I’m sure that this will be a post that serves only to frame my creative thoughts and give catharsis to me while offering very little to the average site visitor. What I hope for is that anybody who’s in the throes of what do and where to go next with their art might stumble upon this and say ‘oh, I really should keep at this thing…’ This is especially for those souls struggling with where they hope to go with their art after so many, varied paths and experiments have provided little in the way of satisfying fruit.
Specifically, what I’m speaking of is my pursuit of the last fifteen or so years to merge three of my passions, musically, into one meaningful creative art form and outlet. It’s important to note here that I’m not talking about creating my own creative high water mark from an art as commodity perspective, like Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours or Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, but rather create a personal high water mark for my creative process, the place where creative intention and the flow creative output perfectly intersect. Until now, I’ve been confident that this was probably an impossible concept. Even now, I’m sure that like so many thing in the stream of life, it’s fleeting. It’s probably that, but that’s Ok. Such is the process.
The intersection of creative process, creative intention and the flow of creative output is really more about a feeling, a sentiment, a motivation, rather than about any kind of output. Here, I channel the eastern-influenced perspective on creativity rather than that of the west, where the process is the point, rather than the outcome. Some people will say: “Man, how are you so prolific…” And for me, it’s not about output, it’s about process, being in creative stream of the process all the time. From that process comes output. I try to be in that process at least once a day – It’s how I recharge and renew.
What creative endeavors have I been trying to merge for the better part of a decade and a half? Well, there are three pieces:
- Musical Improvisation
- My Singer/Songwriter work
- Ambient/Drone and Textural work
Ambient/Drone music and improvisation has always been a natural fit for me. The perfect intersection of sound, timbre, texture, chance and most importantly flow. That’s always been a natural fit. Trying to bring in my singer/songwriter perspective has been, altogether, a different kind of animal. From a perspective of releases, I began exploring this with the Kosik project. Then I began to explore it in the context of my ambient music through a series of one-offs. Then I began exploring it as Olagra. Olagra became the primary vehicle for this exploration, but that never felt satisfying or complete. First, there was the record I did under my own name, Olagra, from 2005, a potpourri of ambient guitar tracks, droney songs and out-takes from the live band incarnation of Olagra. In 2015, under the Olagra name, proper, I released Winter Eyes, which was a fun undertaking and I really grew as a producer and singer during the recording of that, but I went off into some kind of roots rock alt-folk thing and moved away from improvisation and ambient/drone, both… Actually, I thought, for a long time that Winter Eyes might have finally satisfied that urge to merge, as it were (can’t resist a bad pun), but I was wrong…
Even before Winter Eyes and I have to thank my musical partner, Michael Teager, for his infinite patience here, I tried to bring the singer/songwriter stuff into the work of Borghi | Teager. In fact, Borghi | Teager, our ambient project was borne out of a series of shows under the Teag and PK moniker, in which we improvised on songs. Later, as Borghi | Teager we focused on ambient/drone and improvisation. The various perspectives had an air of exclusivity to them, for me. The ambient/drone could be improvised, but lacked the structure and the songs. The songs had structure and could be “ambient” or droney, but lacked improvisation; this piece also usually occurred in a recording situation. The songs could be improvised, wherein I would basically write songs in real time, start out with vamps, draft a melody, build on the melody, try to add texture… this phase couldn’t have been accomplished without my outboard pedal situation or my use of Ableton Live. Even still, my singing and musical instincts couldn’t respond adequately to the improvised moments. Damn. Back to the drawing board.
I’m a long-time fan of improvisation. I’ve been improvising musically almost as along as I’ve been writing songs. I love improvised music from jazz to jam bands to John Cage. To me the pinnacle of the art form is improvisation, so you could say I’ve become quite the student of improvisation. I believe, especially for live performances that, to bring oneself 100% completely to a live performance, mind, body and spirit, is to give a true, original, fresh and unique performance worthy of any audience that might be interested in seeing what you have to offer. What I didn’t realize, though, and this maybe the printer in me coming out, was what I had embarked on as part of my creative vision, was every bit as much about developing the craft of making the music and bringing together these elements to do it, just as a plumber, electrician, master carpenter, cobbler or printer must apprentice and learn their craft.
That sounds like a pretty significant epiphany the way I set it up.
It wasn’t. In fact, like so many things, I’m slow on the uptake and it took me a long time to internalize this realization. I’m still trying to self-actualize it; this writing is part of that.
For the artist, there’s no script, there’s no path. Art is a synthesis of an individual’s influences and interests. As Joseph Campbell said, ‘Your life has no precedent’ and this couldn’t be more true for the artist: ‘Your art has no precedent’… Sure, I could get into true art, and original art and all that, but I’m going to dispense with terms such as ‘true’ and ‘original’ and assume that anybody who endeavors to smear something on a wall or a page for its own sake and endeavors to do it more completely and better each time, is the kind of artist I’m talking about. So, if ‘your art has no precedent’ then it stands to reason that you have to define what the apprenticeship of developing your craft is based on what you’re trying to do as an artist. No shortcuts. You have to define it yourself.
