Sitting in the DJ booth at CiTR Radio during 24 Hours of Radio Art, airing the 3 hour long series of compositions I created for this (“Shrug“).
Thinking a couple things: 1. It’s better than I thought (there’s usually a gap in between finishing any album and being happy with it and later hearing it again and in the gap I find I tend to only remember the mistakes… It’s where the old cliche about every artist thinks their best song is the one they’ve only just finished, because that’s what’s freshest to them) and 2. Holy fuck it’s so much longer than I thought (because of course it’s 30 short sub-compositions between 5 and 6 minutes, hearing them all together is huge).
Of course, that length was part of the idea. Shrug is inspired by Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, not exactly known for its brevity, though I managed to read it unless than a week because I couldn’t put it down.
I do wonder if I’ll ever do another single work as big as this one again, though I have joked with my friends that I tend to hit my stride in the longer lengths. I still think in terms of albums, when I write fiction I can write 100 pages easier and better than I can write a dozen. Etc. Three hours might be a stretch even for me though, but I am still happy with Shrug.
And I guess Atlas Shrugged is near and dear to my heart as a producer/creator and considering that half my family came from Poland and still get squirrelly about talking about politics under the communist regime.
