Trivialities by entertainment for the braindead
Now this is nothing for the Greatest Hits Collection. No excellent piece of craftsmanship, no mentionable artistic value. Just stuff that happened, songs that happened while I was planning on something else, like a comma in the short story that is my life.
That’s how it rolls, you’re designing your career, planning out your steps, willing to create something big and meaningful, and in the meantime there are all those little things going on… friends become strangers, strangers turn into friends, maybe one of them reminds you that life’s not so bad or meanwhile you’ve found comfort in nihilism, and then there’s this little ukulele that you’ve owned for years but rarely ever played… yet suddenly it’s overflowing with music.
No experiments this time. No exploration of unknown terrain. No concepts, nothing big. Sometimes I feel so sick of sounding lovely all the time, of always sounding the same, but then again I can’t help it. So, fuck creativity! Fuck belief in progress! Maybe I should be elsewhere already.
We always feel urged to move forward, do better shit than yesterday, more accomplished, more brilliant, more fancy, and maybe it’s almost considered stagnation in personal development if someone just wants to lean back and play some boring ukulele folk songs to comfort himself. Sure I want to be more brilliant and fancy and better than ever, too, but for now maybe there is no need to reinvent the wheel as long as I’m happy playing my rediscovered ukulele for a while.
All the flamboyant shit can wait until tomorrow. So once more I’m not taking a creative leap forward but rather just sitting down on the very spot I happen to stand right now. But maybe someone wants to sit besides me and listen?
Sometimes I read funny speculations about what instruments I used on my recordings. This was my repertoire for these songs:
A soprano ukulele, a bowed guitar, a bluegrass banjo, a mandolin banjo, glockenspiel, one concertina, another concertina, a wooden flute, borrowed drums and a cardboard box, casio mini-keyboard, shaker & tambourine.
Tracklist
| 1. | A Smile | 3:24 |
| 2. | A Friend | 3:55 |
| 3. | An Answer | 4:11 |
| 4. | A River | 2:43 |
| 5. | A Glass of Wine | 3:50 |
Credits
Everything done by Julia Kotowski. Thanks for the wine to N.
License
CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. See the Creative Commons website for details.
Julia Kotowski, based in Berlin, weaves her sonic universe from shy song lines, small instruments and field recordings, carefully wraps them in paper cut-outs and serves them with home-made ginger cookies. And coffee.