This song is a bit different, as I tried to reach and challenge myself a bit. With this one, I started writing on the guitar – which I haven’t really done in earnest in decades (I think I was still in Face Value the last time I really tried) – and ended up with some pretty hard industrial as a result. I kinda channeled Justin Broadrick a bit and basically wrote a pseudo-Godflesh song.
An Extras Innings Win
Since I’d already successfully completed the RPM Challenge at this point by reaching the 35 minute mark, I decided to keep going and see if I could hit 10 songs as well. I also decided to try and reach a bit more and challenge myself a little harder, thus writing on the guitar.
Guitar was (and, I guess, still is) my primary instrument, it’s where I learned music and remains the only instrument I would actually say I know how to play. (Unless you count the Ableton Push as an instrument, in which case I’m getting pretty okay at that.) But I’ve not really put any concerted effort into writing with it in many years, in no small part because I’ve been writing music that doesn’t usually have guitar in it.
There’s been the occasional (half-hearted, to be honest) attempt to do something more guitar-based, but nothing that really went anywhere. So it was really refreshing to actually successfully bring the guitar back into my songwriting. (The little bit of guitar in Disco Biscuits notwithstanding.)
A New Identity?
I’ve been thinking a bit about splitting some of my music off into a second project, an alternate identity of some kind. Most of my stuff is not so dissimilar that it doesn’t all fit as one “band”. But this song, and a couple other works in progress, are a bit different. They’re in a much harder industrial direction, and I wonder if they shouldn’t be split off into something different?
In the end, I don’t know how much I care either way. Writing music is something I do for myself, and I do it primarily for the process and not the product. The fun is in making the music to begin with, not what the final result of it turns out to be. And this is all me and my process, whether the product is semi-ambient stuff like Hypergravity, or hard industrial like this one. In the immortal words of the prophet Popeye, “I yam what I yam.”