Everyone goes through it, that stage when you’re first starting out with a project, getting your feet wet, figuring out what you’ve got to work with. Whether it’s mashing all of your expensive neon colored Sculpey together to make a pretty, neon, rainbow, clay snake or using all the Italian spices you can get your mitts on to make your first spaghetti sauce, it happens. It’s experimenting. Not only does it happen, it’s completely necessary.

It’s easy for already accomplished artists to forget that this is how everyone begins. Unless you’re some deaf virtuoso touting around the concertos you wrote whilst picking your nose at age five, in which case, you’re excluded from this, the first time you picked up a guitar, you didn’t start shredding like Steve Vai or paint the Persistence of Time on your first try (Dali). Maybe you could conceive more than stick figures or play a few power chords, but you had to start somewhere. People forget this. Unforgiving professors who are unable to fathom the varieties of individual learning curves each person has and why their students don’t understand basic things like the circle of fifths, they don’t remember that they once were probably in the same position. Or in a worse case, perhaps they were an exception, and it simply was second nature, these professionals lose track of the concept of teaching.

What makes L2Ork such a special thing is that everyone is learning. And everyone is in that beginning stage of understanding the new medium in which we are working. So like the kid who upon getting his hands on a sequencer for the first time made a hip-hop beat, we’ve spent the past few weeks playing with these wii-motes. Really. And it’s been incredibly fun, albeit absurd. We’ve glitched voice overs and presidential speeches, mapped soul-wrenching percussional smack-downs and the dings of little bells to wii-mote directional hits, bent the pitches of Chewbacca and Lightsaber samples played on top of dripping water loops vocoding our voices. Heck, I may even admit to being guilty of trying to make a hip-hop beat with these things.

On top of being a blast to play with, as I said before, this process of gaining familiarity with your instrument, an instrument that changed nearly every class period with updated patches and effects, was a necessary step. It showcased the wide potential of sounds we could create and the amount of fun we could have with our new instruments. It posed the question that every artist needs to ask in order to progress, where is this going? How are we going to get there?

A focus is emerging in L2Ork. Truth be told, I don’t  think many of us can answer these questions yet, but the fact that we’re asking them truly shows that a direction is starting to form. We may not be painting the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling any time soon, but we certainly aren’t finger-painting.

-Adam

Dig it: Radiohead/Hail to the Thief (I can’t help it, I always listen to this album in the autumn)