It’s true that losing a decade’s worth of work represents an unfathomable number of hours spent working on things for which I now have very little to show. I liked having all of my work, because it was fairly diverse and I figured I’d never know when it might prove inspirational or even useful. For example, two years ago I wound up opening the first Reason project I ever did, the one I made while teaching myself to use the program, and found that it only really needed a little bit of cleanup and better mixing to be something of which I was really proud. I spent about an hour working on the arrangement, bounced it out and mastered it, and it got used in a student film project at school.

There were tons of projects I always meant to go back and finish, some closer to completion than others. A couple of the Ableton projects were supposed to be finished and released on Dorje sometime around next month. But hundreds of them may never have gotten any further along than they were a week ago. Truth be told, I only went through a lot of the older folders once every couple of years, and usually only one or two of the ideas turned out to be inspiring enough to finish or incorporate into other projects.

It was fun going through that stuff like a scrap book, but it’s likely that much of it was stuff I probably wouldn’t ever have used seriously. There is wisdom in the idea that things like this can be a rebirth. I’m not uninspired, and my systems and instruments still work. I know I will make more music. And I know I’m better at it now than I was when I started filling that drive. My canvass is empty and my palette is loaded up and ready to go.

I’m not trying to marginalize the feeling of loss I’m dealing with right now. Of course losing all of this hasn’t quite turned into a positive thing for me. And no matter what I do, I know that there’s no way that in ten years I’ll say “I sure am glad that happened. I wouldn’t like to hear that stuff today.” But I’ll still have work to show for myself at that point. I’m not lost or broken. I will work hard to finish this film score and put the whole experience behind me, and then I’ll go back to what I’ve done for years and make sounds and music with my toys.

William Orbit said in an interview that once he finishes a project and it gets released, he deletes all of his MIDI files, multitrack recordings and sequences. I’ve looked and sadly can’t find the interview, so I can’t quote him exactly, but basically it had to do with not wanting stuff he’d already done to be a crutch, and always moving forward with his music. I find that beautiful in a way. I am going to focus my efforts on always moving forward with my music for a while and see how that goes.