Filling the Creative Space

As is my wont, I have been sidetracked from one of the many projects  I should have been finishing, into a new little project that reached up and grabbed me last weekend. I started recording a long instrumental using just my Roland Juno 6 Synthesizer, and it ended up as a 25-minute piece reminiscent of the multiparted Tangerine Dream influenced electronica I recorded (with pretty much the same setup, give or take an effects processor or two) in the mid-80s. (e.g. here and here).  This has now morphed into a new quickly recorded album which I'm expecting to finish just over a week after starting.

As ever with a new project its not as simple as just the music or the writing - there is the whole stuff around it. What is it called? What is it about? (Given that the instrumental has no words...this is important). How do I present it? (On its own? As part of an album of contemporaneous stuff?) And each of these decisions creates more decisions. I've long wanted to call an album "the Return of the Juno 6" as both a factual description of my much beloved synthesizer (though its never entirely gone away), and as a bit of a spoof western title. Who are or were the Juno 6? I guess like Magnificent 7 or Hateful 8 it depends on who you're talking to and at what time. I like the idea of the "Juno 6" being like Neil Young's Crazy Horse, coming together when the need arises then going their separate ways. Yet there's just me here - so the "six" is that imaginary band that I've never quite got together - and probably as much about different versions of myself as anything else - or maybe its my influences.

So with the music almost completed, a title and a cover concept in the works, I find that the graphic art on the cover lacks something. It needs some kind of image for the centre piece - but what is it? Stringing together pictures of influences was my first idea.

Here we have Vaughan Williams, John Denver, Robert Southey, Delia Derbyshire, Pierre Henry and a teenage version of myself, all with some oblique influence on the words and music within. (And it is oblique: there's a John Denver sample on a track I don't think I'm going to use or finish, whilst Robert Southey told the first story of "Goldilocks" which relates to a single line of a particular song.) But that doesn't feel right either. 

I'm going to go for something more abstract - some collage. I've always loved Frank O'Hara's poem "Why I am not a painter". where the poet visits his friend, the painter Mike Goldberg. Its as good a description of the creative process as you'll find. "It's got sardines in it", says Frank, "yes, it needed something there," tMike replies. He visits again. The sardines have gone. "It was too much," says Mike. When the painting is exhibited its called Sardines. Of course, they are no longer there, but they were there, during the process. It is enough. But its as much that first thing: what was there during the process - that need for something there.

I think any artist will recognise it. You've wrote a piece, or painted something or made a collage, or a piece of music, but its just not yet itself. Whereas Michelangelo could see the finished piece in a piece of marble, the blank page is multifarious, it could become anything. Why and how it becomes this rather than that is what is part of the process. So my cover for "Return of the Juno 6", even though its unimportant, needs something in it, and its not a collage of famous influences. It wouldn't surprise me if it takes me longer to get this sorted than the writing and recording of the album itself, yet in some ways its the same process. The beauty of writing instrumental rather than lyric music is that the something you need has to come from the music, whereas its always possible to scat sing your way over the top of an otherwise uninspiring bassline or chord sequence. Sometimes its the non-tangible, the metadata that matters....so that my song "John the Replicant" only made sense right at the end when I appended that title to it; (it also was the last track recorded for the "Traipses" album which waited about a year for it to come along.)

The more we find out about famous albums we realise how non-sequential they are: that songs are sometimes hangovers from years before; and I guess as writers and painters we are jealous with our creativity, we hoard our good ideas; like a decent farmer, in times of abundance we store them away - and don't tell our neighbours - bringing them out only at another time, when there's a creative space to fill and we need something to fill it.