I've neglected this blog recently because I've been focussing my attention on getting some more music produced and out into the world. It's been a strange balance to strike though, because without an online presence, or any exposure to a potential market, the music may as well be confined to my studio! I concluded that I shouldn't have neglected this so much though because this blog has actually been a valuable outlet for documenting the progress that I've been making, and for sharing my ideas.

The comments I've received by email have been sincerely appreciated. To the people who seem to have had problems leaving comments on here, sorry about that. I had a look at it and everything should be working fine if you click on 'leave comment' and follow the instructions.  

I'm still out and about working with the usual people and teaching (which takes up a considerable amount of my time), but I'm trying to break out of the patterns which I've sometimes found myself in which are not conducive to achieving as much as I could. I'm not always very good at prioritising things and I tend to work very hard on 5 or 6 projects at a time and make slow, steady progress with them all rather than to focus my attention on one thing at a time and complete it before moving on to the next. I'm trying to change this, and be more directional with my work but because the nature of creativity is that it is a completely untamable beast which requires a permanently adaptive aproach, time scales for completing work sometimes seem to be very artificial and even destructive! I've tried to work to them though because I could very feasibly work on a project for 5 or 6 years and the outcome would not really be any 'better' than the outcome I could reach within a few months. 'Different' perhaps, but I'm not convinced that within a subjective artistic field that the concept of 'better' actually applys.

I would welcome peoples thoughts on this.

Nik

I've given 'Aliens and Lasers' some serious consideration over the last week. This has seemed to be a terminal back burner project which actually began life as a joke! It was initailly meant to be an instrumental rock/fusion album which was serious compositions, but a parody of the instrumental rock albums which have been made by certain players! I've held out on making it for a long time in favour of my ensemble based projects Turquoise Noise and Ensemble Craft (I much prefer the idea of being part of a band than being a lone wolf soloist with assistance from other players). The incentive I've had to actually make this has been in the form of a lot of positive comments and questions from the good folk who frequent the Northern Guitar Shows about certain riffs, or melodic lines which have been within the compositions for 'Aliens and Lasers'. That 'unofficial' critical feedback gave me a push to complete it and get it out into the world.  

This album shouldn't take me too long to complete at all. All demos for the compositions have been completed for some years, and any minor tweaks should be done with minimal time consumption with todays level of technology. I'm targetting getting this completed by the end of January 2009. At this stage, I'm going to give myself the incentive to work hard on this album by declaring in black and white that if this album isn't complete by the end of January 2009, I will have either had a serious amount of unforseen circumstnces to contend with, or I've been slacking off! 

Spiritual Atrophy still going strong, and on schedule! I'm going to be making some videos of performances of some of the Spiritual Atrophy tunes which should be online by early November. I'll post notification on here when they're online.