Week 10 - Final Journal
Final Journal
Psychoanalysis in collaborative studio practice—or a story of a very exhausting weekend. I will explain this text.
TLDR: I set out to do a piece that captured the readings— but what I ended up with was a sort of practice-based reflection on the readings via the process of trying to make the piece—if that makes sense.
I was thinking about a lot of stuff from the last few weeks and started working this piece with a general focus around a few of the readings. Then when I was in LA over the weekend at a session I brought it in to work on with some folks—and that’s where things really came together both for the track and for this project in general. You can pretty much hear where the LA session comes in, in that it starts to get some defined form and actual lyrics.
Basically, I sat down at the mixing desk in LA and pulled the project open. We got a shared Notes doc open and I put in some lyrics I had been playing with. I sat facing the speakers working and talking, my producer friend sat behind me on the studio couch listening and coming up with new lyrics based on my writing and whatever free associated nonsense came out of my mouth as I worked. I hadn’t considered it until basically that moment, but this process is extremely similar to the analyst-analysand psychoanalytic setup. Here I had this person just floating behind my head asking me questions, prompting new perspectives, and helping me construct a mental understanding of what I was experiencing emotionally. Occasionally, they would pop in to play some chords, sing some lines, etc. and we’d basically switch roles. All of it was very therapy-esque (in a sort of cheesy pop way). And I’m glad it was, because I was extremely emotionally charged from the week prior. The TLDR is that last week I had a day-long manic episode, and then the following day, a person I’m involved with had a rather large one too. Both of us attempted to help the other understand why this shit happened using the many psycho-whatever tools we know how to use. Then I went to LA in the morning, did a 7 hour studio session immediately followed by attending this club show til 3am. It was an emotionally exhausting but cathartic day I really needed—and I think there’s something about it that we could be considered some legit psychoanalytic practice amongst friends.
A lot of readings come to mind in various ways (some in ways I can’t parse out due to my general inability to understand half the words in them), but I can pick a few that stand out.
Fink’s Listening and Hearing definitely echoed in my head—the part that stuck with me from that was on “hearing what we expect to hear,” and how analysts can place logical connections where things aren’t meant to be, or hear sounds not intended to be heard. For example my friend wrote the lyric “all that drama you put me through” but I heard it with total certainty as “all that trauma you put me through” which very clearly showed my brain had amped the situation up to be far more intense than they’d believed it to be. Drama is annoying, trauma is scarring. But through their assertion of drama, I understood that a psychic trauma had occurred. In this sense, the mishearing can reveal more about the analysand than anticipated. I think this also speaks to a larger theme of misunderstanding one another—hearing what you expect to hear rather than what a person is saying—which is exactly what brought about the drama/trauma of the week. Fink’s Four Discourses I think also has a bit to contribute on this in the concept of creating individual “truth” between agent and other—in both how “truth” was defined in the world of the song versus how it was, and continues to be, developed in the world I live in every day, and lived in for the week prior. As a more general concept in session recording—free associations around words constitute a core practice of lyric writing and development of ideas. Misheard chords, misheard words, associated rhymes, experiences, etc. are all core to the practice.
On a more specific note, while doing the vocal performances—Moten’s Black Monin’ came to mind—specifically the concept of a reproduction of a physical act via vocal tone in Al Green (although obviously not in the same level of intensity and violence as being discussed in his example)—but in using this sort of cracked vocalization on the line “freak out in the parking lot” at the end to get across an original production of crying til you can’t talk, or screaming all night til your voice blows out in a club. Being able to translate an affective feeling of being totally emotionally overused, to get across a feeling of total physical exertion that only straight up days of vocal abuse and crying can do. In this case, the reproduction was done the day after that original session once I’d gotten back to San Diego. My voice was completely blown out from the weekend, I tried singing in the car ride back and heard the cracks and was like “yeah gotta get that down” since it sounded like my brain crying—immediately hit the 201 studio to do that quickly.
During that after-the-fact recording I also did some more shaping of the track—in a reflective way as I sort of recovered. I was considering “silence” a lot in the context of club spaces as I reviewed a few voice memo recordings and videos from the night prior—in which it became very clear to me just how little noise there was aside from the music coming from speakers. This brought to mind Gautier’s Silence, specifically. Aside from the occasionally “wooooo” it’s mostly people dancing and simply breathing in silence, talking occurring in other rooms by bars etc and not on the dance floor. So in a weird way, there’s actually a ton of unsaid, unspoken, silence, in this extremely loud space. So when I was doing a sweep over this, I tried to consider the kinetics of things and focus on breath more. What that meant in practice was dancing around in the studio as I worked to help shape things. It’s extremely easy to end up just sitting at ur little chair bobbing your head while you work—but the end result of the track is to end up in that dance space, where people can abandon their voices to silent breaths or inaudible screams that are completely drowned out by bass. Maybe not drowned out actually, they are absorbed into the sonic mix. And because of that, I integrated straight up crowd noises into the track which act as percussive elements in the latter break portion. They become silent when other sounds layer on them, but they are there. There’s something trippy to me about the ability for vocal silence to be determined by musical output in a space—silence becomes relative.
Anyway, I’ve spewed a lot since apparently this is also a psychoanalytic journaling space for me—but I appreciate having a spot to do it, and this was a wonderful exercise. Btw I never explained the text—it was my Dad’s birthday on Sunday, and I called him once I got back to San Diego. As crazy as shit had been for the past few days, I felt so much appreciation for how much general love and vibrancy my life has in it right now, and I think that came through to my dad, who doesn’t say this kind of stuff that often. He sent me this text and it made me very emotional, which I’d say basically capped off the weekend as one of the most emotionally intense and exhausting that I’ve had in recent memory. I took the love from this text and put it into the track, in some way, I’m sure—the way I take it with me everywhere I go, every day.