Post-It Notes

The whole process of delivering 'Inlets' to the world has been extremely educational. Now that the album has been available for several weeks there are many ongoing threads I must attend to.

Firstly: I find myself constantly re-evaluating the Chameleon Lectra website and making adjustments. Two things still need to be addressed here - a clearer mapping of RMusic and PMusic and the development of the sketchBook area.

Secondly: 'Inlets' needs to be promoted. I have a series of ads in the Wire magazine arranged and I also plan to contact Resonance FM to see if I can do something with them. I must send out some review copies.

Thirdly: (and this tends to interfere with the previous two points) I am currently creating new music. This, in itself, involves an ongoing process of evaluation and selection.

What is clear from this post to myself is that I need to have an effective strategy to attend to all necessary areas. My advice to anyone getting involved in music creation and distribution, from what I have learned so far, is: be prepared to keep things flexible and be curious about new developments, both cultural and technological.

Canvassing

I read this in my email today (29th June 2004): 'Feast your eyes on the stunning 30-inch (diagonal) Apple Cinema HD Display—the largest high-resolution LCD ever designed for the personal computer.'

A 30 inch monitor is impressive by anyone's standards but what impressed upon me the most was the fact that in the future there will surely be no standard computer monitor - that the choice of monitor type will be governed by its utility.

I'm thinking about this mainly from an artist's point of view, which is, admittedly, a fairly rarefied view. But I often see the monitor as providing a 'frame' for a piece of work. Apple states that 'big ideas need big canvasses' but this is not universally true. It's an obvious comment but many of the most profound ideas, in art and elsewhere, have necessarily been represented through small or humble means. In art, for every 'Guernica' there is a 'Scream'.

Leaving aside the metaphoric implications of 'big is best', although we may make computer-based work which is fluid, indeterminate, ever-changing, for such work there is an even greater need perhaps to have a fixed and stable 'framing' device - and this is may be contingent upon monitor size. This is not to say that one cannot make works which are also non-determined in relation to their scale i.e. that are made to respond to a range of televisual dimensions but this would be a branch of the art in itself.

In essence what I am saying is that monitor size has become another variable - some artists will choose to keep this variable constant, some will choose to place it within the realm of chance.

But you cannot assume a fixed attitude to this new variable - not everyone will choose to make use of it because 'big is best'.

Launch

The Chameleon Lectra website was officially launched last Tuesday 8th June 2004. And so Motile's first CD 'Inlets' is now available to the world. I've had around 40 hits on the site in the first week but this hasn't been matched by sales, as yet. To paraphrase a character in a recent cartoon series: 'now my work can be ignored by 90 million people' ;-)

First Tracks

I have recently created a record label called Motile which is due to issue its first release, 'Inlets', very soon. One of the things this Blog will do is document the process of creating this record label.

Ever since I was a young child I've been in love with the gramophone record and it has long been my ambition to own a record label that released 'new' music in fresh formats. Finally, nearing the resonant age of 45, I've been able to bring together all the strands of my experiences, coupled with the development of new technologies, to take me to where I've wanted to be for a long time.

Since adolecscence I've been conceiving the world in terms of albums. 'The album' is my favourite creative unit (even better than 'the book'): a musical, and sometimes visual, statement of a way of describing the world.

To have a record label is therefore to have a means of publication for all those creative units. There are many problems and dilemmas naturally enough: problems of solipsism, copyright, distribution, saleability and so on. There are even problems of 'shape' - with the advent of digital downloads from iTunes and Napster et al, ideas of the album and ideas of the record label are changing through the use of new technologies.

But my overriding view is that it's worth it just to live an idea first formed so many years ago. If there's the opportunity to give something a shape, and a new one at that, let's take it before the music ends forever.