I Want An Army Of Gramophones
June 27, 2008
Hurrah! I have eleven of thirteen total wee baby songs done at Minute Minute Month! When June's over I'm going to put up a poll to figure out which songs should become real live flesh-and-blood-longer-than-a-minute songs-- so if you want to help me American-Idol-style vote for who gets to stay and who gets booted from the little song stage, pretty please sign up for my mailing list:
(Or add me on MySpace, or Facebook, I'll be posting there too.)
You can also hear the beginnings of a little ghost musical that I pitched in vocals for, over at Two Minutes. So, terribly, terribly fun. I have this vision that there will be a bunch of these, and then artists will make paintings based on it, and there will be an art show with gramophones on little tables, each playing a different song. (I mean, did you even realize how cheap gramophones are??)
Posted by Olga at 8:30 AM | Comments (0)
When Ghosts Play Piano
June 26, 2008
I was recording the Wednesday Minute song late, late last night. Moving little bits of notes around, I clicked on one of the tracks and a chill went up my spine."....Elaine?" I typed to her on AIM. I can always rely on her to be my partner-in-insomniatic-crime. "My computer has just started playing music. That I didn't write."
She teased me. "It's learning."
Then I sent her over the track my computer was playing, of its own accord. "Olga?" She said. " Get out of the room. It wants to eat you."
You probably think we were overreacting, right? Turn off the lights. Put on your headphones. And play this: Ghost Track 1.
Now there's no hidden mystery checkbox in Garageband that says when you click on an instrument that it will play creepy death march music. I know. I checked. But then I clicked on another track, while writing my song, and the computer ghost started writing counter-melodies: Ghost Track 2.
And it kept getting weirder: Ghost Track 3.
There's got to be a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, right? Right?
Ghost Track 4.
After about thirty minutes of this, I found the perfectly reasonable, logical, sensible reason as to why my computer was playing ghost-written music.
My piano had started playing itself.
Across the room, my little piano keyboard had set itself off into "demo mode"-- you know, every keyboard has one. The button that suddenly starts playing a cheesy generic drumbeat that you can play along to. And my piano had turned itself on, and was playing silently in the corner, until I clicked on a track: suddenly my piano was playing through my laptop, angry haunted music through whatever instrument I had selected. So the valuable lesson I learned last night, boys and girls, is that a drum beat interpreted by an Indonesian gamelan sounds like the end of the world.
Give a listen to my very not-haunted-I-promise Minute Song from last night: Tent City.
Posted by Olga at 12:52 PM | Comments (0)
Two Things
June 23, 2008
The lovely Uriel Durán has put up a feed for this blog on Livejournal. If you have a Livejournal account, you can add the feed here.Secondly, the also extraordinarily lovely Belinda Casas has made a video for one of the Minute Minute songs, Feather. (It's got video she took of me while I was visiting her house in Los Angeles.) You can see it here, hurray:
(And one last thing, which doesn't count as an item list , not really: I'm still working on Monday's Minute Minute song. It will be up very very soon!)
Posted by Olga at 10:03 PM | Comments (0)
Theory To Time, Minute To Minute
June 20, 2008
Today, tonight, I'm exhausted-- and I spent probably all of two hours on Little, Thing, Round. (It's a round. About little things. ;) )I'm averaging 4 hours a song, but I only took two for this one. Part of taking the extra time is making sure that the vocal take works-- that I sound the way I think I should sound. The less time I spend, the more likely I am to leave in the missed notes that make me cringe. And it's okay, really, because you know what that is? Me making a mistake. And letting myself make a mistake. And not hide under the bed when it happens. So all in all , that's okay.
(For the record, by the way, I skipped last Wednesday, because, well... honestly? I started forgetting what day it was. Oops. I'll make it up with an extra song before the end of June.)
I was talking to my friend Elaine, about the photographs I take, and how she sees a through-line in the pictures I take. She can tell that my photographs are, well, my photographs. Postulating that there was a common language shared in the way I write and in the way I take photos. We meandered onto some other subject, describing something I saw walking around, and I said: "It's hard not to fall in love with everything when you're looking so damn closely." Elaine said to me, "THAT's your signature, Olga. That's your thread, right there. The line criss-crossing everything you're making. That one sentence."
Minute Minute Month. Go check it.
Posted by Olga at 10:54 PM | Comments (0)
Crisis Of Faith
June 16, 2008
You write to find yourself. You fashion nets out of your glittering words, out of letters and art that looks like you to remind yourself of your place in the world-- the place that looks like it does it in your head.It anchors you.
I met a man at a party who used to work at a bookstore. He wanted to write so badly. He wrote and submitted books to publishers without luck, for eight years. No interest came back at all, from throwing his work into the void of the world. But he believed in himself.
And eight years after starting this process, writing and writing again and writing some more, submitting and getting rejected, working in a bookstore and dreaming: he got a publishing contract. For half-a-million dollars. And promptly quit his bookstore job.
My friend and I discussed this after: how long would you chase a dream? To some eight years might seem interminable; to others it's a drop in the bucket. And the key here is, had the writer in question stopped believing himself at any point-- though I'm sure he had moments that rocked the foundation of his faith-- had he at any moment really and truly just quit on his dream, he never would have gotten here. Never would be enjoying the knowledge that yes, it mattered. His work, his belief in self, it has amounted to him realizing what he's always wanted.
What would you let yourself chase for eight years?
Better question: what have you avoided letting yourself chase, while eight years have passed you by?
