As a first-wave Millennial who is rapidly approaching 40, I am just now beginning to face the socially imposed idea that my best days will soon be behind me. The youth that our culture, at least on the surface, worships and caters to is no longer mine to claim, and realistically, it may not have been for some time. That said, I do not, in my own person, feel the age that my years on this planet measure, and strongly believe that creatively my best days are yet to come, and that I have barely scratched the surface of my potential to be artistically productive and contribute to the cultural dialogue in a positive way.
I have had a handful of artistic projects that I have been gradually chipping away at over the past few decades (Timeslip Productions, for example), and each iteration is a learning experience through which I grow in skill and ability. One such project that is relatively new to me is the production of a music album (Dermestid - Extinction Event) that I was inspired to begin a few years ago. I think one important thing to keep in mind regarding this endeavor is that until I began the project, I have literally never played an instrument or dabbled with music production in any way. I have since then taken it upon myself to not only learn to play the guitar, bass, and keyboard, but also learn music production, including recording, mixing, mastering, etc.
The related website that I would like to create has a couple of goals. First, I would like to develop a space where I can feature the music that I am creating. There are already a host of platforms available to musicians to feature their music, such as SoundCloud, Spotify, Bandcamp, and even YouTube, but I find that most creators who are serious about their creations also have a place of their own on the web that is free of the constraints of these other media platforms. Additionally, most of what I am working on musically is still in very early and rough stages of development, and none of it is complete. I think it would be interesting to feature this project through its various stages of development, and give people the opportunity to watch it grow and evolve over time, particularly as my skills in both musical performance, songwriting, and production improve. This site could ultimately document the progress of the project, and serve as a sort of historical record of its production.
This leads into the other main goal of the site, which is to demonstrate that, despite one’s age, your creativity is always valid and relevant, and your best days will always be ahead of you if you are willing to learn new skills and expand your knowledge and experience. In this way, I think the site could be, at least in some minor way, inspirational or illustrative to folks of my generation, or anyone struggling with a certain creative malaise as it relates to their age and perceived place in the cultural landscape.
Moving to the music itself and the specific audience who might be interested in it for its own qualities, I would expect to attract people who appreciate music with a harder edge to it. Ideally, I am going for an industrial metal mixed with modern punk sound, and am hoping to eventually attract an audience of similarly minded metalheads. The website itself should be easily navigable and user-friendly, with bold imagery and an aesthetic that reflects the harder sound and irreverent, subversive nature of metal and punk music. The album itself is meant to be a loosely connected series of songs that contemplate the current state of global political unrest and impending environmental cataclysm, culminating in an inevitable apocalyptic scenario, and the imagery should reflect this concept in a cohesive manner throughout the site. The site will also require media players for the music that will be presented.
The site itself is expected to go through various stages within its production process. Assuming that the site should be completed by the end of the semester, an initial outline/diagram of the site, including all of its pages, should be available in the coming few weeks, with a rough draft and a final draft to follow within the weeks and months afterwards. Given that the production process is basically dictated by the CMSY-168 class schedule, I expect the actual timeline to be provided shortly. Image and content creation will be required within the period following the initial outline and approval. The majority of the content throughout the site will be generated by myself, including imagery, music, text, and any other media. Some imagery production may require the use of textures, photographs and fonts acquired through creative commons and license-free repositories such as textures.com, unsplash.com and urbanfonts.com. Website development will likely follow guidelines outlined in various w3schools tutorials. Once the site goes live, I expect updates to occur regularly, hopefully on a weekly basis as new content is produced. The updating will be wholly my responsibility, as I will be the sole content creator.
- Josh Leisenring
