We’re Doing Jamuary!

Kind of last minute decided to do Jamuary, the month long challenge that asks you to make a short musical “jam” of some kind and post it every day in the month of January. When I released my album in May, I figured I’d take a few days to relax, then dive into some synth programming and sound design for a month or two and then launch a new album or release of some kind. Then life happened — I moved TWICE in that span of times, sold a house, bought a house (and rented one, too), got a new part-time job, and dealt with the various things that you have to deal with as an adult.

As a result, I didn’t make a ton of progress… I have a bunch of little loops and starters I made on the Ableton Move (I ought to review that thing…) and a few modular jams that need to be worked on, but nothing beyond that. And the last time I did Jamuary, in 2021, I generated a TON of great ideas and shortly thereafter recorded Oneirogen Codex, which was a big breakthru for me at the time. (The best/most complete of those jams were included on Is Life in Dreams Are Made Of?, along with a few other stray tracks; the rest are mostly no longer available online.) So I figured, fuck it, five years is a long enough break, so let’s do it again!

To make it a little more fun, I asked my friends, fans, and online followers to suggest prompts for me to react to for the jams. And boy, did they ever respond! I got 32 prompts, ranging from short recordings, to drawings and photographs, to abstract videos and lots and lots of (mostly) weird text prompts. Each day, I will select one (probably using a number picker site/app like this), spend up to an hour making a little jam/improv out of it, and then posting the results (here, and/or on Bluesky, Mastodon, and YouTube). I may stream some/all of them, too (at YouTube). (BTW, you can always find all my social media links on the Ether Diver Online page.)

So, one prompt a day, chosen at random, worked for an hour or so. At the end, I’ll have 31 (if I don’t miss days) little rough pieces to inspire me or to release or polish or hide away forever. If you’d like to follow along, give me a follow on one of those social media sites, or add my RSS feed to your feed reader (subscribing via the link at the bottom here gives you a sub to Other People’s Music, which is unrelated, but by all means sub to that too). You can also just pop in here and there and look for Jamuary tags on posts, if that is easier for you.

And if you’d like to jam along? Or just check out the wacky prompts ahead of time? Those are shared in this spreadsheet.