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Thursday, October 7, 2010

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This is my new and improved website. I like how it's looking, and feel confident that this is an actually kinda kewl appearing site with lotsa potential cranked in. Hope others like it. I got the idea viewing John Landers BEAUTIFUL site, and, well, just got the idea and website bug is all.

I've been trying (TRYING is the key word, argh, frustrating) to blog, at blogger.com, pretty unsuccessfully...till now.

Not only do I not have John's keen eye for symmetry, detail, effects (photography wise, he's evolved into a pro!) I don't have a wonderful art/fashion forward portfolio comprised of shots taken and developed over time!

Obviously, this isn't to be the reason for my site: the lo-fi sound aesthetic in music, is readily peppering my speech and I know, kind of, what I want this to start looking like, however, it's a "work in progress..." VERY MUCH. As "LoFi" is to music "LoMob" and the LoRes camera aesthetic keeps the Nostalgia buttons toggling. I would even say "McSweeney's Lit Magazine" is a Lo-Fi Literary confection referencing nostalgia mainly, as its theme.

Bearing that in mind, I cannot testify or offer testimonial to what may be a final draft or final cut formula I am only finding my way into now...first off, as "The Offstage Voice" or an "audio literary actor" beginning the whole newfangled hi-fi (ironically) audio-recordings endeavor.

All the pops, hisses, and distortions relished, cherished, beloved, sanctified and sought out by musical bands I particularly love and understand as "lo-fi" and "nostalgic" right now, are precisely what I have to fight my losing battle with (thus far, to the extent that there is a near perfect hi-fi sound the folks at Librivox where I am reading audiobooks aloud for free, are striving for, from their volunteer power-squadrons).

The irony is, my enemy is comprised of an array of any and all "ambient" noises (well, they are ultimately) and any extraneous sounds not made simply by my voice reading in a refined, amplified, noise-controlled and subtracted way. The aesthetic at Librivox is one completely devoid of pops, hisses and everything "lo-fi" and muffled, scratchy or so-called "unprofessional" sounding. When I began recording for the blind over a decade a go this was done on a simple tape recorder.

Now audiobooks are a staple, without giving "the blind" their due as the vanguard audience they were, and as the ultimate trade recipients of so much of the earlier experiments in literary recordings, aside from spoken word poetry, with its fire and brimstone madness and its very far from "clean, and tinctured" hospitalized green-room anestetic aesthetics.

In doing this to the spoken word, Librivox is thwarting the whole emphasis held aloft as a golden mean as the whole emphasis of indie-rock at the moment is thwarted and subjected and ignored by those who are striving for ever more perfect "sound" in home studio envioronments, even and especially in the digital mastery and the reading of audiobooks. It's really schizophrenic, to think of it in these ways, at all.

Well, I will have much more to say as I return to the site and the blog (which are linked) at another time to discuss the ins and outs of "audio voice work" as a "voice actor" I dub "The Offstage Voice" and a "Walkie Talkie" such as myself. St. Vincent's song "Actor Out of Work" strikes me as particularly poignant in my rare frame of mind. It is my current anthem, but too rich to listen to on an everyday basis, and hence, ironically, also, a bit schizogenic as a choice of my current contemporary anthem.

YET I do declare, "Actor Out of Work" is the anthem for me it is. :)

Well, all, "over and out."

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