me there. Maybe I'll just call them 'practices'. Because it is not about finishing exact tasks to get there but more about exploration of new areas of knowledge.

Another thing that is important to me is my songwriting. I have actually written some songs that I like now, but they're a few years old already - some of them two years - and I'm starting to get distant from them as time moves on. For my guitar style and my views on life have been changing. Nonetheless, I still like those songs. I do want to put them out - especially that one song that I play people, when they want to hear, what I have written. I am not on the same level of confidence with my singing as with my guitar playing. Also sometimes I still struggle to record the sound exactly as I envision. But I will have to do it by myself and I guess I will get there. Hiring a producer wouldn't work for me because I can't rely on my performances yet and I want to use my money a little more carefully at the moment.

  • Record that one song (and give it a better name) and release it.

I will promote it also, because I want people to hear it. First I will post it in forums like Reddit to get some feedback.

  • Write some new material.

Now that my last exams are done, I will have time to read again! I've got this list of books that I want to read, but they're mostly more exhausting reads. But that's something to keep in mind.

And then there's this neocities.org page. I would really want to be more of an active part of the internet. I want to engage in good conversations, show myself and my ideas and be seen.

  • Learn html,
  • learn CSS,
  • learn JavaScript.

And also:

  • write, write, write (learn how to write, write about writing).

I don't know yet, what I want to write, but I know that I want to write. It's weird, but I never really had that aspiration, but now I just feel like it. Let's see. I don't know why anyone would want to read this - there's no context about me, there's not much music on here yet. But if you did, leave a message on my site! I'll keep you updated - you faceless, hopefully benevolent crowd.

If I wrote a blog -

If I wrote a blog. What would I want to write about? - I would want to write about me. I would want to feel represented by my writing.

I might write about music. What music I like and what my opinions on music are.

Let's start. I haven't been listening to a lot of Jose Gonzalez in a long time. But I actually am very inspired by his music. He is a nice continuation of Nick Drake's music in my opinion; and I think he might not even disagree with me - only he might say, that he is more versatile and has more influences than that one artist. I once saw an interview where he said that he avoided thirds; and that was and is something I tend to do as well. With Nick Drake and him, I feel that they tried to overcome traditional functional harmony. Functional harmony to me is this complex system that has been developed in euroclassical music and that I feel more and more distant from. It is based on diatonic scales: major and minor. And its biggest flaw in my opinion is that it treats the minor chord the same as the major chord. (Of course this was not new. It's been there before music became functional. But it's a big part of functional harmony.) With Nick Drake, you can hear that his first two albums are very influenced by the classical functional harmony that reigns over pop music. But in his last album there are so many nice 'dissonances' and I feel that here counterpoint plays a way more elaborated role than in his first two albums. And it is because of the way he treats consonance and dissonance. Everything seems to be based on modes, major chords (as part of the overtone series). Nick Drakes use of modes seems very natural to me. But I might say more about that another time.

I shortly want to write about Jose Gonzalez and why I think he is a continuation of Nick Drake's way of overcoming the traditional functional harmony. It will be a very short analysis of the song that got me into his music. I first heard the song 'Far Away' mindlessly watching some game play videos. It's funny, because the song's lyrics are drenched in imagery about embodiment. "Step in front of a runaway train/ just to feel alive again./ Pushing forward through the night, /Aching chest and blurry sight." But the lyrics where the second thing I noticed. (As far as I remember) I actually felt the idea of embodiment and connectedness through its very repetitive ostinato. The guitar is tuned to B-A-D-a-b-e; with that very low and rich (in overtones) B-string. And the ostinato plays a B7 chord without the third! So the 7th overtone is there but the third (5th overtone) that is so euroclassical and traditional is missing. When I transcribed the song it was very hard for me because there was one concept that I wasn't really aware of: breaking down a 4/4 beat into groups of 3 and 2 - so not only groups of 2, 4, 16, ... . Now I am using that concept so much. This is of course also part of the tradition. The tresillo rhythm (332), that I had already found through analysis of alt-j is used very often in the pop/rock tradition (coming once from South America and/or Africa probably?). But this was way more complex. It is 2+2+3+2+2+3+2, which is 7+7+2, making a 4/4 bar of 16 again. He uses this in 'How Low' also, but I won't go into that.

So that would be the kind of stuff I would write about, if I wrote a blog. But I would also write about topics like: "How do I want my blog to look like? One topic or more representative of myself?", recording, my singing journey, and so on. I would write about what I've been thinking about and what media I have been consuming. Today I watched two documentaries on social media algorithms and some of their problems. One was The Click Trap (by Peter Porta), the other one was... I don't remember, if I actually watched another one. But I watched The Click Trap on the arte mediathek and not on YouTube.