In 2023, I created an interdisciplinary arts project that merges my best comedic storytelling with my 30-year background in musical composition and borrowing heavily from my professional experience in web development and visual design. I’ve channeled all of my expertise and skills into this project to create a unique and innovative work of art, music and entertainment.
Writing is at the heart of what Day For Night is, mostly due to the creative nature of work which is sometimes self-initiated, and where there are characters, stories and situations, but the mythology or back-story is left to be explored. It’s been my journey since the age of 10, and which informs my current work ‘Epiphanies’.
It is by coincidence that the use of a realist metaphor, that subverting the language of advertising can become a big part of how something like that gets presented. For example, we have Simon Patterson’s “The Great Bear”, joining the world’s public persona, engineers, comedians, royalty, planets and major philosophers on a tube map; the […]
I’ve always had this passion for fiction intertwining with reality, and blurring those edges – especially where these either make for a good dialogue about life and art. Perhaps it even fulfills a need I have; for irony to find a home in art. The effect of bringing lightness and humor to every experience now […]
Words, to describe pictures of people who use words and pictures, to describe places and things. The Situationists were a league of French political artists during the latter 20th century, whose slant on social reform took the form of a surreal post-Dadaist manipulation of word and text. Often, their détournements (diversions) involved the supplanting of […]
day 008, identity, day for night, eric scott
Current policy is to remove harmful or limiting adjectives from any stage of the creative, or music-making process. As I began to use language that felt free of terminology, labeling or artistic judgment, I found that I also felt happier about much of it. Instead, I was favoring a system of organizing music by its […]
Begin by putting all the ideas into a kind of bag. This restores a greater degree of equality between each idea. This, in turn, builds awareness of the effects (sometimes adverse) which labels can have upon our beliefs about what we create and do. So de-labeling at the beginning, that is a system that works […]
I have limited attention and like to work on only one project at a time. But often, I’m required to manage many more, and so my attention is continually being divided between what I feel I should be doing and what I prefer to be doing. So, each week at Day For Night, Thursday is […]
So what is a musician’s responsibility, as an artist, to music before all else? Electronica, in musical terms, is a sort of textless world… The prospect of less politics may be what makes this seem so encouraging. After all, it captures the inspiration of so many solo music-makers, along with the immediacy of the process. […]
We are generally intolerant of things we don’t understand. And as musicians, we love to taunt and tame the limits of modern music consumers. Targeting the unreasonably short fuse is a viable place to start. We pervert sound, we make the unfashionable listenable. We suggest that anything that was formerly listenable is still exercisable as […]
Experimentation in the realm of audio as music, is certainly no new topic. Being experimental is of value to every artist, in all media. Sometimes it seems to lack relevance; we have seen pioneers championing electronic technology since the first half of the 20th century. As a topic for discussion, it is perhaps less relevant […]
Brian Eno, in his introduction for the latest edition of Michael Nyman’s “Experimental Music: Cage & Beyond”, makes some excellent points about the trajectory of 20th century experimental music and our intellectual fetishes.. The best books about art movements become more than just descriptions: they become part of what they set out to describe. I particularly […]
You open your mind, and this is where you experience the new. This is a fundamental element of wanting to enjoy myself as much as possible. If I judge while I listen, I tend not to find much to enjoy. Maybe, because I begin by assuming that I’m right first, and that if I don’t […]
OK, now that’s funny. I’m remembering now – perhaps due in part to recently taking in 24 Hour Party People – the very first time I remember hearing New Order and liking them. It was, of course, hearing Blue Monday on KROQ, which my father would let me play in his car – on the […]
It’s funny how we choose to listen to music. Music people somehow fall into two vague categories, people who are genuinely interested in music and fans of the medium itself – and casual listeners, whose conscious efforts are often left out of the matter, but who enjoy their role as consumers. Fans of the medium […]
This one is justified visually, by the signage in big record shops, as a purported improvement over listening with your ears. This is the one that says listen with your beliefs. And, this is a form of compartmentalizing personal experience. Of course, most artists reject categorisation of their work. It’s insulting. It demeans and diminishes […]
Could it really be important enough to discuss what makes music important? Yes and no. Other people who are genuinely interested in music will definitely join me on this one. “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Thanks to debatably, either Elvis Costello, or Frank Zappa for that gem. Or both. We aren’t really […]
I don’t know exactly what it all means, or what might happen next, but… I definitely like it. That has generally been the assessment, or ethic, of all Day For Night work produced, usually at the moment of completion. Occasionally, I make attempts to re-contextualise my finished results. So, too often, the work is finished, […]
The imprint catalogue for Day For Night, much in the tradition the Factory Records cataloguing system, is more of a curator’s definition of an artists’ catalogue… Rather, it is not of objects to buy, but rather of events and situations, (Day 001, Day 002, etc. all the way to Day 100) all placed within a […]
Day For Night originated in 1991 as a recording imprint and independent-projects label, based out of Santa Monica, California. Promoting multimedia while emphasizing a lightly-branded, personalized design style, Day For Night CD releases to date include works in contemporary music and new media released on CD, CD-R and the web. In nearly-equal parts, the Day […]
It pays to be reliable. It also really pays to be flexible. It is the promise of joint partnership, such as an invitation to participate in an affair, even in an observational capacity. Like the look of a young woman, whose parents are driving her mad. It is a massive hormonal buildup. Everything about her […]
There is much additional creative that takes the form of lightness in dark — licht und blindheit — light and blindness? We expose the means and methods perhaps, but in so doing, we are to remain simple and unaffected. Perhaps it was Greenaway’s intention to do the same, using the text of the script as […]
Years ago, I remember a friend pointing out that a piece of music I played her off a CD sounded so simple – too simple. She said she could have done it. Using spoons. OK. So what’s wrong with that statement? Easy, it was a negative; it was a dismissal of the first artist’s work, […]
I was at a multimedia conference in San Francisco, and became momentarily obsessed with typing this when I should have been listening to the speakers. Truth is, I was listening — it was to Hillman Curtis, who inspired me so much that I went into “processing” mode — which is where I free-associate, and instead […]
For me, Day For Night has never been about any political or social issues, because these really don’t, on the whole, interest me. Want a list of things that interest me? Here: inspiration people loneliness noise order chaos values (like-mindedness) And the list goes on, but none of these are hot issues. So the only […]
