Music has always been a fundamental ingredient to the making of my art. When people talk about having an emotional response to seeing my paintings and drawings I can only relate that experience to my love of music. Music touches me at a base level. Even though I make music with computer technology I don’t consider myself a musician. And I worry, when other musicians explain to me the technicalities of how music can be engineered to create an emotional response, that perhaps knowing how to make music that way would destroy the magic it gives me. So I stick with the medium I know and perhaps channel the emotions I receive from other creatives into that.
I have a ridiculously large and varied collection of music. In genre it spans hardcore gabba to minimalist ambient, post-punk industrial to sixties pop, medieval plainchant to seventies loungecore. Hundreds of thousands of tracks… and the primary criterion is that it must be ‘interesting’ – which covers a vast arena of sins.
One track in particular has been repeatedly played for a few years now while I’m working in the studio and that’s been “Yesterday’s Fire” by Moonface. I think my attraction to the song was the drama within the music itself but also the vocal delivery by Spencer Krug which has a few notes that raise my spirits and the corners of my mouth every time I hear them.
The more times I listened to the song, and I would frequently put it on loop, the more I started to identify with the lyrics. I’m not certain what Spencer’s intentions were when he wrote the song, but for me it came to represent and retell some of my frustrations I have had over the years with the art gallery arena… those gatekeepers that decide what will and won’t be seen in their precious, hallowed cultural halls.
Spencer very kindly gave me permission to use his words in my work.
The particular track that inspired this set of work can be heard here
But if you’d like to see what Spencer Krug is up to currently then follow and support him here:
https://pronouncedkroog.bandcamp.com/
guydenning.org 