Bah, musical writers block.

I have officially hit writer's block. I haven't written one musical note in several weeks, and I haven't even touched my keyboard. This time last year I wrote my best pieces (in my opinion), simply because I had uni, and general life there to inspire me. At home, I have nothing but my house to inspire me - I rarely go out, mostly because I don't feel like it, but also because I can't afford to often. Life without student loans is weird! Back to the matter though.

Even when I did compose something, I just felt unhappy, it felt uninspired, and I was forcing the ideas, rather than letting them breathe and develop naturally. My 'View From an Astronomers Backyard' album is currently on hold, I want it to be my 'Chinese Democracy', it's an album with a grand concept, and I don't care how long I take to finish it now (it's not like I have a label breathing down my neck for a release date) - I did have some dates of release in mind, I was almost finished with it around February this year, but I decided to pull some songs as they weren't sufficient quality - maybe "B-side" material at best, I'll probably scrap them altogether in the end. The story itself is remaining the same, I just want the music to incorporate my solid story, and so far I only think about 4 of the songs will make the final cut, with many corrections added I'm sure.

What I was working on was a short-song album, entitled 'Collectable Collectibles', and the idea was that I would try and link them together in some way, so that it isn't just random songs. However, after speaking to my good friend Ruaidhri, he mentioned that it might get a bit stale, if I was working around a tonal centre, or keeping the same theme in mind - in the end, it is a bunch of random short songs compiled together. Still, I have songs from maybe 2/3 years ago on my laptop, all mostly unfinished, and with a little bit of work I could have them as complete short songs.

The annoying thing is, I have loads of compositional ideas in my head, but the motivation to actually DO them is just not present. For one, I want to write an electronic orchestral piece, i.e. using a bunch of synths and string/real instrument samples, pretending that it's an orchestra, and using them as such - for example, getting a synth sample, that isn't ACTUALLY a timpani, but I influence the sound so that it sounds similar, or has a same effect musically - again, it'll take a lot of time to achieve what I want, and to actually go ahead with it...but I think once I do get the motivation, it'll be a huge project which I will most definitely release as an album; preferably over an internet record label.

I've been listening to Brian Eno's 'Music for Airports' album a lot, and just the ambience created in that album is something I've striven for for a few years now - beautiful, dreamy musical landscape with subtle melodic themes, but it is perfect background music. His philosophy behind it is great too; he wrote it to go against what happens in airports, i.e. stress, lots of loud noise. I think it's played in LAX airport (Los Angeles) on repeat, which I think is a great idea...it's probably like one of those white noise generators, that is in the background, but can relax you so much.

Roll on December 14th, so I can get out of here, and feel inspired again (hopefully).

Iain