Writing in a fishbowl

While I am very much enjoying my rediscovery of musicianship, I’ve also found the process somewhat lonely at times. I’m extremely fortunate to have the tools at hand to enable my creativity, but the responsibilities of life: job, parenting, family, etc., mean that the prospect of performing music for people in a live setting is tricky. Certainly I’m not really prepared for such exploration at the moment.

So instead I’m investigating social media avenues, and over the long weekend I’ve been experimenting with live-streaming from my studio. It’s been an interesting experience so far.

The first thing I noticed is that the simple mechanics of running a video stream out of my studio makes me much more aware of what I’m actually doing from moment to moment. Not sure whether that’s a good thing or not. I’m cognizant of the fact that it would be all too easy to let this become a performance, and that’s not really what I’m wanting to do. At least not for now. I have to remind myself that I’m creating not performing. I think with practice I will relax into it.

It’s interesting to work while streaming though. Mostly I’m streaming to nobody, which isn’t unexpected. I just started doing this. It’s not like I’ve got much of a following. Occasionally I look up and there is a viewer or two. Usually they don’t tend to say much or stay very long. Which is fine. What I’m doing is slow, not particularly visual, and certainly not polished. It’s not mainstream Twitch fare. It’s a better fit to twitch than YouTube though. Again, YouTube seems like a place more for performance than something as process oriented as what I’m doing.

It was interesting tonight, however, that a roaming channel wandered by and stayed for a while. I’d forgotten that this was a thing that happens on Twitch. So when a small van full of people stopped by in the middle an early improv, it was kinda nice to say hi. To a kid who grew up in the 80’s it was kind of a Max Headroom moment, a reminder that I live in the cyberpunk world which used to be fiction.

A small tour bus stops by the studio…

Also, on the music side of things, I’m really digging the combination of a baritone guitar played with an E-Bow. Lots of expressive possibilities as the sound can shift from soft and synthy to brash squalling harmonics with just a subtle shift of the wrist. Indeed, it’s got an organic unpredictability which adds just the right kind of chaos to the proceedings.