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Re: How often do you listen to your own music?



great David!

I started looping to create a background for my exercises to cure my back pain
and even a year later I kept saying that it was not music, just a sound carpet
but when I came to Rio and played with Marcio Miranda, I felt it turned into music
and I started feeling the mission to cure people with it. 
I played for therapy and even in hospital (which did not work out because too many different people needed too different music) and claimed that I was able to channel music for listeners
but when my wife did not want me any more, I stayed for 3 days in my room looping and came out ready for new life.  
and when I wrote the manual for the LOOP delay, I added a chapter "self therapy"
(which Gibson then did not adopt for the Echoplex, calling it "loop religion")

later when the fanatism passed, I had big doubts again whether I really felt the public or simply had an impression about them...

but certainly, its a big difference to play alone and to play for listeners!

and I suspect that many artists that entered history had the impression they were doing "journaling" as you call it! a very personal story can become relevant for humanity, independent of the intention…


On 28 Jul 2012, at 9:22 PM, David Coffin wrote:

I could suddenly get what my music-making had been driven by and what it was for: my own emotional health. My development as a musician wasn't at all the real motivation, nor was my output really intended for anybody else. The whole craft/skill issue that I'd imagined was behind my obsessive and extensive home-studio time was nothing compared to the raw "self-_expression_" that I was engaged in. I saw and heard how other people's music could never be quite as precisely designed for my personal emotional universe as my own creations, no matter how exquisite.

Also I could see that playing my tracks for others was the musical equivalent of discribing my dreams; in other words, they were almost always going to be really interesting only to me. Simply being perfectly expressive of myself was no ticket to universal interest, nor was this the royal road to "Art". THAT was bracing--good to know! The dimly recalled quote, from Freud I think, to the effect that if someone could truly succeed in bringing his dreams to life, he would be the perfect artist, seemed to be thoroughly disproved. Or maybe it was simply that journalling isn't art-making; hadn't realized that was all I was really doing. Still sorting that one out, all these years later. And mostly listening to other folks' "real" if necessarily "generalized" or "approximate" music; it bears much more repetition:) Still, there's still no real equivalent to the custom-made audible "medicine" I used to make.

I wonder if anybody reading here can relate...?

dpc



On 28 Jul 2012, at 4:16 PM, kay'lon rushing wrote:

I guess this is a rather odd question but I'm curious. Do you only listen to it for improvement? Or do you enjoy listening to yourself just as you would listen to an artist you like?