This has been a long week on both a personal and global level. Personally, I have been finding myself in situations that have tested my emotional limits and forced me to build a level of trust in others that I didn’t really think was possible for me to find. Necessity and motivation will do that. And then the news on Thursday, where things started to domino into fun being cancelled on a national scale for some time, I started to reflect on my personal life and realized that my social habits would make me a particularly chaotic carrier of this new bug. For me, it was an easy decision but hard reality that for the near and probably medium future, I will need to be more intentional about who I share space with and avoid the kinds of spaces I like to go to in order to enjoy random encounters and conversations.
On the other hand, this will probably be an introvert’s dream.
One thing that, for now, doesn’t seem necessary to change will be my habit of walking outside. So it seems like a good time to release Walking Music Volume 7, Slow Motion Trust Fall. The title came earlier this week, before things started ramping up on a national scale, but it seems to fit the feelings I’ve been having from both angles. In a certain sense, the next weeks and months will be a new exercise in trusting the good of humanity on a large scale, and the gentleness of others in our little communities.
Now is a good time to revive the art of talking on the phone, catch up on some books that you’ve been meaning to read, and get some more practice in. In some sense, I am excited at the prospect of the scene having a sort of collective hibernation, and coming back a few weeks or months later and having a lot of things to catch up on, as long as we all don’t go flat broke in the meantime. For me, as long as work is open, my days will be filled with Clorox wipes, Lysol, regular repetitions of the Litany Against Fear, as well as all of the other routines of the day, sans random social movement. The part of me that wanted to be a monk long ago will probably be satisfied to an extent.
The music this week is derived from a piece I wrote for CISUM Percussion in NYC, Monochrome. The original piece was written for nine tuned pipes, but in Slow Motion Trust Fall, it is recontextualized over several timescales and registers to create an hour long meditation on being still. Honestly, I’ve been wondering whether or not there is a point to writing long-form pieces in such frequency, but for the near future, it seems like there might be more time for it.
Tomorrow I will be releasing the music video for Reflect and Release and will be plugging away at new projects with a renewed fervor as I step out of the emotional slump of the last few days and back into work mode.