Eric Scott "Inner Radio" [Day 092] Day For Night

#92

Idea: Part of an Adobe Aftereffects QT movie, or Director Interactive piece for DFN, or, a gifbuilder stream online?

“I - - d - o - n - ‘ - t - - k - n - o -w--a-b-o-u-t--y-ou .”

Each word types irregularly in Falls-esque typewriter font, complete with type sounds and Carriage returns.

dreme092

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01.

Eric Scott :: Inner Radio. Day 092.

1991 saw release of the first disc in the Day For Night imprint, intro­duc­ing com­ poser Eric Scott to new music cir­cles with “3 Mains” (Day 001). A col­lec­tion of fif­t een suites and minia­tures arranged for piano and ensem­ble, these record­ings are con­ structed and emu­lated via lo-fi syn­thet­ ics and sam­ples in lieu of a proper cham­ ber orches­tra. For this mov­ing col­lec­tion of pieces, Eric adopted the genre “avantgarde-jazz-classical – an edgier and more insis­tent, anti­thet­i­cal cousin to easy listening.”

02.

Eric Scott :: Inner Radio. Day 092.

Inner-Radio A Library Inner Radio is an ongoing musical experiment...

On January 1st, 2014 I made the decision to chronicle the unknown musical activities taking place in my brain during all the waking hours until December 31st of 2014.

I should begin by noting that the idea of musical notetaking is not something I first experienced on that date.

I have been experienced in recording my musical ideas since I was 12. I always had tape recorders and treated them with great care and fascination. I recall making my first tape when I was 10 of myself and Daniel (my cousin who was 12), comprised of bits which we recorded comedically in hotel rooms and gas station toilets, while my parents drove us on a cross country summer vacation. [...I’ll never possibly begin to understand what could have happened to that first brilliant cassette. Vanished....] The recorder was my first version of iTunes, just laying over songs I would come across and capturing them with a mic before, at age 12, I figured out how to wire a pair of external connectors to my parents’ stereo cabinet, which allowed me to copy over anything from a turntable onto my portable cassette recorder without also hearing the hushed conversations taking place

Eric Scott :: Inner Radio. Day 092. across the room...(!).

My love of music making began promptly that same year, when I realized I was completely frustrated musically, by never having taken or shown an interest in learning an instrument. Now at age 12 I found myself wanting to sing all sorts of new musical ideas I was suddenly hearing, though I quickly realized I was also attempting to do this without even the faintest hint of a decent singing voice. [...My cassettes became very private after that, while I began working on improving upon my croak...] Learning the guitar by the frustrated age of 14 made it even more of an imperative that I also start to use this as the tool to explain my musical ideas with.

I turned to recording my ideas in my own musical shorthand for the rest of my life. Often, also turning them into full ideas and production once my studio skills came a few years later. But the idea of musical journal has never been too far away. It forced me to become extremely methodical about keeping a fully current library of these ideas, which are all carefully, named, categorized and flagged with keywords and tempos. I put a lot of time into coming up with this system because it never let me down.

Anyway, back to January 1st, 2014, when I found myself

thinking about a time back in 2001 when I had wanted to silence that “inner radio.” I thought it was a disruption in my conscious thought; possibly a conflicting voice competing for attention, and some of it just sounded so silly and obnoxious, that I found myself reacting often like an enraged hotel guest, complaining to the manager downstairs about the constant noise coming through the walls.

It occurred to me, upon this January 1st, that I’d never deliberately “acted” upon my musical instincts before, in any kind of regular way using the recorder, which is never far from my side. I wondered how many ideas like this pass through the freeway of my brain without a hint of a second notice. I figured there’s a great likelihood that a lot of inner musical censorship is always taking place, and as we all, know, the network censor always knows best. Right?

This involved taking a year off, in some ways, at least from other, competing activities. There was a tremendous amount of admin around the project, and creativity, of all sorts, were allowed to triumph even in a race against time. A proper measurement of my creative worth - as some sort of annual figure - appeared to be the prize at the end of the stick.

Needless to say, I was pursuing an experiment.

Eric Scott :: Inner Radio. Day 092.

Some tracks, upon review, were rough lumps of coal and were hummed, beatboxed, tapped, grunted or mumbled; usually a “session” anywhere from 15 seconds, to 2-3 minutes.

Day 092 is the project, as well as category-tag I gave to all improvised music created after 2014, where the loop or the ‘gem’ as the basis for the idea was at least captured, with variations and possibly other layers/tracks addressed as beatboxed samples. I recognized that this methodolgoy of work for me was my basis for the Mr. No-Logo grooves in the show Epiphanies so I also expected to (later) re-discover more than a few MNL tracks buried in there, from using that approach.

Day 036 is the category I later assigned to the other tracks would immediately turn into guitar or piano sessions, sometimes resulting in multiple takes at times.

These would last between 7-15 minutes, usually. I allowed myself to take the instrumental sessions a little more seriously with that second category, as it presented the song as possibly ready to enter the ranks of a live set.

I saw myself crafting a possible live set I could play, just something that would work with my playing style and I asked myself, if I found myself going onstage – solo, suddenly like in a general nightmare scenario with

Eric Scott :: Inner Radio. Day 092.

nobody else there to accompany me, what could I do, alone? I took some time with my RD-250 looper pedal, also thinking through the rest of the gear I would need, apart from guitars and keyboard.

I went to the Roxy in April of 2015 and saw East India Youth perform live and it was incredible to see him attempt a breakneck show with hundreds of responsibilities. I thought he would have a nervous breakdown doing all that, but it worked somehow.

I needed a (definitely more) manageable version of that, and began to plan the logistics of doing that. Day 036 was the Live Setlist, the publishable Songbook of compatible “live” material, as a way to suggest a fanbase might eventually be built up if I allowed myself to play live and let people hear the music in a live setting, in a way that I felt I could control without more than that Factory-band level of professionalism and also without getting a lot of harassment if any of the details started breaking down or going wrong.

In doing this, I think I simultaneously diagnosed my own fear of live performance and hoped to make a better turn out of the result, with a plan to conquer stage fright as well.

Eric Scott :: Inner Radio. Day 092.

Day 092 Day 036 2014 2379 376 2015 2441 557 2016 673 707 2017 598 357 2018 252 101 2019 315 130 7350 10390

Eric Scott :: Inner Radio. Day 092.

Eric Scott :: Inner Radio. Day 092.

Eric Scott :: Inner Radio. Day 092.

Eric Scott :: Inner Radio. Day 092.

Eric Scott :: Inner Radio. Day 092.

Eric Scott :: Inner Radio. Day 092.

Eric Scott :: Inner Radio. Day 092.

Eric Scott :: Inner Radio. Day 092.

Eric Scott :: Inner Radio. Day 092.

Eric Scott :: Inner Radio. Day 092.