Nathan Leigh [dot] Net

as i finished the latest tremendous seasons record last night, it occured to me. i have very very strange holiday traditions. i spend valentine's day watching star trek movies with my friend roman. i refer to halloween as "darkoween" and celebrate by listening to and/or performing the entire donnie darko soundtrack. i celebrate thanksgiving by eating vegetarian lasagna and playing scrabble. and i celebrate christmas by recording an offensive irreverent album of garage rock christmas songs with the world's best all jewish novelty garage rock christmas cover band...

not to mention passover and my birthday which i seem to spend massively ill every year.

i do spend the 4th of july blowing things up though. and new years dangerously intoxicated. so there are some american traditions i respect. anyone else have insane holiday traditions? i'd love to hear em. 

25 was a hard year. not a bad year. a hard year. some of the best days of my life, for sure, but also a year of hardship, frustration, disappointment and pain. i started the year by leaving my girlfriend of 4 years and moving out of our apartment and back in with my parents for a few months. the year ended with both my laptops dying, my car needing serious work, and far too many overdue paychecks "in the mail."

but there were good things on both ends too. the debate society's cape disappointment at ps122 started the year. one of my favorite shows i've ever worked on. not to mention the release of my full length "tell me something honey." and the year ended with the release of "glitch," recording a new series of EPs, and a very successful workshop of kyle and my new play "the consequences."

a year ago, i told friends i wanted to spend 25 doing the work, 26 promoting the work, and 27 actually enjoying some success. i think i'm actually on track. i've got a lot of big projects in the works, and i'm starting to get established in the new york scene. i've only been here 8 months but already some amazing people are starting to pay attention to my music.

i'm not sure what this year will be like. i don't have much concrete planned out beyond december. and yeah the past twelve months have been pretty rough, and i don't see it getting much easier any time soon. but i'm at least hopeful right now that it's all worth it, and i'm finally moving towards something.

my solo project has always been a repository for ideas i couldn't express somewhere else. when a thousand ships was on hiatus, i released a noisy electric album that no-one liked (a fine disaster). when we started up again, i did a techno ep (rants and raves vol. 1). when we were in full swing and i was getting hired a lot to work on plays with complicated electronic scores, i recorded a heavily orchestrated acoustic album (tell me something honey). but my love for glitchy electronica, noise, early emo, folk, hip hop, and randomness is something i've always sort of shoehorned into other projects, but never actually explored in full. mostly because i assumed no-one would want to hear it.

i recorded a remix of "let's get lost" about a year ago, and included it with some of the versions of "tell me something honey." it got generally positive responses, but i wasn't really sure what to do with it. when my good friend tim sullivan decided to use it in a dance piece and i started getting e-mails from his students, i realized that maybe it was worth releasing it on its own. i decided to take several of the songs i had written over the summer and work on them in the same style. the end result is the "glitch ep." over the process of working on it, i've really fallen in love with this genre, and the idea that the recording should embrace the medium. i think a recording on tape should sound like it's on tape and a recording done digitally should embrace the quirks of digital media. skips. clicks. noise. glitches. randomness and unpredictability. and as such, the length of an album shouldn't be determined by the expectations of physical media. if i only have 18 minutes worth of an idea, why can't i release an 18 minute album? why try to stretch it out to an arbitrary term known as "full length" and ruin 18 minutes of solid material with filler and unfinished ideas?

in this vein i've decided to record a series of eps over the next year to be released on the first of every month in 2010. "glitch" is the prologue. each ep will be a stand alone album with a beginning middle and end and will revolve around some sort of succinct theme, be it musical, conceptual, or lyrical. some may be 10 songs long. some may be 2 songs. i want to explore both new sounds and continue experimenting with the idea of "glitch pop," and at the same time embrace the death of the cd and try to figure out what that means for recorded music. will the idea of the iTunes LP save the full length album? or have we already irrevocably returned to the concept of singles and b-sides from the 50's? if my project is successful, i may never record another solo full length record again.

i tend to have a sort of love / hate relationship with my recordings so i apologize if i contradict myself. i'm proud of them, but embarrassed of them at the same time. like when you're a kid and you've done something wrong, but you're excited about the attention. that smug steve urkel smirk. how does writing emotionally honest, but lo-fi, abrasive, and frequently roughly performed songs jive with working in theatre where everything is about perfection and precision, not spontenaety and personal expression? the same reviews that praise my sound design and composition in theatre for being clever and meticulous tend to dismiss my own music for being rough and erratically produced. and it takes all i have not to e-mail reviewers and say "come on! look at the context. i don't have any money. of course it's all lo-fi. i record in apartments and basements. of course it's rough. you gotta lay your takes down quick so you don't piss off the neighbors."

for the past month or so i've been revisiting my backlog and trying to actually organize and archive it all for once. every few years i say i'm going to do it, get started, get distracted, and end up leaving it half done and as a result even more disorganized then when i started. i'm pretty close to done right now, so i have hope that this will be the one. we'll see. but it's been more than a little educational to actually listen to these songs again, some for the first time in 5 years. i find the ones i'd forgotten about - cut from a project, or just never finished - are the ones that hold up the best. the ones that i've held up as "important" to my life tend to be the ones with groan-worthy lyrics and out of tune vocals. mistakes all over the place, and generally incompetent production. but that doesn't make them bad necessarily. silent orbit's eps now sound silly, given how far my abilities as a producer have evolved, but they were a product of their moment. i still get e-mails from people who fondly remember those records. and as rough as they are, they still really resonate i think. but lo-fi music often holds up better in retrospect. i mean, let's be honest. does anyone actually like husker du now who wasn't around back in the day? and as much as i worship lou barlow, some of his stuff is just terrible. malkmus is the exception. the higher the production values his albums have, usually the worse they are.

ultimately lo-fi is about immediacy. it's not about sitting in the studio and trying to perfect the sound with take after take. it's not about creating something who's sound will hold up through "the ages." it's trying to get the take that feels the best and just capture a moment in time. it's about saying "look how much i was able to do with nothing!" not trying to ape the sounds of studios with a hundred times your budget. because that's just not interesting for me. in my "day job," i write music that gets poured over. analyzed. rehearsed. discussed. broken-down. injected, detected, neglected, and selected. i lose sleep about noise floor. and complain endlessly about not being given the right microphones and speakers to work with. and a lot of people in the theatre world don't even know i've recorded albums and play shows every week. and when they find out they always ask "why didn't you tell me? i would have come to your shows!" and i always shrug and say "you didn't ask." but really i just don't want them to know that at heart i don't care about using the "right" microphone. i think rehearsals are boring. i'd much rather get something that feels emotionally genuine than is technically acurate. and yeah, it's great to have a hi-fi recording of an emotional performance if you've got the resources, but sometimes a little bit of noise and distortion gives a recording character.