This week’s session was mostly spent watching the film Bleep, which was about the history of game audio. I found some of it interesting regarding working within extreme limitations, but a lot of it was people saying the same thing over and over in different languages which kind of made my interest falter a bit. In this session though we did go through everyone’s concepts and where everyone was up to, and it made me come to the realisation that I am way further behind than I would like to be, because I still didn’t really have a concept nevermind having started working on anything particular. While the movie was playing, I started to read interviews with Will Long from Celer, doubling down on him being the focus of my paper in a way.
- “It seems to me that the most important thing to learn is that nothing ever changes.”
- “Eventual Needs is about realizing how much you need someone after they’re already gone”
- “Melancholy, memories, the passing of time… Would you say that are these the keywords and the interpretative keys of this release?” “Celer: And every release… or life, in general, to put it more simply.”
I don’t want to conduct any interviews myself, I guess this makes it more difficult because it would mean I would have to read the quotes myself and make it clear in some way it is a quote but, I am not that kind of person that could conduct an interesting interview I feel, the questions would run out quite quickly. I guess I am not so much as interested with what people have to say about their work, moreso with what is gotten out of it, I find these personal connections more poignant and interesting than completely factual facets of life. But I like Will’s work a lot because of the interconnection between his personal life and work, it feels like his music is like a kind of public diary to share however he’s feeling, wherever he is.
I can personally inquire into that idea myself with the paper in this way, I feel like the loop format of his work has an interesting interaction with this diary format, the endless repetition of his work being a kind of preservation of the time that the work is based upon. I can inquire into this relation created by loops with archiving of time and space in this way through the use of Celer’s music, might be interesting to over-extract from his music and would make the hundreds of hours I’ve spent with it feel justified outside of pure enjoyment.
I started to write down some ideas freehand without reference or purpose, just getting down some ideas to serve as a base point. A lot of it was a little vague and some was a little unpalletable, but some ideas work more than others;
“Audio loops serve as a medium to fix a sound in time, suspended mid air only to repeat indefinitely, of course the degrading loop serves an interesting function to convey real time death of something, but the fixed, true loop conveys the same moment in time over and over again, the time it was made, the thoughts and feelings happening at the time of making it, the time, the place. The indefinite loop extends beyond when the CD runs out, when the file ends, the recording is a document of the loop, the loop is ephemeral happening somewhere elsewhere after it has been stopped. If suspended long enough, it’s like I was never there in the first place, I change while it doesn’t, attention wanders elsewhere.”