Purposefulness

Seemingly ridiculous word on paper, but yes it does exist. Anyway, Leasha's gone stateside for a while, Helena's in similar territory and Glasgow seems to have diminished to a select band of electro die-hards, gagging for experimental music (that's you if you're here on Wednesday night).

The days have changed to warm and humid weather, with cloud cover in the morning and early afternoon and clearing for pleasant evenings. I'm starting to lose faith that I'll ever find a job that has anything to do with anything I've done so far in my life. The 'graduate schemes' are starting to look more appealing, as everything else seems to require four years experience or a degree in a relevant field, invariably not music. I guess I'm starting to give up and hope that something may just walk my way at a convenient time, and the general admin posts are looking more suited to me again. How can that be? I've done the damn things for so many years, and hate them. There's something about that anonymous environment and the inconsequential work that you do that is comforting. Knowing your work could probably be done quicker and more efficiently by a machine, but that they choose a real person to humiliate instead fills me with an unknown and strange joy. That it's simply that easy to describe your job ('filing', 'labelling') is odd. I've been some places where I have almost asked them "Why have you hired me?" especially when the person in the booth next to me does little more than check the football scores and then phone his mates to discuss it, and all the planning he does is to organise fantasy football tournaments and the weekly trip to the pub.

How can I persuade people that I would work hard for a job more meaningful than that? I don't think you can. Best just plug on and make the most of life, although there's always those little niggles.

Tomorrow Tullis arrives for the gig, Bill arrives the day after and then we soundcheck, dine and perform. Almost too easy. I'll let you know how I feel about it afterwards, because at the moment I'm excited but yesterday I was feeling seriously apprehensive. I got my bass back from the repairers on Saturday (not without a terrible hangover from Friday) and it sounds great through the patch. I'm sure there'll be a sound-clip from the gig online before long, if I feel pleased with the performance.

I'm thinking about my next musical project, and what I was thinking of in April (it's been gestating) is producing an album. I see the future of music in recording rather than performance. The ipod generation is not going anywhere at the moment, and when music is available to everyone everywhere at the touch of a button, wirelessly, there won't be a need to go to a concert. We can all blog our latest performances and you can be at a festival for your favourite performance over your video phone or even on your 3g ipod. What's the point of turning up to a gig when everything is permanent and you can view it at any time after the event has taken place. The BBC already offers the facility of listening to most broadcasts again on the net, or as a podcast, whenever you feel like it. The next thing is getting that to your handheld device without the computer. Phones and mp3 players are already becoming more similar in terms of functionality, and it's only a matter of time before we can share everything quickly and easily.

I'll write this up eventually, but there's also my argument of how classical music does NOT fit into this. It's stuck in the dark ages. The contemporary music magazine spnm doesn't even offer sound clips of its shortlisted composers on the website, just some concert listings. It hardly even has photos. So much for hearing music. The refusal to move with any of the contemporary developments has killed contemporary classical music. Noone has heard of it, and certainly their are no peers outside of its own production - that is composers and their friends.

You've got to ask why this is, and I think it stems from the fact that classical music sounds terrible on cd. It just doesn't stand up to recording. People are so concerned with trying to capture the feel of a genuine classical music performance that they forget people don't have to facility to play back the music at that quality. It should sound good on any player, and it patently doesn't. Where do we stand? A refusal to adhere, and in the stagnant, not the revolutionary sense. The experimental factions in music are already way past anything that's happening at the moment in contemporary classical music, and I don't think we really deserve a look-in.

Solutions? Comments? Ideas?