International

Concept

Album

Month

This project will focus on my adventures, fascinations, and dreams, forged during my many recent visits to Iceland.  While Reykjavik will have a central role, I expect to also include observations and celebrations of Iceland's natural wonders, its open-hearted people, and its fascinating history that keeps pulling me back for more.

Will update this later after I've had some more time to reflect.

In my quest to balance my InCoAlMo goals against my personal goals for (what will very likely be) my final 10 months in Australia, i finally (8 days late) came up with a concept that might work for me.

This year's project will be focused on exploring, listening, and writing about local independent music.

The mission:

1) Seek and discover 12 regional indy bands with original material that i find engaging.

2) Write (and, if possible, record) a music review (equating to about 3.5 minutes of spoken material) on each band.

3) Attempt to see at least one of these bands perform live before the end of March.

This endeavor is definitely a new twist on the InCoAlMo challenge for me, but i think it might be a great way to both rekindle my love of finding obscure indy music and immerse myself deeper into my temporary home here in Australia.

I'm very happy to say that this year's project was exactly what i needed right now, and i'm definitely calling it a win (both for the challenge and for me personally).

I met all of my mission goals stated above, except for one trade-off: i dropped my band/track count to 6, but in exchange recorded much longer, more in-depth reviews.

The drive for this change of plan came as a result of two factors.  First, while i'm sure there are lots more local bands out there to be found, the research process was a little more decentralized and slower than i had expected, so finding material to review took more time that i thought it would.  Second, i shifted my planned review process from creating fully refined written reviews (which i thought i might record later if time permitted) to recording semi-improvised conversational reviews directly from pre-processed versions of my listening notes.  The combination of these factors gave me fewer bands to work with, but allowed me to more easily fill up an album's worth of "radio-show-like" content.

The result is a more laid-back recording covering fewer artists, but it allowed me to go into much more detail on the ones that i covered.  Given how busy my month was (outside of InCoAlMo), this also worked out well in terms of letting me complete a recorded version of these reviews within the Rules of 40, 30, 20, and 10. ... though i honestly still only barely pulled it off in time.  :)

As has been my practice since around 2020 or so, i am using the Rule of 0 only to allow myself to finalize mastering and handle the details of release (e.g., creating an album cover, writing liner notes, uploading to Bandcamp, etc.).

All in all, i'm very glad to have taken this unique route for this year's challenge.  I discovered some great authentic local music (including a few artists i'll try to catch live (again, in one case) if i can) while still getting to focus on doing something creative and music-related this March.

The concept is usually conceived towards the end.

This year I focused on just keeping the process fun and not a drag. I didn't force myself into any constraints or standards. Part of that is because I know I have certain standards I hold to anyway: no bullshit, sounds good to at least me if not to anyone else, something is better than nothing. In the end I'm happy with what I produced.

Could I have done more? On the one hand, yes. I had enough hours when I COULD have been working on this that I didn't that I clearly could have done more. On the other hand, no. I did what I was mentally capable of and I am not ashamed of the result. So, y'know, a win in that I made more music I like.

In other news, Voisona is freakin' amazing. Also, Helium Sequencer gets me closer to the DAW I need than anything else so far. Those two tools are MAJOR additions to my toolkit. Without these my output this year would have been substantially less.

I'm planning on playing this year and batting around a couple ideas. More to come...

My parents met at the Theatre Royal in the 1950s when dad was a pianist in the orchestra and mom was one of the Royalettes. This concept album is packed with songs and tunes reflecting some of my earliest memories of their memories of Dublin, which are still alive in me.

I just got laid off, so I'm gonna write some songs about finding a new way

Cars?