Imagine music that brings you a bit more joy, a bit more hope even, perhaps a bit more mirth—right now. Because you need at least a short break from sorrow and despair. Perhaps it sounds like this:
Imagine sitting in an empty church sanctuary over your lunch break with nothing but a loop recorder and your voice. You’ve got one hour to create a piece of music that captures the essence of how you’re feeling in that moment and that allows you to cultivate your skill as a musician. You will perform the piece, record it, and mix it within the space of a single hour.
This is the process, repeated five days a week nearly every week for two years, that has produced the nearly 400 songs of this Daily Song Project.
No auto-tune nor any other audio processing was used in these recordings. Following a Japanese wabi-sabi aesthetic, any so-called “imperfections” are embraced as an integral part of a piece’s beauty.
May 2016 was a particularly good month for the project, and resulted in the album What Words May Come available on Bandcamp. The 17 songs in this collection were each inspired by a different haiku poem or short quotation. (For this recording, a minimum of audio processing was applied for mastering purposes.) Listen to the entire album for free at Bandcamp.
Amado has written several posts about the Daily Song Project that you can read for more information.