The serendipity of having a podcast allows me to try out ideas that I would otherwise not think to do unless I was sitting at home on drugs and staring at the wall all day. Instead, the podcast is the drug or maybe a better analogy it’s like a personal trainer, because it’s pushing me to make things every week.
The idea that naturally came about this week is to continue writing a piece of music for another lake that I visited on this month’s hiking trip. We stayed on three lakes, so this week I wrote a piece called Harness and paired it with the video from that one.
Before the performance, I discuss a few ideas from the hot book of the year called Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman which is about not expecting perfection from such a limited life span.
I think the message of that book is well integrated into the work that I do here, because sitting down to play music on camera leads to many destructive thoughts ranging from, “will people like this?”, to, “spend your time doing something better!” and everything in between.
But walking towards the resistance and the darkness is the only way to truly grow. You have to be willing to sit with the discomfort of doing the work that you truly want to do, in order to make the best possible use of your time.
The piece from last week’s episode, part 1 of the trilogy, is now available on streaming and YouTube. This version is the studio version, so if you watched last week’s episode this is a more robust version of the piece.
With artwork like this, the track is nothing but thick ambient, covering you in the womb-like sensation of being wrapped in a properly insulated sleeping bag on a cold morning in the forest. You could totally put this on before going to sleep to knock you out as it’s ten minutes long.
Don’t watch the new documentary on Woodstock ‘99 on Netflix. This is traumatizing content about how gross the mainstream culture was in that era (which is just a form of hindsight bias). And yet, like a car crash on the side of the highway, we can’t not look at it.
This is why music festival disaster stories capture our interest, but Woodstock ‘99 went to a whole new level as they tried to finally turn the Peace and Love movement into a profit-generating machine. It could’ve been done in theory, but the wrong mix of people came together to pull this one off. I can’t watch the rest of it, but I just might.
Ok sayonara good people!
See you next week,
Elliott