Why ask why?
This is a hero’s journey/Sisyphean task to release music in conjunction with writing as a cross-genre odyssey to save the world.
Expect to receive 12 songs over the course of a year and two essays accompanying each release. I’m hoping to keep this going for the long-run as a creative practice. I plan to keep the verbiage concise as well as fresh, incisive, clear, persuasive, retractable, and mildly amusing.
Please consider the entirety of the content, including nonfiction essays, as part of the artwork. My original intent was to use this platform to discuss songs released under the moniker “Miter” from my recent release Shelled and for a series of singles that I will release over the course of 2023. The focus shifted to releasing one fully completed and produced original song each month.
laBelaBel Business
Are you interested in being “signed” and joining laBelaBel? Here’s some information from the original post.
Or, just say hello via Notes, Chat, or any comments for anyone in the group. There are absolutely no restrictions, obligations or costs. It is 100% about building solidarity and support among music creators on Substack. We need your help to improve and evolve the idea, or to make it your own.
Who is Miter?
It’s me, Ryan. Many of my readers are family and friends. If you want to get in touch, just reply to a Substack email from Miter and it will go to me. Or, just send me and email at rjstubbs (at) gmail ya turkey!
Why Miter?
There is an astounding amount of duality in the world. For example, power and corruption should be diametric terms but only exist together. Cohesive beliefs and groupthink are a ways for us to share commonality but they end up excluding the beliefs of other groups. These types of incongruencies speak to the duality of our world as we perceive it. The frequent occurrence of paradoxes and the codependency of the antithetical are the types of ideas that I want to explore. The music I am making under the moniker “Miter” attempts to explore these ideas among others.
The word miter has at least two definitions:
1. A hat worn by Catholic bishops.
2. The joining of two pieces of wood at a 90 degree angle.
I’m trying to stay away from cringe-y philosophy (too late) or religious diatribes (still ok) in this writing, so I’ll steer clear of definition #1 for now. I do like the meaning and metaphors that can be taken from combining two things at a perfect angle.
Phonetically, mite-r could mean a type of insect, a dust mite, something insignificant. Also, the words “mite” and “might” sound exactly the same while being antonyms. The term “Mites” is used for youth hockey players aged 7-8—not to be confused with “Mini-Mites” who are players aged 5-6 years. As a youth hockey player myself, I was a mite. And a mini-mite.
With these phonetical expansions, the name Miter has a wonderful number of meanings that are tangential and paradoxical. I don’t have a preference regarding the meaning of the word Miter but it is important to me that there are multiple meanings. It’s the duality between the blurry and the focused that is part of what I want to explore, and music is a good vehicle for doing so.
