State of the aggregate


The Natural Aggregate is a project that has taken a back seat in recent times. The evidence for the decline is clear, with the last release a single assembled from a shortfilm OST in September 2015, and the only other follow-up to the May 2014 EP being a contribution to the Red.Soul remix EP in December of the same year.
                     
Although these two satellite releases, which equate to a mere three tracks, do take the opportunity to express some different ideas that came since the EP, nothing has come close to becoming a holistic, coherent body of work.

It’s around four years since I began the process of producing the 10,000 Little PopstarsEP. And in the time since its release, I’ve felt the pathetic obligation to release music fall away and in its place, has emerge out-and-out guilt at not following-up this EP effectively.

I’ve thought a lot about where this vacuum has come from. It’s possible to blame commitments to other projects or my work, however I feel these explanations are limp. If something was pressing enough, I would have felt the need to address this. It was this thought that completed the circle for me; as I didn’t have anything significant to express, I expressed nothing.

10,000 Little Popstars, although conceived as a university project, did communicate a message that was important to me. It concerned my environment at that time, the peers I collaborated with and the academic setting I worked within. It was an opportunity to leap out of the sideman status that is home to many bass players and say ‘this is what I sound like’.

Having left university and entered the real world of work, I have learned a great deal about my character and I have never ceased to be a student. I feel equipped to re-enter the fray and produce a new body of work, with a new set of ideas that are important to me.

In this blog, I will be cataloguing highlights in any research I carry out and I will be transparent about my journey through the ideas that will inform the writing and production of this work. I endeavour to post as frequently as possible, however I would recommend checking in with me on Facebook or Twitter to learn more about what’s going on.

Yours naturally, Martin

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why would you say that?

Image
Could Facebook be putting words in your mouth? One of the questions at the centre of this project is Do we need to change our attitudes to publishing online? The term ‘publishing’ tends to create thoughts of the gatekeepers of the printing press, with ability to transform you into the next JK Rowling.  The reality is we all publish every single day, submitting an array of media from text and images to audio and video, in the form of tweets, posts and statuses. If you so much as post a comment on social media, you are publishing online. Arguably the most prominent social media platform is Facebook. With over two billion active monthly users , it has rapidly transformed over the past decade or so from a directory of your friends, to a source of news, entertainment and much more. Its success is founded upon the idea that everything is better with friends, as well as several definitive innovations, most famously the News Feed. Once upon a time, Facebook’s New...
Read more

Convenience always costs

Image
It’s time for you to meet Jaron Lanier, computer scientist and virtual reality  pioneer . Several of Lanier’s ideas sit at the very centre of this project’s philosophy; these will be explored in-depth later. Since the publication of his first two books You Are Not A Gadget and Who Owns The Future? Lanier is often asked to explain and expand on his criticism of social media sites. 1 Given Facebook’s most recent presence in the press, it made sense for Lanier to speak out about the company. Speaking to CNBC in the US, he encouraged support for those leaving Facebook and reassured us that there is life after the social network: “We’re not citizens of Facebook, we have no vote on Facebook, it’s not a democracy and this process is not a way we can design the future, we can’t rely on this single company to invent our digital future in such a big way. When people delete, it’s not so much that they’re effective protesters, it’s that they’re inventing what life can be like witho...
Read more