Posted by Olga at 7:47 PM | Comments (1)
Making Minutes
June 15, 2008
About three weeks ago, I got an email from Greg about his Two Minutes project. I forgot to check out the project itself, but the the idea was so inspiring I set about creating Minute Minute Month. (Six songs down, seven to go...)Then several of my friends got inspired and started making their own versions of Minute Minute Month-- found here and here. I mean, it's such a helpful creature of a project: you have deadlines which force you to make art. Regularly. And it's tiny amounts of art, so you get to learn all about working within constraints, all while getting it done in a tiny amount of time.
I stumbled back upon the original email from Greg and finally wrote back, telling him his idea is brilliant (check out Juror #6 and Juror #10) and here was his lovely reply:
Olga,
I don't know why it took so long, but I only just now pieced together that Olga-from-Fabulist is Olga Nunes, WebElf, whose music I've been listening to since a link to her Myspace went up on Neil Gaiman's blog. Your Myspace. Whatever. Several parts of my favourite little corner of the Internet just fell into place.
In any case, I love, love your stuff. (Especially, at the moment, Gloomy Sunday, which I just discovered.)
And I'm extraordinarily glad/excited/flattered that you're enjoying Two Minutes. Even more so that other people are doing the same thing. Max, I'm sure, will feel the same, once I've delivered the news.
Minute Minute Month is breathtaking, by the way.
Best,
Greg
So there you have it. I'm going to post about this on the Fabulist, too, and see if we can start a tiny artist minute-project revolution.
Posted by Olga at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)
Little Zygote Of A Song
June 10, 2008
I put up yesterday's Minute Minute at about 4:30am. And then went to sleep at about 8:30am. For about an hour. I blame guarana lemonade. That stuff is made of awesome.Download: Feather
Of the four I've done so far, this one I think will grow up to be a real song one day.
I spent all my hours of awakeness doing things like putting my Fabulist posts on the sidebar of the blog, as well as a feed for photos I've taken that are on Facebook. Which looks more interesting than it sounds-- but the really cool thing I did is:
I've released all my music under a Creative Commons License. (Check out the pretty buttons at the bottom of the music pages-- nifty.) Which means the songs can be played with and tossed around and remixed and things, which in my opinion is a Good Thing.
* * *
Several different friends sent me a link to JK Rowling's commencement speech at Harvard-- on the usefulness of failure:
Posted by Olga at 11:17 AM | Comments (1)
Little Bits Of Love
June 7, 2008
I was talking to a friend tonight, playing her bits of music trying to unearth how to answer that impossible question: "So what kind of music do you do?"I have no idea, honestly. When I asked my friend Elaine, she said the kind with melodies and lyrics in. Which is apt. After some discussion, I offered up this: Ambient Blues Pop Folk. With didgeridoos.
(Well, okay, I haven't actually put in didgeridoos. Yet. But you never know. I'm carving out a niche, people!!)
As it is, the good news is I've been linked to on Largehearted Boy, and on Achtung, Baby! And the following lovelies had nice things to say:
"...incredible voice..." -Ugly Doggy
"Ms. Nunes’ arty, bluesy rumblings sound like a slow keening. Something like a soulful Bjork that isn’t too tied into marching to her own beat." - Aural Grace
Which is very, very cool. And I've cooked food tonight, that tasted of the beginnings of greatness: lemon rosemary sweet potatoes, with spinach. (I have no idea when I learned how to cook. Possibly in my sleep.)
Alright. Even though it's one am. and I didn't get to sleep until six am last night-- I am going to go into the back and climb into the recording studio. (This is one of the very many lovely things about my house in London-- it has a recording studio in the back. So. Good.)
Posted by Olga at 5:09 PM | Comments (0)
The Most Popular Way To Fail
It's been a good bit since I've posted on here, so bear with me-- there's a huge glut of stuff I've been sifting through online about creativity and hope and art that you will be made privy to.... now!
On Doing Creative Work:
On Hope:
On Failure:
On Being Inspired:
Because of these and all things rolling around in my head, I've decided to do a mini-project. Minute (small) Minute (60 seconds) Month: three one-minute songs a week for the month of June.
And I've done three so far, and I think I'm living up to the whole "making mistakes in public" thing-- because each of the three so far feels like a mistake. The first is a song that is fine, but not terribly memorable-- and the second and third have come out of the cracks of technical difficulties. (My MBox and laptop aren't playing nice, and every vocal take is subject to some amount of pops, clicks, and static.)
But enough whining. It's *strange.* Strange to be creating these super-short song babies. Babies that don't quite work. But like Ze Frank says...
Each day I live in mortal fear that I've used up the last idea that'll ever come to me. If you don't wanna run out of ideas, the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don't have the time or resources to do em right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack. No matter how bad things get, at least you have those good ideas that you'll get to later.
Some people get addicted to that brain crack, and the longer they wait the more they convince themselves of how perfectly that idea should be executed. And they imagine it on a beautiful platter with glitter and rose petals, and everyone's clapping, for them! But the bummer is most ideas kind of suck when you do em, and no matter how much you plan you still have to do something for the first time and you're almost guaranteed the first time you do something, it'll blow. But somebody who does something bad three times still has three times the experience of that other person who's still dreaming of all the applause:
So what am I trying to say here? It's 5 in the morning, and I still haven't gone to sleep. Having many online discussions with friend Elaine about giving yourself permission to be be earnest. And about becoming the best version of yourself. And, well, of course, about Ze Frank.
Here's a collection of quotes culled from a recent Ze Frank post:
Hope is the thing with feathers - Emily Dickinson
A quote I always come back to is from Journey to the West. Monkey is talking to his teacher: "Sounds difficult" said Monkey. "Nothing is difficult, it is only thinking that makes it seem so."
"If you are not nervous about your latest venture or push, you are not far enough out on the ledge...nothing revolutionary happens from the comfort of a safety harness."
"Playing things too safe is the most popular way to fail." - Elliot Smith
Posted by Olga at 3:25 AM | Comments (2)
