Pushed back more times than a Curtis Hanson film, at last this weekend sees the Stylus debut of Trouble With Classicists: Composition and Criticism in Real-Time.

As you can see below, “Lucky Me” isn’t exactly the first post of TWC — only the first affiliated with Stylus Magazine, for whom I’ve written intermittently since 2003. You can see my inaugural Stylus-unaffiliated post here, but suffice it to say that the creative process behind TWC is this:

A) Write music –>

B) Upload music –>

C) Write about music –>

D) Review comments –>

E) Repeat…maybe

Now, the original idea wasn’t just to write navel-gazing electronica, but to some extent, that’s what’s happened. Only one track, “Shino,” has gotten the full TWC treatment, having gone from a J-pop instrumental to a ragged post punk vocal pop song, to a…well, you decide.

But the real goal here is to put the creative process completely on display — with the web helping make the experience as three-dimensional, interactive and in real-time as possible.

With that, let’s unveil a few of my more recent creations, which range from half-written pop songs to vocoder fragments to microsampling experiments.

But first…some aforementioned navel-gazing electronica:

To a large extent, I’ll let these speak for themselves — “Gertie” is a bit more of a finished product than “Daisuke Blues,” which has some nice juxtapositions, but feels like it kind of peters out instead of builds. Still, there’s something to be said for the feel of tracks like this, which, as I wrote previously, are largely about exploring texture. They sure as hell aren’t about melody. As I’ve found in recent months, sketching things like this may not produce any masterpieces, but it does kind of relax me.

Oh, right, melody. Initially, “Demon Sea” was supposed to sound like Provision-era Scritti Politti, but ended up sounding more like any-era Aimee Mann. Obviously, this isn’t finished yet and the vocal is a little drama queen for my taste, but the melody and lyric conceit each have real potential.

Next up, some microsampling…