Why monolog? Why everyday and why the Clavia Nord Modular?
A problem has occurred in recent years that we are now all to familiar with, a problem of an ever increasing amount of distractions. These distractions can be anything from emails, social networks, that cool new app you can’t live without, a new gadget giving you something you didn’t think you needed before, whatever this distraction decides to disguise itself as, being able to beat this fiend known as ‘procrastination’ and find time to actually make things happen is becoming increasingly difficult.
I am someone who suffers with this contagious virus that spreads like it’s Z-Day. I am also very hard on myself and don’t want to feed on the brains of everyone else’s interests, and want to create something interesting of my own. So is born this blog.
Well…I call it a blog, but is it?
For me a blog is more than frequent posts about something I am doing to cause distractions for others, and is more a small community of ideas, a place for ideas to be shared and inspire. The obvious way for this to happen is through the involvement of others mainly through commenting, and as you might have noticed this blog has none…yet.
This lack of commenting is partly the reason it is called Mono-log. It is a log of my creations, my ideas, a documentation of a project that is planed to last only a year. I do plan on putting in commenting and so if you are reading this it will either already be in place, or will be hopefully coming very soon, and then for me it will function like a proper blog should.
It is also a pun on my very nature of my talking a great deal, and normally with my partner preferring to play her iPhone(iMdistracted) occasionally responding with an aptly timed “oh yeah”. (She’s amazing :)
During one of these ‘monologues’, I was discussing with my partner Lucia, how I wanted to use something creative each day, (much like Taylor Deupree and Marcus Fischer had done previously) to insist a discipline on myself and to be able to create something as a result of this discipline. Ultimately I wanted to spend more time doing my ideas, and less time merely thinking about them.
I also wanted to do something more than simply doing anything, unlike those that had inspired me, I felt limited in what could achieve creatively, (doesn’t everyone) and so wanted to find something specific that I have often found little time doing previously. Lucia suggested why not create sounds in the my synthesiser the Clavia Nord Modular…genius.
I have owned the Nord Modular for many years, and although I have used it on occasion, have always found it difficult to find the time in sitting down with it and really exploring it. The Nord Modular, being a software/hardware version of a modular synthesiser, demands a building of sound from nothing. Using building blocks such as oscillators, envelopes, LFO’s and various other tools, sounds are slowly created.
To create something in the Nord Modular, can easily be time consuming, so to create something everyday for a year, is exactly the challenge I was up for. Being a long time fan of Nord products, at least the early ones, I love their sound, the usability and the work from many artists that use them extensively in their work.
So on January 1st 2012, while feeling somewhat despondent to not have either hover boards or be living in beautifully minimal white worlds, creating something in the Nord Modular each day seemed like the next best thing.
