life update: i wrote an album?

[serpentinemalign]

i hope you are doing well. im doing pretty good right now which is awesome :D more of that please

but yeah. i accidentally wrote an album over september, as part of creativeclash. i wrote a bunch of themes for people's OCs and ships :D i guess it is a sort of 'singles' album... the tracks are all different genres and are not really related. but... it's 51 minutes. thats album length, baby!

i was sooo hesitant about doing creativeclash this year because i wasn't sure if i had the energy or motivation. i've been trying to fix my General Physical and Mental Health and it has been rough going (oh yeah also bonus life update: i was finally officially diagnosed with adhd lol). but i must say this has been quite good for my mental health, other than the many, many ways to fuck my sleep schedule while doing this challenge.

i think part of me was worried that an exchange would cause me to vanish into my crafts for others and ignore my own needs and tastes. especially with the added challenge of translating a character design or narrative into music, i wanted to ensure that i kept closely to people's requests. but... i had nothing to worry about. my mark was over every single thing i made, and it didn't matter that it happened to be based on other people's ideas and stories. (you could even say this is just. the philosophy of transformative fan culture as a whole. more typical professional Art(tm) spaces could never!)

i also just really appreciated being in parallel with a bunch of people frantically making cool stuff for each other. and as a bonus, people made me some absolutely gorgeous gifts as per always <3 i cant wait for next time, i've literally started planning my next challenge (this time i used exclusively synths and rompler instruments, so next time for miniclash i want to make a bunch of tracks ONLY using samples that i personally curate or record myself.

i figured out a LOT about my creative process and motivations through this challenge. things like:

• i talked about this on mastodon too, but the structure of art exchanges tells me a LOT about what information is actually needed to make my own works, too. this does not come naturally to me by default. like... oh, it's easy to draw a character when someone gives you a full body reference with turnarounds?!?! no way :O :O :O for music specifically, i asked people for 3 songs that remind them of their character/ship, and any additional instruments/details they'd like. if they didn't provide any, i just picked songs from my own music library to function as the anchoring point. and then i realised... wait. shit. i could just do this? for my own music?!?!?! it's kinda weird like it's basically, i feel sort of like my artistic process is very much consciously mashing existing materials together. like, i dont do well if i dont have something i can visualise and shoot for. i sort of feel like my musical process is chewing up songs and spitting them back out in new forms.
• i need extended time to be hyperfocused rather than trying to be consistent. i had three weekends, basically, where almost all i did was compose. the rest of the week there was no obligation or plan to do anything. I could just compose if I wanted to. or I might find a peripheral thing to do on a busy day that's related but more relaxed, like listening to music related to the current composition, using the chord writing app on my phone Or humming melodies into my sound recorder. it was fucking AWESOME. my partner and I have both been enjoying having these hobby evenings where we just get to focus on things that we're working on in parallel. body doubling! yippee! I still don't know the healthiest way to do this step cause yeah, i didn't forget to eat or drink or anything like that, but my sleep got... super fucked. but it seems like I need to ration out my time in all my other areas of life so that I can spend as much time as possible just on this one thing. and potentially actually use the accommodations that have been recommended to me as an ADHD person like actually using the flexible hours I have at work....... or currently right now I just switched to the voice dictation on my device (you'll notice because suddenly my Is are capitalised) because my wrists were cramping from typing after a very extended mixing session yesterday. so yeah I guess I still could have taken more breaks to avoid that... it's a work in progress lmao
• it felt vaguely connected to some of my spiritual findings because I've always seen 'flow' as like being possessed by a force that is yours, but that you may not have a huge amount of control over. and like the intense concentrated wild bursts that involve a lot of Ritual, like moving the space around to fit the current activity or brewing the tea that i associate with my creative energy, feels more befitting when envisioning art as a sigil or hypersigil, or a communion with whimsy, demons, deities - yknow? this affords a seriousness to the challenge that made it feel very authentic and important in a way that got me past the finish line.
• this was pretty much precisely the kind of challenge that felt feasible but not completely worthless if I didn't manage to get everything done. it was also challenging enough that I wanted to prove my modest expectations of 'maybe enough for an EP at most?' wrong. I spent probably more time per attack than I ever have for previous CCs, with an average of about 7.5 hours per track. but in the context of music making as a whole, the last big project I finished took the same amount of time for less than half the amount of music. in fairness, i have a ways to go with mixing and mastering these tracks (this is what listening fatigue does to a bitch. do you want some music to go with your compression?), and that previous time was the time taken for the WHOLE project. but still!
• yes, i love showing off and having an audience. but even better, i love an audience that is small, curated, and friendly. non-competitive online art events are absolutely perfect for this, especially if there is a gifting element. i have desperately been seeking similar stuff in music communities. but it's hard to find. in music production and composition, it often feels like everythings a competition. everythings about exponential improvement and growth, which just makes my teeth itch and makes me think about my line of artistic improvement being Stonks.

