Freak Guitar Lab: Kintsugi

 

Kinsugi is the Japanese art of repairing things like broken ceramic goods with gold to keep them, useable, but also "a reminder to stay optimistic when things fall apart and to celebrate the flaws and missteps of life".

That is a wonderful philosophy.  

Last night Mattias uploaded his track Kintsugi to YouTube. He gives me a credit, but the video I took in Osaka of him is really such a small part of this video:

For the love of Japan I put together a tune called Kintsugi, celebrating imperfections and the impermanence of all things.

Filmed by Yogev Gabay (Sweden) and Adrian S. Bruce (Japan).

Much thanks to Keiichi Ishida and the crew of Zanshin Musical Instruments for everything.For more information about Freak Guitar Lab and the Ulv guitars, please visit https://freakguitarlab.com/ 

A really small part, must only be a few seconds.

Mattias brought this track to Japan in early May. He seems to work on many things at the same time in his Freak Enterprise, like recording tracks and videos, preparing for, then doing his Freak Guitar Camp, handling his online store, promoting his guitars, other clinics or performing.  Kintsugi is quite a complicated video to edit together, but he has done more than a few of similar complexity, so guess it didn't take him as long as it would me to do. From the little I heard of it in May to the release yesterday has been 4 months. Think it indicates just how busy he keeps himself  "being a modern, successful, musician in the age of streaming and social media". 

What a guy! 😮

Listening carefully I can hear a synth part or three in there as well as the Toontracks drums and guitars. The kind of thing I do too. Not as skillfully though!

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology

A Creative Exercise: Music-Comics

 

For many weeks I have been regularly making some short piece of music that I can pull out an under 60 sec clip from to use as the soundtrack to one of my Music-Comics.  60 seconds is the limit to upload to X/Twitter, which is by far the simplest way of showing the 1 or 2 people that could possibly want to read/ hear them. Pretty sure most who view them have the sounded muted anyway. 

But I really do them as a creative exercise for myself. Making stuff keeps me a "Happy Camper" and these are not massively time consuming things to do.

Ola Englund: Sunday With Ola, weekly opening music was a way for him to force making music into his schedule, and sub sequentially release his CHUGG PROJECT albums.  This is something like that, but not as regular, or for any real audience.

The music is made in Reaper with guitars and synths I have, The video is all made in MOHO Pro12 from a small collection of stuff I have made to do these with.  Mostly all first take things.  Make something, release it, move on.  Getting the 8 string increased my output for a while, as I practiced and got used to it. I always record and practice into Reaper anyway.

Of course I like some better than others.  All depends on what comes to me as I do one. 

I originally started just making square format YouTube shorts, as that is what YouTube encouraged, but they are undiscoverable by anyone doing that, and how many people get to see them is up to YouTube putting one in 10 peoples feeds for some hours after being uploaded, seeing if any play them to the end to determine if they show it to someone else (and taking into account what your subscriber numbers are and some other random stuff). 

So YouTube is all a "why bother" situation for me. I am not a fan of the portrait or square format either. I just prefer square to portrait, and if you upload a less than 60sec video that isn't like that, it isn't considered a "short".  

So this is what a Short Format looked like:

The other problem with shorts though, is they are 99% garbage. That seems to appeal to the largest audience, but not me. 

So what is this Music-Comics about?

Just trying to combine my interest in making music, with my interest in comics, and my dislike of doing time consuming animation, and rendering. Hate waiting for rendering.  The comics are really fast and easy to do in MOHO. This being the project for the Cubism thing at the top of the page here.

I currently have the waveform of the music as the background, and show the red playbar a wave player has. 

To the front of that is just something I feel like saying today.  Like a 3 panel comic strip in a newspaper, doesn't take long to read, and could say something that makes you think.  As far as I know, nobody else has done this format before. 

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology

Not going along with everyone else...

When I was a kid, the top of our street had a roundish area where several drive ways came and merged with the corner of a bend in a quiet road. Thanks to google street view I can show what it looks like above.

The 3 or 4 local kids would ride their bicycles around, and around, and around there.  During holidays I remember this activity starting early in the day, and going most of the days.  But, even as a kid, I found it entertaining for about 15 minutes at most. I don't remember there being any goal,  rules, or any kind of game associated with it to make it interesting.  It is what those kids did. They loved riding their bicycles. It wasn't just a tool to get somewhere that it was for me.  This was north shore Sydney where there were  no activities around, other than sports clubs,  churches or the pool/beach. And most of those were too far away to get too.

But during the holiday weekdays, mid morning, maybe it was 10AM, but I really have no memory of that, they showed this great science show Watch Mr. Wizard on TV.  

I loved it.

But I was alone in that interest. I remember saying, I'm going home to go watch Mr .Wizard ,  while the other kids were intent on their going around, going nowhere activity, and them saying something like "you're strange to watch that".

I didn't know of any other kid around me that watched it or cared.  But I found science cool!

I see on wikipedia it was popular.  Just not in the backward place I lived.

It was just another thing in my early life, that showed me that fitting into a crowd,  could be such a dumb waste of the opportunities available.  It seems many people are content to just "be". What drives them, and gives them contentment does not align with my own way of thinking at all.

There are some 33 million on X, (Twitter), but it seems to me, only around 1000 do anything at all actually worth posting about. Such a tiny fraction! The rest are busy with their going around, going nowhere, many with millions of followers, thinking the few that aren't  going around, going nowhere,  like them, are strange.

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology