It must be Tuesday, because I'm answering your question.
Q: Dear Ty,
Over the years–in addition to all the other art you've made–with sound you have moved from songs to improvisations to collages to these things called "mixys." I asked the lord god world wide web and they couldn't tell me. Ty, what is a mixy?
Sincerely,
Lapsed Fan Club Dues
Ty: Good
question and an even better observation, LFCD.
I have been putting sound to recording device for as long as I can remember. And I can remember back to the mid-1970s AD, bless. So, not literally for as long as I can remember but pretty close to it. I remember watching TeeVee productions like Sanford and Son, Welcome Back Kotter, and Barney Miller and recording them on a portable cassette recorder and listening back over and over. I guess those TeeVee productions all intersected around 1975. My smart phone calculator indicates that I've been recording sounds for 47 years. So I was like nine or ten years-old. Gracious, was I ahead of time.
Even though I had watched those TeeVee productions, I would listen back and study the patterns. Once they were broadcast in those days, that was it. Gone. The VCR was still years off. I would study the studio audiences. The direction. The interactions. How lines were delivered. The production beats. I was a student. Artist and psychologist.
I learned there are no rules to sound. The math doesn't always have to add up. And people can have differences. People can even love really bad stuff. As Bart Cooper said to Pete Campbell, "Who cares?"
I've made a lot of music. I've recorded a lot of sounds. As you said, LFCD, I've made songs, improvisations, and collages of original or originally sourced sounds. I enjoyed that. I also found that I really like using other people's sounds to run together with other-other people's sounds to make something new. Or, just different.
That's a mixy; just using other people's stuff to conduct producing exercises. Maybe these producing exercises are heard by no one, I don't know but I've still put in the work. I'm learning so much. Maybe someone hears something I made and decides to let me produce their jawn. I don't know. That's also a mixy: not knowing. Exploring. Producing. Existing.
Over the past few years, I have made about four mixy mixes each year then linked them up as one production piece. Sum of the parts. I guess the year-end product can be called a record and maybe that's the product. A literal record of a year in my life. The sounds that go with the sights. I don't really know. It's just where I am right now, LCFD.
Mixys are like the
Unitarian Universalist's; they are everything and they are nothing at all. Bless. Well, actually the Unitarian Universalist's believe in "one god" so don't buy all the they-believe-in-everything/theyb-believe-in-nothing nonsense. Religion is religion, all that stuff is fake.
That's a mixy!
Just a guess.
-ty
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