I've resumed the beginning of the account of my relationship with Melanie that I started a good twenty years ago, and which stopped before the beginning of our lovemaking proper.
The notes I've been collecting over the last few months for Les Filles des Villes du Nord have been useful too; in a few days I'll be done, if I may say so, with her.
It's becoming increasingly clear to me that writing must be my main artistic activity; interactive fiction, role-playing, music, photography, everything, in the end, has to do with language, thought, memories, narrative, and nothing I do exists without being accompanied by a certain amount of storytelling – to use a term that's been in vogue for the last few years.
Second thing: my memoirs have to be one of my main literary projects, firstly because it's pretty much the only way I'll be able to pass on what I've seen and known, thought about, done, loved or hated, in the course of my life, since I don't have any children of my own; secondly, because it's clear to me, after all these years, that my own life and my own memory, however much they may have been disguised or rearranged, are my primary source of literary or musical inspiration, and that it's important for me to accompany my works with autobiographical commentary – at the moment in the form of a self-interview, but anything is possible in this field.
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I've completed my PDF of Nancy photos, and uploaded it to my personal Archive account, under the same title as the blog: Fragments Nancéiens.
I don't think I'll be embarking on any more photo expeditions to Nancy. This work, too, is finished. And so is the period of my life that corresponds to it.
To bring this sequence to a complete close, I'd have to finish Adieu à Nancy. I'll probably do it as I've done with most of my other works: by giving up on going all the way, and publishing an "acceptable" version.
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I really like the Bitsy game engine and am keen to do a little something with it. Nothing complicated or really interactive; just create a few locations, a few sprites, a few atmospheric texts, something meaningless or so cryptic that it seems to be, but poetic.
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I've given up once and for all on the idea of Langh-Hath as interactive fiction; I'm going to try and turn it into a novel. I'll have to force myself to make the time for it. The writing itself won't be a problem, I think, I'll keep it stylistically very simple; the idea is to tell a story, and I don't think I give a damn about literature as an art form. My approach is different, it's one of pure compensation and revenge against reality.
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Following the death of my high school friend Jean-Michel, I put online various rehearsals, demos and live songs from his old band Lisence to Confuse, as well as a little rehearsal from when I used to play with him and Michael, in my cellar on rue Saint-Denis. Nothing immortal or worth re-releasing, obviously, just teenage nonsense, but it's strange to hear it again exactly 30 years later.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eBEY7BSpQ8YGs9L-SCW2ruKGrllFGM_e/view?usp=drive_link
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What was I doing in February 2004?
According to my photo albums:
• I had a visit from Alix at my home on Rue Guerrier de Dumast
• I attended an excellent Beinhaus concert at L'Austrasique
• I spent a night at Gauvain's in Bouxières
• Went for a walk in Hanweiler
• Had a drink with Florence at Le Pinocchio
• I visited Haguenau with my family
• I DJed at a goth party in Luxembourg, at the Rox Bar to be precise, with Sandra and Maxime.
A whole year's work, at my current age of 43, soon to be 44.
On March 9, I'll be spending the night at France's place in Nancy, and we'll be going to an EPK concert, or maybe to a techno party in a small town a few miles away.
On December 7, I'll be seeing Front 242 in Paris with Pierre. It's their farewell tour.
Anyway, I've promised myself I'll get back to socializing and going out.
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On Cauldron Music's Archive account, I started uploading my collection of teenage mixtapes, where I'd mix anything and everything – album excerpts, radio shows, drafts or definitive versions of my own tracks...
https://archive.org/details/a-private-collection-of-teenage-mixtapes
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What have the last few years taught me about creating music? More specifically, about my own creativity?
• That changing your style periodically, even (and especially) radically, allows you to renew your inspiration. Ditto for "changing your project name". In the absolute, even, you should only make debut albums, changing genre each time.
• That my best albums, or at least the ones I prefer, are the ones that weren't premeditated, that sort of built themselves up over time and by chance. That I must strive to compose, to work "blind", without premeditating the final result, without already thinking about the reactions and the discourse that will surround the album before I've written the first note; because that creates more anguish than pleasure, and produces more mediocre albums.
