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Looper's Delight
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Well, I'm chiming in on this fairly late . . .
I figure that if you're playing "non-mainstream" music, you
pretty much need to figure that the majority of the population isn't
going to "be ready for it." They may like it over time, or they may not.
But if they haven't heard anything like what you're doing before,
there's going to be a little bit of a "learning curve." (I don't mean
this to sound self-congratulatory at all. I think that it's just common
sense. I wasn't particulary ready for Circle the first time I heard
'em.) Some will "not understand" it - yet wish to investigate; some will
just view it as an aberration.
I personally think that too much modification of your vision to
an "audience" is a potentially destructive and unhappy move . . . and it
often doesn't get you what you think that you want anyway.
That being said, I know that there is a little bit of a scene
for experimental music in Portland and Albany (?). My suggestion would
be to try and hook up with that scene and help expand and soldify it.
Then maybe move up and down the West Coast to Seattle, San Francisco,
LA, etc., as time and finances permit. Don't give up your day job.
The hooking up with a scene tends to ghettoize, but I'm not
really sure how else to deal with the fact of "unappreciative"
mainstream audiences. At least you'd be "preaching to the converted" .
. . or at least like minds.
The way I figure it, we're basically in the guerilla war mode.
No large scale operations for most of on this list. Go do what you do,
melt back into the surrounding countryside.
Enjoy what you do. Try to be happy doing it.
On a (slightly) tangental train of thought. Has anyone out there
read N. Slonimsky's "Lexicon of Musical Invective"? A sometimes scary
but mostly hilarious compendium of critic's (mostly scathing) reviews of
such slackers as Beethoven, Liszt, Stravinsky, etc.