So Very Real

Last night was a watershed moment for me. I finally ran out of things I wrote or recorded in the 70s, 80s and 90s that I could refashion or remake into new songs using AI. It's taken me more than six months, hacking away at the past a little more every day, but now it's clear cut and there's nothing left but stumps.

Well, okay, not exactly. I could give the longer pieces another pass or two. See if there's anything I missed. I didn't really pry all that much away from the longer of the two extended pieces of fiction because most of it seemed unsuitable for conversion into song lyrics but maybe a different musical genre would shake something else loose. Everything can't be sad dreampop.

And there might be the odd fragment I haven't found, left lurking somewhere in the house. I can think of a couple of pieces I remember writing that haven't turned up yet. One of them would be perfect. But if they still exist, I've run out of ideas on where to look. They weren't in the loft and that was my last hope.

Or maybe not. There are a couple of outside possibilities. I doubt very much that I'm likely to find any of the printed zines but I have a couple of PC floppy disks I haven't been able to read. If I could get into those... 

And before I got the PC in the mid-90s I'm pretty sure I wrote everything on my Amiga 500. Which I still have. And the disks. The problem there is that I'd need a CRT monitor to plug the Amiga into and I got rid of the last of those just after the pandemic, when I was having a clear-out. One more piece of evidence to support my belief that decluttering is never a good idea.

I was looking into it and it seems you can get various adapters to connect an Amiga to an HDMI display but my experience with such things in the past has not always been great and honestly I don't think I can be bothered. If I'm honest, I don't even want to dig the Amiga out from the inaccessible hidey-hole I buried it in when I was almost sure I'd never want to use it again...

No, I think I'm just going to have to accept that those last, few fragments are gone for good. And that's okay. I've recovered and restored a huge percentage of everything I ever did, most of which I thought I'd never see again and none of which I ever imagined would have such a scintillating afterlife.

It's been a revelation, rediscovering eveything I wrote and recorded decades ago, finding much of it was far better than I remembered and then turning it all into something new that's given me an extraordinary amount of pleasure and satisfaction in its own right. I think it's okay to let a few scraps fall through the floorboards.

There is another very good reason to call a halt to the crate-digging, too. If I don't have any more old stuff to rely on, I'll have to start making some new. That would be a whole different adventure, wouldn't it?

I probably ought to start by finishing the pieces I left unfinished back around the turn of the millennium. One, supposedly a novel, I stopped mostly because I didn't know where to go with it next. The other, an episodic string of vignettes, left off, as I now realize, at a very unhappy moment in the story. Both of those deserve proper endings.

After that, maybe I might even come up with a new idea. That'd be the first this century. I don't believe I've had a new idea since the mid-90s. I'm assuming they still exist. It might be a myth.

New ideas are scary, though, and so is making art. Curating it is a lot more comfortable. Perhaps I'd have a better time organizing what I already have and figuring out some way to present it in public. Not that I have any illusions there's a public out there likely to take an interest but I figure it's better to offer it than not, even if there are no takers.

That's a thought that deserves some analysis, isn't it? Why does any creative act need to be shared? Surely the act of creation is sufficient in itself. And if an audience is required, I am it. I mean, I really appreciate my own work. In making it public, would I be sharing it in a spirit of benevolence, offering up something I feel is valuable and worthwhile for the pleasure and entertainment of others? Or would I just be looking for validation and applause?

Yeah, I don't really care much about all that introspective nonsense. Mostly, I'd like it on the web because that maximizes its chances of survival over a longer time-frame and I'm broadly of the opinion that things should persist whenever possible. Besides, someone might get some use or pleasure out of it one day. Also, it'd be really convenient for me to have it all in one place, even if that was actually several places, as in multiple blogs or websites, with the "one place" in that scenario being the collective wrapper of the internet.

As you may have realized by now, those who've stayed with me this far, this isn't so much a blog post as a conversation I'm having with myself as I try to decide what to do next. Coming to the end of the ongoing project I've been engaged with for most of this year has unsettled me a little and this is me, trying to think it through and figure out what comes next.

And do you know what comes next right now? You won't guess. I'll tell you. 

I'm going to go into the bedroom, open the door to the cupboard where the hot water tank is and rummage through the shelves beneath it, where I keep all the very old clothes I'm never going to wear again but haven't gotten as far as throwing out yet. I'm hoping that among them I'll find a T--shirt I bought in Antequerra about thirty years ago.

That T-shirt, which got too small and old to wear decades ago, has a cartoon on the front of five young women. They aren't characters from a comic or a movie or a show. They're just five people someone drew and presumably sold to someone else, who turned the image into a piece of clothing that ended up in a shop in a backstreet of a middle-sized town in Andalusia, where I found it and bought it for no reason other than I liked the look of the characters.

And then, later, I gave them all names and wrote a story about them. Which is one of the pieces that so far hasn't come to light. 

I don't really think seeing the image again will bring any of the names I gave them back to me. Except I already know what one of them is called because she turns up as a character in that series of vignettes I mentioned.

She's called Cat and I'm hoping if I can find the shirt I'll remember which of the five she is. So let me just go see if I can find it...

... and no, I can't. I have, however, discovered the hot water tank is rusting and needs to be replaced immediately, so that was... lucky?  

Also, a reminder that there are things more pressing in life than either writing blog posts or worrying about what happened to short stories you wrote half a lifetime ago. And with that I think I'll go do something useful for a change.  

 

Notes on AI used in this post

Just the music, which was created using Suno from a guide vocal uploaded by me. Actually, I whistled the tune. Mostly I sing them but some days my voice just isn't willing to co-operate and that apparently was one of those days. 

All the lyrics are mine, adapted from the penultimate paragraph, which reads as follows:

"Rachel sometimes does fireworks for us, just as it gets dark, and I help with the snow statues. If I feel lonely she'll hold me, if I ask. When I'm tired I go up to my little room and close the door. I think Rachel has a room somewhere, but I've never seen it, Rachel is very real. Perhaps she's the real one, not me. Cat and Cathy, I don't know where they go. They're ghosts."

As you can see, I didn't change much, just added some emphasis and extra poignancy. I've found the two techniques that work best for turning prose into lyrics are either to add a few rhymes or to use repetition. It's amazing how effectively repeated lines and phrases substitute for rhymes.

I ran lots of variations and fiddled around with them but in the end, the best one was the very first run. It happens that way more often than you'd think. Suno sometimes seems to get worse the more you ask it to iterate. 

The prompt was

 "strings, cello, soft, sweet, low, husky female vocals, Gentle, soft, quiet, restrained, understated chamber-pop soundscape throughout, production very crisp and clear, female vocals low and husky but soft and sweet, Pitch is generally low, a somber quality indie-pop, dreampop fuzz-pop, simple subdued drums, quiet simple bass, quiet fuzzed guitars, strings"

Again, I find repeating things, particularly at the beginning and end of a prompt, helps a lot. It often seems as if Suno fixates on what it hears first, last or most often. 

If you want to hear it on Suno for some reason, it's here.  It's exactly the same though.