(last year, i submitted to a small, for-fun music competition and every entry got critiqued as a 'gift' from the organiser. this was not laid out in the competition terms, it was purely a spontaneous decision. it didn't feel like a gift to me though! it felt like a violation. i didn't know that was the type of space that was being encouraged. i mean also it kinda felt like the rug was pulled out from under me. like if i'd known this, i would have spent way more time on perfecting the track so that anything another person caught was genuinely new information to me. I've previously thought that my hostility to critique is something that has to be eventually trained out of me because it's not becoming of a good artist to reject advice that might help. but at this stage of my life, i honestly don't know if i want to be 'a good artist', i want to be AN artist and I would rather feel safe to make things i want in the limited time i have for my creative practice. for me 'safe' forms of creative improvement originate from just making shit, trying new techniques, doing my own research into the typical rules or best practices (even if i diverge from them later), and trying to learn from the art that other people made. I also don't necessarily think that I am the most moved by stuff that is the most technically accomplished - though of course I will still look at art by others and see that as a goal. but 'look/sound more like this artist' is a much clearer goal than 'master the entirety of my craft on every level'.

I also think that there is definitely a distinction between this type of online art space that has a DIY art school vibe by default, versus asking a trusted person or group for their opinion when you are ready. i think the latter also requires you have some intentionality and self-reflection in terms of what you actually want your piece to do and where you intuit that it may be falling short but you dont know how to fix it, as opposed to a blanket 'please tell me everything that is Objectively Wrong with this contextless piece of art', which is often how it feels when i receive an unsolicited critique. the impersonality of it makes me ironically more likely to objectively adhere to it. it has in the past made me much more hesitant, more timid.

sorry I have lots more, slightly defensive and prickly thoughts about the purpose of critique in creative spaces, but I will leave them for now)

• making art in exchanges for both the gifter and giftee is a way to meet the social need of being noticed and acknowledged and complimented by another person. whoa :O no way :O but for real, i never realised how mutual this is until actually a bunch of people said some very lovely things about my music (even people whom the gift wasn't for!). i think previously i had seen this aspect of the art exchange as mechanically transactional or only possible through the gamification of the exchange event. but i am much more willing to romanticise it after this year's CC. it is truly truly an act of love.

the other thing is i figured out a lot about my creative identity over the course of... simply making shit and not having much time to think too hard about it. this has been a huge issue for the past few years as i have realised, i have this space online, this dimension to me, that almost nobody IRL knows about. i keep putting endless thought and guilt into these huge vanity projects that will prove my worthiness, that i have NOT crashed out, that i have NOT failed, that i HAVE lived up to the potential that people saw in me. previously this is something that caused me a lot of angst.

but i look at the only artwork i released this year that is actually tetherable to my face and name. you know what it was? it was a cry for help. it was a begging, pleading desire to notice my failing mental health and the horrible state of the world. not exactly a resounding claim to success! lol!

currently i could not care less about being visible with my real face and name. a few different inspirations have led me to embrace anonymity as something actually very cool, something that can itself be an artistic and political statement in a world of increasing mass surveillance and censorship, especially on the internet.

so... yeah. im currently crafting a musical alter ego. my artist name is going to be Manaconda, and my persona (two steps from being a fursona lol) is a masked man who is also a snake.

this whole thing has absolutely ignited me creatively because i realised i could unite all of my varied creative interests in a way which doesnt, like... necessitate doing crafts im less interested in at that moment in time. like... currently, i received a wonderful design for a superhero as part of CC, and i was ofc gonna make them a sexy villain to ship with, but what about a whole cross-genre comic book universe? no commitment to a huge overarching narrative, just fun isolated stories and projects, and all the characters and story arcs could have musical themes too! and my musical alter ego CAN BE a character in this universe! the serpentine malign cinematic universe...

anyway. things are going good. i hope this trend will continue 👍

Comments

[mossy_bench]

I'd never heard of creativeclash, but this sounds so incredibly cool.

my mark was over every single thing i made, and it didn't matter that it happened to be based on other people's ideas and stories. (you could even say this is just. the philosophy of transformative fan culture as a whole. more typical professional Art(tm) spaces could never!)

HELL YEAH

And I agree with you too re: non-competitive creative spaces in general being great. Looking forward to hearing more from Manaconda at some point :)

[serpentinemalign]

I highly recommend it! :D They have "write/draw your own ocs" events in November/December and they usually do a mini clash around march!

Thank you!! Hopefully that will be very soon, I'm very excited to get the tracks polished :D