Well now... hello 2023. When was the last time I posted one of these, eh? But of course there's no great mystery about that: the answer is, nine years ago (minus one day). Hmmm, and if you haven't read that one already, maybe don't bother with it now, as it will in all probability prove completely unreadable*; given how the rest of the year ended up, at least from the blog's point of view, it can at best be regarded as something of a false dawn anyway... better examples are available, from previous years. That was, however, the last time I did one - until now.
It always felt, during the blog's long slumber, as if it would probably awaken eventually, but as the years rolled by that had begun to seem less and less likely. So it rather took me by surprise when it actually happened. Now: what am I really looking to achieve at this point?
What I would like to achieve is to demonstrate that it is possible to draw meaningful and worthwhile conclusions about complex music without formal training (... and without psychoactive assistance, ahem).
I genuinely am not sure to what extent that is possible, however - or at least, whether it is possible for me. So I suppose what I am really looking to establish is, precisely, whether it is possible - or not.
In the meantime, what I shall be doing here is continuing the recent trend: some observations on specific recordings (which will hopefully become more detailed over time), some musings on non-specific aspects of B's work, or of creative music in general; some commentaries on pieces of video footage, some comments on new releases or whatever else might come up... that kind of thing. In the massively unlikely event that anyone out there is still waiting for the Braxtothon itself to continue, I can't see how that would ever happen now. (There are several reasons for this, and/but I'm not about to enumerate them here.) On the other hand, I would like to think that I am capable of rising to the double challenge of engaging with the composition notes more (at last...), and of trying to get to grips with the substantial collection of bootleg tapes which was passed on to me more than a decade ago now (FFS), and which I never did find the time to deal with. I may or may not be able to wrangle the Tri-Axium Writings (being, as I am, a piss-poor excuse for a scholar**); that remains to be seen... but one way or another, I have amassed rather a large collection of B's recordings over the years, and I'm still adding to it, and it seems only fitting to keep on writing about them. Above all, I find that I want to keep writing about B's music. So I will. Who knows, (some of) it may even turn out to be readable...
Onwards!
* It may literally be unreadable, given that it's barely comprehensible even to me... written as it was not only under the influence of cannabis, but in the bewildering intensity of - what was at the time - my first smoke in six months. I had not greatly enjoyed being "straight" for all that time, and seized the first chance I got to fall off the wagon - but, as fate would have it, that turned out to be a most inopportune time for it (not that that stopped me, of course, once my mind was made up). We never did find out what caused dog #2/whippet #1 to suffer his phantom back injury - subsequent investigation by an expert found absolutely nothing wrong - but... well, anyway. On this occasion, more than ever before, I found myself on the horns of a dilemma, to wit: getting high allowed me to hear music with extraordinary clarity, but greatly reduced my ability to communicate effectively, whether by speech or in writing. Instead I would convince myself that what I was coming out with made sense, since although (by now) it never came out the way I wanted it to, I could always adjust my thinking to the point where it made sense to me, and therefore a patient enough reader would be able to follow my cognitive twists and turns and end up seeing what I - god knows why I ever thought that anybody would bother even to try, but there we are. I can only apologise for the state of some of the posts in the "middle years"...
** Just in case anyone thinks this is British false modesty: it really, really isn't. A number of people observed about me when I was younger that I was too clever for my own good. I used to wonder what the hell they were talking about - and I never stopped to wonder for long. But I presume what they meant was that I was clever enough not to have to try properly, or learn properly. For a long time I was able to finesse my (undoubted) potential into a temporary, somewhat illusory state of over-achievement, but eventually it reached the point when I was actually expected to make good on that potential, and of course at that point I discovered that I couldn't - I had never learned how, and I wasn't about to find out (at a time when all I generally wanted to do was get high, listen to music and chase girls, more or less in that order). So the basic tools of the scholar - which include being able to read complex texts quickly and with a high degree of retention, for example - are pretty much a mystery to me. I can read complex texts, but it is harder work for me than it "should" be... in the end I escaped from university with a decent degree, but that was more down to luck than anything else, and the stress involved in getting to that point resolved me never to put myself in that situation again. I did, eventually, flirt with (some form of) scholarship on this blog - something which B. himself was gracious enough to recognise. But, again, when it came down to seeing it through...
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