This is - apparently - so easily done: I slip back into an all-too-familiar pattern of treating the blog, and any music associated with it, as "work" and hence putting it off. Evidently it's not just habitual dope-smokers who suffer with habitual procrastination.
In entirely predictable fashion, it was the long-deferred Thumbscrew album which really brought this to the fore, but in truth it's been building and it just feels like a good time to admit that, get it out in the open. (Part of the blog's function for me has long been to delineate my own process, such as it is.) I wrote in early November about acquiring several releases featuring Braxwerks, and not only have I not managed to write about any of them yet, I haven't even been listening to them over the last few weeks. The Locals CD I bought, played once (and enjoyed it way more than I thought I would, when I first saw it had been released) - and then promptly shelved, because it's "work"... and therefore is mentally filed away in some sort of in-tray rather than in the enjoyment and recreation pile (where it properly belongs).
The actual underlying reasons for this are all far too obvious to be worth analysing here; it only feels worth confessing at all because it shows how quickly, how easily, I can slip back into an old and self-limiting habit.
Of course, there was also a complicating factor where Thumbscrew is concerned: having laid out my conclusions (such as they were for the time being) regarding the vexed question of the album's seventh track, I was almost immediately "set straight" by being pointed to a piece by Carl Testa on the TCF site - although it's not that simple*, and will stand further consideration at some point (not now... I'm already fed up of talking about it for a while at least). What this did do, though, was prompt me to think about my own activity, back when I was a far more active music blogger (during the 2000s especially). At the time, I regarded part of my own contribution as being to help clear up little details wherever I could, so that if someone posted, say, a live recording with incomplete or inaccurate information, and I was able to supply missing details or make some corrections, I would do this with the minimum fuss and as quickly as I could. There was never any element of criticism intended: rather, as I saw it, we were all part of the same community, which wanted basically the same things, and since I didn't tend to post much in the way of actual music, if I could help sort out some of the information surrounding it then so much the better. And I don't think most people took it as criticism, but I know ( = eventually found out) that some people did**. Anyway, I hadn't really though about this for quite some time, but I did find myself revisiting it recently... it's all useful material...
- Not that this has really got anything to do with why I'm stalling (again) over posting some observations on the actual music. No, that's just the sort of thing I do - still do, obviously. I'm not going to keep indulging myself in this, however. I only have to go back as far as September this year for a time when I was listening to B's music every day, and making my own daily life better as a result (as well as finding plenty to write about): before this newly-reacquired habit (of avoiding listening to music on the supposed grounds that I can't listen to it recreationally, but must always approach it with full focus and taking of notes) becomes completely crystallised, I am going to break it. So that's that.
***
Some people will remember my old friend Atanase, formerly the editor of the semi-legendary free jazz blog Church Number Nine. At the time C#9 was active, and for a good while thereafter, he lived in London - but he has long since moved back to his native Georgia (the country, not the US state). He does, however, play reeds these days. I'm not saying any more about that just yet..!
*All the article proves is that the band were justified in believing that they were indeed interpreting Comp. 61 - something which I didn't doubt in the end. This doesn't, however, mean that the handwritten score which the band had access to for purposes of recording their album actually represents the piece that was originally intended to be Comp. 61 - there are a number of features specified clearly in the composition notes which appear to be directly contradicted, or at best disregarded by that score... and that's not even mentioning the fact that the same tune had already been recorded under a different opus number. No, we're some way off having a proper answer to that question...
** One person in particular - not someone I'd ever dealt with directly - took the whole thing very personally and eventually made it clear that he thought I was just "finding fault" with him. This had literally never occurred to me - I mean that anyone might take it that way - and it came as a bit of a jolt. (I was still a few years away from being diagnosed on the autistm spectrum at that point..!)
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