For starters, you have to have a vision. Without the vision, even a foggy, vague vision it’s almost impossible to know where to go next. Once you have the vision, which, while I blow past it quickly, isn’t necessarily a given or easy to achieve. Anyway, once you have the vision you can begin work… For me, only after a very long time did I, sort of, unbeknownst to me, start developing my craft. I didn’t know I was developing a craft, it was just happening. This dawned on me recently as I went back and listened to Huronic Minor, my second full-length recording for 2000… Does it stand alone, sure, I guess, as much as anything does? But it’s mono, because I didn’t know how to record in stereo, and flat. I’m making myself feel defensive, which is funny because if I had a record that seems to be universally appreciated it’s Huronic Minor, but when I listen to it 18 years later, sonically, I’m not satisfied with it. I like the textural and musical material, but the recording is flat, but of course it is it was recorded in mono in $35 multitrack recording software that I scarcely knew how to use. In time, I learned how to use it. In time, I made great strides in my recordings. In time, I would be able to go into the biggest and grandest studios in the world and would give direction on mic placement, acoustics and a variety of things to capture my sonic vision, but it all started with that crappy $35 multitrack recording software that I bought at Best Buy. It probably even started before, more like 1996, when I landed a fluke music production job at a Detroit radio station because I was too disinterested in doing the promotion work that I was actually hired for. I would have been the guy handing out bumper stickers and keychains, but I wandered into an unused studio doubling as a production suite where an ex-On-Air talent guy was cutting commercials, and voila, I was creating music. I don’t remember it too clearly now, but I used some kind of weird integrated system, with a monitor, keyboard thing with other controls and a couple 3.5 floppy drives — Maybe an Otari DN-10, but I seem to recall it had a green screen that looked a lot like Fairlight synthesizer model. I combined an Everything But the Girl loop with an explosion on the 1 beat… Man, was I pleased with myself…
So, yeah, craft… I think I’ve written about this before, but I got into improvisation after reading a book about Pink Floyd who came up with their sound trying to emulate what they heard was happening in San Francisco in the mid-1960s, so I, in turn, decided that I wanted to take my high school band in a direction of more improvisation, so that we, in 1993, could be more like the Pink Floyd of 1968 that was emulating the Grateful Dead of 1967. Man, I free associated a lot to get that point. I didn’t musical improvisation was a thing. I didn’t even improvise much until I resolved to use it as a tool to stretch out our songs. There was no Internet then and I really kind of intuited my way through relying on little more than imagination and conceptual framework that I was developing from my 100,00th listening of Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Side A, because, of course, at the time I wanted to believe that was completely improvised… how else could there be all that space in between the words and music and texture. In hindsight, that was an uninformed perspective based on little more than making up a narrative, but that recording as a whole became a singular touchstone for much of the work that I would in the 25 years that would follow…. ‘Shine’ had those opening textures, a spaciousness, clean production, great, memorable lyrics. It evoked a sense of time, a sense of what it meant to be a live and it was unlike anything I had ever heard. The first time I heard it: Mind completely blown – Face completely melted. Straight up in blew me away.
I continued to develop improvisation. I continued to write songs. I continued to merge the two. Around 2000, in a story I’ve told too many times, when I purchased a 4-track recorder I learned how to make ambient/drone music. I did this for years. I released a lot of records, but after the first few years I wanted to bring improvisation, songs and the ambient/drones together. 15ish years later, I’ve finally done that.
It’s been an interesting journey… As I was writing this two particular incidents stuck out to me. The first was this was one time, probably 14 years ago, when I was talking to academic guy I had just met about improvisation. We were having a good discussion. He was pro composition. I was pro improvisation with composition baked into it. He told me that maybe I was just lazy. That pissed me off. We didn’t talk after that. In hindsight, maybe he was right. The second incident was more recent — A dude reviewed Shades of Bending Light, a 2015 improvised recording I did with Michael Teager. The guy said something to the effect of ‘it’s a great record, but there’s no way that they improvised this; it wouldn’t be that…’ Ahh, that was a favorite, because we literally started the tapes rolling without any preconceived notions and what came out was what we released. It was a compliment and also kind of not. Sure, it’s a recording, a commodity, not every minute of every track made it onto the release. We recorded for two and half hours and did zero post-production, I culled it down to about 65-70 minutes… Still, completely improvised.
I shared these anecdotes to illustrate how the path of an artist’s craft is a long and circuitous one. I may lose this feeling tomorrow, delete this post in a month and in ten years ask myself what the hell I was thinking when I wrote it, such is the path…
I feel like you have to respond to the moment. Those are the feelings of the moment, the sensations of the moment, the experiences of the moment, etc… I don’t always do it, but I always try. Improvisation is a place, where usually, about 90% of the time when I put my instrument on and the first note sounds, I’m there, man, all in… There’s nowhere else. There’s no time. There’s no tomorrow or yesterday, future or past, but the moment as it all unfolds… sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s not, sometimes it’s just barely good enough to keep doing it, but I keep doing it. What else would I do?
I have a small, unpolished, arguably questionable release that I’m doing to celebrate this place, this long sought after intersection of the singer/songwriter, the improviser and the drone artist. All of this music is live. Recorded in one take. There was no prep. There were no notes. There were no lyrics written down (I’ve had to transcribe those after the fact). There was no pre-production. There was no post-production (other than EQing and compressing the final mixed tracks). Some will notice none of this. Some will notice all of this. Those that don’t like the mix of vocals and drones won’t like this. Those that don’t like vocals really won’t like this. Those who like only vocals won’t care for the drones. Those who are willing to have an open mind will likely bum on the, less than audiophile, sound quality. This is all live, a snapshot of the creative mind at work and all that comes with that; like life, sometimes it ain’t pretty, sometimes the pretty hides in the folds of the not so pretty and you have to get down all fours and really examine the thing, and then, maybe, you only see a flash of the sublime or maybe it was a speck of dust caught in sun’s ray. Anyway, enough. If you got this far. Thanks. Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and still I try.
