The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnified world in itself. Almost an 'unrecognizable' world. The writer waits in ambush for these unique moments. He pounces on his little grain of nothingness like a beast of prey. It is the moment of full awakening, of union and absorption, and it can never be forced. -- Henry Miller, Plexus
Workbench Recordings has been online for over six months now -- though it seems to me to have been longer than that. It's not a disparaging comment. It's just that a time-greedy project like this one makes me forget what life was like without it. "What did I do with the time?"
For one thing, I played guitar, which is something I haven't been doing much of in the last six months. Not that the website is to blame exclusively for that. Generally I would get most of my practice time in before work on weekdays, and a couple hours each weekend day. But now those slots are going to the website -- whether it's writing, or working on the covers, or promoting it, or contacting artists, or any number of things. The to-do list grows faster than I can scratch things off.
Truth is, I'm sure I could still find time to play if it were a priority, but it's not. Though I was at the top of my game last summer, and had written a lot of the material that made up the Astral Law album, I look back and I think I was running on fumes. Practicing had become too much of something I felt I needed to do, needed to keep up with, needed to... "Need to" is a bad substitute fuel for what music requires, which is love. The engine can run for a while on need but it's going to seize up eventually.
Why it happened like that I don't know. On the one hand I was having a good time coming up with a series of (for lack of a better word) etudes. "Easy Pieces No.4" is one of these. I was also genuinely enjoying reading some simple classical guitar pieces and transcribing some jazz guitar recordings. But another part of me was getting tired of the same practice routine: time of day, position in the room, the sound in the room. The goal seemed endless: there was no session or gig I was preparing for. I was playing for myself and the microphone for too long. There wasn't enough sunlight; my practice had become hermetically sealed.
So, though the guitar had fallen off because of the website, I realized one day that I felt lighter not worrying about whether I was "keeping up" with whatever phantom goal I had been trying to match. From that point I decided the hell with it, I'm not going to badger myself about it; if I don't want to play, fine; good even!
I've left off practicing one other time in my life -- around 10 years ago, for maybe 6 months, or maybe it was a year -- I don't remember exactly. When I came back to it it was out of desire, and I became absorbed in my playing again, truthfully and happily. And that beginning impetus, the back-to-basics tack I took 10 years ago, had enough combustion to last a decade.
What this new dip means for my long term guitar practice, I don't know. Maybe I'll become re-absorbed in it, maybe I won't. Maybe I'll pursue a different direction. I'm not rushing anything. It feels good to be in between.
This week's track is one of the last solo guitar pieces to come out of last spring/summer. It shares some background with two other Astral Law tracks posted on the site: At the Foothills and Stellar Rushes; both of those started off as "Easy Pieces". And there is one other one too; it'll be posted here in the near future.
