I claim to be quite a respectable guitarist, and I’ve played in several different bands during the past years. But somehow, we never really seemed to take off, get amazingly good record deals and fill stadiums with our songs – in fact, playing at „Hermann’s Strandbar“ last summer was the preliminary peak of my career as a musician. In other cases, me and my mates didn’t even make it out of the rehearsal room.
The reason for my failure seems obvious to me nowadays: Perfection. Basically, we used to stick to improving a song on and on, instead of simply going out and trying to rock the hell out of the audience: Back in 2001, me and my bros in a Death-Metal-Band actually rehearsed an epic hymn for about a year, until somebody suddenly had the idea to simply drop the whole thing and go back to square one. That was the point when I quit the band.
Now, after not making any music for several months, I have tried a different approach. Let’s just call it „cacophonic simplicity“. The basic ideas:
- Compose a song as fast as possible, invest almost no energy
- Don’t work with other people, only with the computer
- In fact, let the computer do most of the work
- Mission objective: Piss off as many people as possible with horrible tunes. And grin if they say your music sucks
The result is some midi orgy which I put together in Cubase within two hours. Two hours? Yes, well, composing a song would have actually taken less time – but I also needed to find a proper text-to-speech-converter, learn how to use it, find quotes by Josephine Baker and convert them – it was Josephine’s birthday, so I wanted to honor her in my own way.
Of course, there is no major one-hit-wonder without a music video. So I took the song, stuck it into Adobe Premiere Elements, added several hours of 20s-movies and let the computer do the work – after two days of rendering non-stop, the masterpiece (an automatically generated movie) was finished.
Now, you can watch the video online – on this blog, and also on YouTube. Please feel free to tell me what you think about my little masterpiece of madness. Quite likely, you’ll hate it – so my mission is accomplished.