Phone It In
New South Wales, Australia
Check Out the Album
Original Concept:
Amidst living a new life halfway across the world from where i'm used to, how close can i come to meeting the Rule of 40 by starting half a month late, writing songs as fast as i can whenever i can find time, and then just recording them live with no post-production on my phone?
Only the next 9 days can tell ...
Artist Post-Game:
Well, apparently the answer to the question above is about 28 minutes short. :D
This year was difficult for me, but i still had some fun with it. There were a lot of factors that affected my time, energy, and (to be honest) inspiration to create this year. I was excited about the _idea_ of this, our 10th year of the annual InCoAlMo challenge, but i felt like i had some blocks and setbacks from feeling jazzed about the musical possibilities that i had in mind.
That said, as the month went on and i couldn't seem to get any of my ideas to take root, i tried to really just embrace the core underlying idea behind InCoAlMo in general (and The Rule Of 0 in particular): creating something is better than creating nothing. That's when i finally gave things a go, and after getting a couple of songs underway, finally officially registered for the challenge.
Process-wise, just focusing on writing, playing, and super-simple recording was a nice change; it really let me engage more with the most-fun parts of the process. It meant really limiting my instrumentation, layering (none), and post-production (almost none), but made the whole endeavor much less daunting. That said, it did pose the problem of really having to be able to perform the music live; there was no option to overdub, comp, or make complex edits. This was really the single biggest challenge to production, especially on the somewhat-complicated instrumental track (which, because i wanted a metronome, actually required _two_ phones (as did the album cover)).
All told, i'm pretty happy with the product (under-12-minute runtime notwithstanding). I wrote a couple of neat little tunes, had fun with them, and got to throw another drop of music into the ocean to add to the background radiation of the universe. It's also got me thinking about how i might try to leverage this type of creative freedom on future projects.
Thanks to all my fellow InCoAlMo artists who helped inspire me — especially this year — to keep it Real.