33 Days (2023)

An album on 33 electroacoustic compositions.

 

In November 2023 I set out to compose a daily sound art piece. At the time, I felt creatively stuck and bored. I hoped that by forcing myself to start and compose daily, I could overcome perfectionism and improve my skills in creative decision making. For 33 days I tried and failed and tried again.  

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The sound material came from anything I could find in my archives that sparked my curiosity. Most days, I had no idea what I wanted to make. I just sat down with my laptop to let the raw sound material guide me. Like sonic meditations. Often, those pieces were the most satisfying to work on. Some days I didn't feel like making anything, and I would often start on a composition, hate it, abandon it to make something entirely new, only to return to the abandoned material a couple of days later. Sometimes I would become obsessed with exploring a specific sound or a new plug in for a few days, resulting in similar sounding textures and compositions emerging. 

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The 33 compositions vary in duration from 48 seconds to 6 minutes 44 seconds. Some days only allowed me to work on a piece for 30 minutes, other days I could hyper fixate on it for several hours. I found that when I allowed myself to work on a piece only for as long as I enjoyed the process, it would take me exactly 2 hours. When I started, I didn’t know how many days I would go on for. I let myself be guided by joy and intuition and by Christmas, something told me it was time to finish. ​

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Nearly a year on, I’m still battling perfectionism and my creative decisions are questionable at best, but these pieces stand as evidence of a desire to transform my creative practice.

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Thank you to Alistair MacDonald - who kindly volunteered to be the receiver of these daily sonic ramblings. Without his support, I'm not sure I could have completed 33 days of this practice. Knowing there was someone on the other end - receiving, listening, encouraging - helped me stay consistent. Thank you also to Tom Macfadyen who encouraged me to release these compositions.