Ready...steady... postulate

Welcome to my new blog. I'm planning to write from time to time on a few topics:

-improvisation

-writing music

-production and recorded sound

-growing grapes and making wine

-cooking and eating

Most of you will come here from a musical perspective and may be wondering about the relevance of, for instance, making wine. I actually wrote a paragraph about how similar winemaking and musicmaking are, but, by the time I had written it I'd decided that they actually aren't that similar at all. Music always has to be a much more generative process, yet the ultimate aim of winemaking is purely to let the grapes you pick do their thing. Cooking is much closer...

Why I do think all these topics will feature here is because I'm attracted to the alchemy involved in pursuing them. They can all absorb huge amounts of theorising, obsessing and general nerding-out, usually in the pursuit of trying to work out why something is so satisfying. This is really a blog about making stuff,, trying to make it better, and then trying to work out why it was or wasn't good. I've kept links to my old blog, which featured a lot of transcription and analysis of some of the music I love - taking a step back, I could have subtitled each post "Why is this so great??!". It's the enjoyment of finding a new question to ask, making a connection that you hadn't found before, or understanding a little bit more about how people who are very good at creating things manage to do it. I hope you find it interesting.