The Idea of Anything to Be Done, a two-part solo guitar improvisation consisting of “Myself Creating What I Saw” and “Let No Name Ever Pass Our Lips,” is out today.

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This isn’t really an “album,” nor would I call it a “single” per se; I’m shooting for a kind of open form inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Kafka, for whom writing rises against psychologizing and interiority as a form of becoming for the author, trading solidity for universal desire to deterritorialize and escape romantic individuality. For D&G, “minor literature” represents the exceeding of and escaping from the territorializing forces of literary totality. After Laughlin Cantate I told myself I was going to focus exclusively on releasing music with vocals and away from solo guitar pieces, so consider this a slight detour, toward a minor music, maybe.

The titles all come from Austen’s Emma and were more or less chosen at random while flipping through the book. (Perhaps coincidentally, I just read through Northanger Abbey this weekend.) By now I’ve written ad nauseam on my desire to “get back” into a consistent creative state when “the idea of anything to be done” feels insurmountable. I’m working my way through Stanislavsky’s Creating a Role at the moment which devotes some time to illustrating the passage from idea to performance:

…creative impulses are naturally followed by impulses leading to action. But impulse is not yet action. The impulse is an inner urge, a desire not yet satisfied, whereas the action itself is either an external or internal satisfaction of the desire. An impulse calls for inner action, and inner action eventually calls for external action. It is, however, as yet too soon to speak of this.

My recent solo guitar performances have largely inhabited droning, meditative states, sometimes bordering on leaden, so to release something this sprightly and light feels like a necessary corrective and allowed me to draw on my studies of my favorite Brazilian guitarist-composers like Luiz Bonfá and Paulinho Nogueira.

For all this talk of Austen, Kafka and Deleuze I feel I should mention the week these pieces were recorded I read Joy Williams’ Escapes, Michael J. Seidlinger’s My Pet Serial Killer and Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians. The album cover is a Keyhole limpet (Megathura crenulata) at the Birch Aquarium, which we visited the same week to see the little blue penguins. If you get a chance, go see those guys. They’re worth it.