This comes from my forthcoming album/app—One Human Minute—a preposterous concept album where every track is one minute or less in length.
The idea for the album came from several sources, all, not surprisingly related to brevity. There was the idea that in the age of limited attention span, why not just go with the flow and write some extremely short tunes. Musical Haikus, or tunes to tweet by.
But the more important motivator had to do with my schedule at the time I started thinking about the project. When I started working on it in 2010, I was in the middle of trying to make a (failed) music tech startup work. I was composing, though barely playing, ano I didn’t have a lot of time to spend producing finished tracks. So part of the motivation was that I would at least have time to finish 1 minute songs.
Well it’s six years later, and I’ve only written about 20, finished recording less than half as many. Turns out brevity is not so easy. There have been several fits and starts—almost all of them in between ostensibly-bigger projects. I’ve now gotten to the point where I’ve come up with a structure for the entire set of 60 (for 60 minutes), which I will not reveal at this time.
The point is, One Human Minute came into being as very much an in between type of project: what I occasionally turn to either when I need a break from a bigger projected (like Blues, Preludes & Feuds) or after I’ve completed one.
But, of course, at 60 tunes, it is no longer really a side project that I can work on as a break from the major ones. So, at some point I’m going to have to spend a concentrated period of time on it if I’m every going to get it done.
We’ll see.
In the mean time, here are some examples that are complete or near complete.
