I’m starting to see two trends in my work… and they are differentiated by control. Control relating to audience, control of materials, medium, concept, ambiance, site, whatever. In most of my music and video work (until now and sometimes still now) I am a control freak. I want to guide the viewer or listener, I want to control what they think and how they feel and when they breath. I think that this is a somewhat natural tendency for many artists. It shows ability and skill, it is difficult to do, and well conceived control can have an immediate and profound effect on people. Control is generally why people cry in movies, why we all liked postal service, and why cute kids sell cereal… strrrreeetch.

But lately, influenced somewhat by certain people (big and small), but more so by the work I’ve been thinking about and possibly even a dusting of maturity, I am interested in losing some of that control in some of my work.  Losing control is scary.  But, it is also one of the best ways to learn things.  By letting things happen instead of forcing them to happen, or by creating a construct within which things happen, you are offering work with the potential to reach something that might be new and different, might be thought provoking and sublime, and might very well be just be bad.  By relaxing my grip on craft and ability and my forever practiced and obsessively polished set of skills,  I have started to make some art that I can actually watch (if you know me well you would know that I would usually rather eat sawdust then listen to my music).  So, I’m going to try out some new approaches once in a while (quite publicly even) and see where it goes.

Now, I can’t entirely give up all control right away, that’s just plain crazy talk at this point.  My less controlled ideas are still fairly controlled in comparison to the standard canon of experimental (chance based, minimal, site dependent, difficult) pieces out there… but I’m working at giving up some of the control, taking myself out of the thing for a change and letting concept take a bow once in a while.  Even if while concept is taking a bow he is being pelted with tomatoes and other brightly pigmented vegetables.

There is a chance that I could be wrong about a lot of this… and there is always a pretty good chance I could be going a little insane (it is 4 in the morning and I am waiting for after effects to finish rendering a ‘very controlled’ sequence, so I can composite it and finish my ‘ultra controlled’ (will probably post in the next few days) video/music thing.)

just thinkin’ aloud, you know, blaaarging along…