• That I can be wrong for a long time about the nature of my own music and of a particular musical project: until recently, for example, I believed that Maelifell had a precise musical identity and that, since I didn't want to go back into it, its discography was therefore closed; I had to go back over it in detail to realize that, in reality, we had NEVER released two stylistically identical releases, and that Maelifell therefore had no identity apart from being Xavier's and my band. And so we were free. That it could go on.
• That "musical genres" and "scenes" are prisons. Belonging to them is castration. The bands I love are the ones that created their own genre (and were then imitated by thousands of others, but that's another question). And all the more so insofar as Xavier and I unwittingly "invented" dungeon synth before discovering that it already existed, and we also "invented" industrial music before hearing about Throbbing Gristle. In all humility, we are inventors, not followers.
• That I can find meaning, a complete exegesis, in albums (like Im Kreis der Birken) whose content is half improvisation, half scraping of drawer bottoms. Moral: I don't NEED to start with a concept or ideas, even if they're in bulk; the music alone is enough, it takes care of itself, and I'll find all the meaning I need in it, after the fact.
• That my feeble abilities AND aesthetic choices will probably forever deprive me of any success or even respect; that it's likely that the vast majority of people who come across my pieces must laugh or scorn. And that I must not only accept this, but find some pleasure in it.
• That creating involves an element of magic, in the strongest sense of the word, and that you have to expect inexplicable phenomena such as synchronicities: for example, Florence gave me the book En Patagonie by Bruce Chatwin when I was working on the album of the same name, which she didn't know. Similarly, since 2017, Xavier has unwittingly bought back the same Yamaha 4-track I was using at the time, and I "just happened" to come across the Grundig tape recorder I had as a child and on which I made my very first recordings in a shop window.
• That to be my first fan, my first critic, my own biographer, and to write about my music as a major cultural topic, was entirely legitimate and beneficial. Humility brings no pleasure and no added value when it comes to art.
• That blatant lies, hoaxes and pure fiction were just as legitimate and fun. Life is insufficient, but the imaginary not only provides consolation, but also expands life in return, creating new situations in real life. Imagination seeds real life.
• Insofar as I spent almost 10 years without making music (between my break-up with Florence and my reunion with Xavier), only to return to it by pure chance, it's impossible to know when one's "career" will end, nor, when it does, whether it's definitive or not. In other words, you have no control over whether or not you pursue an artistic activity. It's imposed on you; and it can disappear even if you don't want it to.
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There are so many things in the creative life that are pure WORK, tedious, thankless work that also doesn't pay...
When I think that at one time I was masochistic enough to make myself an Excel spreadsheet to record the dates of my "advertising" posts on Facebook: for such and such an album, about such and such a band, on such and such a day... What a pain.
Generally speaking, assimilating more and more my creative activities – musical in this case – to work, to an obligation, to tedious efforts, to a chore stealing time from my rest... has logically led me lately to be fed up, to want to stop. In the same way that the complexity of Inform + the time it takes to create an I.F + the indifference of the community, have more or less made me stop this hobby, which was no longer a hobby, in terms of pleasure.
The question arises, in fact, and the answers aren't as obvious as all that: what gives me pleasure? What do I enjoy? What activity would bring me fun and relaxation, rather than worry and effort?
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One thing's for sure: I love reading PDFs on Archive.org, whether they're digitized fanzines, esoteric publications, neuro-linguistic programming manuals or anything else that's usually pretty wacky, underground, and whose mysterious charm is accentuated by the slightly primitive feel of PDFs. Publishing such documents seems more exciting to me than having, comparatively speaking, an Instagram account.
In fact, I've closed all my Instagram accounts. I'll upload my photos to Facebook and maybe make myself a public photoblog on occasion. I'll try to get away from social networks as much as possible.
Back in the blessed days of NPO and our underground activities, Delwiche and I wrote texts together, somewhere between short story collection, art manifesto, occultism or role-playing manual... They were unclassifiable objects, with a layout that was both chaotic and meticulous, like this one, which I think is the work of David alone, but which is the quintessence of the kind of UFO I'd like to produce.
