Like many musicians, when the coronavirus hit I lost all my work in a matter of days. I had a complicated schedule, filled with tours, festivals, and local concerts, and it all evaporated very fast. Along with losing all my paying work, I was left with the question, what about the work of art? Something tells me art will be fine, even though humans are in trouble at the moment. But right now art is precluded from its important work of gathering us together. So musicians are in a weird situation. In the initial shock, my thought was, I don't know what to do but I can record music at home. So on March 19 2020, I began recording a new song every day and posting them to this album. The philosophy is "use what you've got" (is there ever another option?) -- for me that means clarinets, a synthesizer I can't figure out, and rudimentary recording ability. Because it's a diary I am trying to use the recording process as a sketchbook, and an opportunity to mess around. ("Don't forget to mess around." -- Steve Lacy) Steve Lacy once told Frederic Rzewski "The difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to think about what to say in 15 seconds, while in improvisation you have only 15 seconds." (Lacy's statement took him 15 seconds.) By that measure, PLAGUE DIARY operates in the realm of 7.5 seconds. It's not one-take improvisation (although some of it is), but the goal of making up and recording a song in a day imposes some real limits. Working on PLAGUE DIARY every day, I've felt like I'm getting better at using the recording process as a sketchpad, capturing and refining ideas and contemplating what ingredients are needed in a song. The question arises again and again, what do you put into a song, what do we put into art? The answer, as I see it now, is "everything you know." Not everything you can do, but everything you know of balance, justice, beauty, struggle, groove, liberation. The values are contained in the work, in hopes that they can be of use to the receptive listener. Ben Goldberg - Bb Clarinet, Eb Albert System Clarinet, Contra Alto Clarinet, Roland JX-03 Synthesizer, Korg MS-20 Synthesizer, Empress Tape Delay Pedal, Memory Boy Analog Delay, Composer, Engineer, Producer / Eli Crews: Mastering Engineer / Casio Coleman: Artwork Press on Vol. 1: "During lockdown, Ben Goldberg ordered his diminished universe by applying his clarinets and synth to 216 spontaneous compositions that sound as if they could have been created in the Western world most anytime in the last couple of hundred years. They speak of intelligence, reassurance, dignity, quiet endurance, and even a little humor. If culling the list down to four remixed and buffed-up volumes of melodic discipline to be released a month apart still seems like a lot, consider the short supply in which the above qualities stand." - MetalJazz https://www.metaljazz.com/2024/01/abstractionist_shorts_sunny_ki.php