For context of those not following along, @ht73 wrote a really excellent post in the Pronouns thread. @zengomi made of note of their recording practice to which I responded:
This is the most appropriate thread for me to continue that thought without derailing that important discussion, but I do have additional thoughts that mostly touch here - though there are a lot of places one can discuss the utility of art to its creators.
Story time.
Before I got into modular, I hadn’t worked on music in… 8 or more years… I’d sold all of my music gear to pay for a move from New York City to Seattle with my then wife. An escape. Beyond doing some ulitlity sound design for games, I just wasn’t making music any more. A hobby to get back to, when I had time. And even at that stage, I was mostly trying to find my footing in it, which is also the period when I first got into Monome via maxmsp. It had probably been more like 15 plus years since I was really making music regularly. I was a wiz with Reason at 18.
By the time I landed in Seattle, I’d been trying to make my living in game development. I’d worked on games since my youth. I went back to school for it. Found some good work here, but I decided to strike out on our own with my best friend.
We had some nice success, burning everything as we went to keep going. Until we could finally slow down.
…
And then we failed. And my marriage failed. And my friendships failed. My inner drive axel broke. And I was lost and scared. I am still getting un-lost, and I have made a lot of progress, and I think I’m less scared. This place has been helpful for that. I’m not sure who I want my friends to be in the physical world, but I know I want them to be more like many of you.
All of this as the world became more and more metaphorically and literally on fire.
I was just starting therapy. I needed a hobby.
Modular is a good, rich hobby. It’s so complicated! There are so many options! It’s delicious for a brain like mine. But more importantly, my therapist observed that I needed a means of expression, and as is often the case, my inner world was already telling me that. I’d bitten the bullet on my first modules already. Now, I’m not practiced at putting myself into my art. That was a much more alien concept that makes me comfortable now. Expression still scares me.
But when you make art at your lows, if you’re looking to be critical of your art, it means being critical of yourself to a varying degree. But we’re not always ready to look at ourselves. Sometimes literally. Sometimes figuratively.
There is a literal pile of stuff behind me as I write this, waiting for me to Mari Kondo it to the dump. It’s been there for a while. Longer and larger than I would care to admit. I’ve always lived with a pile. There’s more that’s not even in the pile yet. Barnicles of multiple lives in multiple cities. Keep the engine running towards your goals. Keep holding on until you can finally afford to slow down. Till you finally have time to consder it all.
It’s not just a matter of gumption or willpower. I’ve helped other people clean up much worse messes than my own. I am very good that, until I am not. But those messes are not my messes.
When you have lost a lot, even when you want less things, it’s hard to let things go. It can be hard to look inside and reflect on the reasons you’re unable to figure out what to do with your past selves, and where you want to put your future selves. Letting objects go feels like literally losing parts of myself. There’s a lot of anger, sadness, pain, and disappointment hanging out in my piles. Waiting.
Writing this is part of that processing.
Sometimes I play. Sometimes I record. Sometimes both. Sometimes people need to express themselves for the sake of expression. Sometimes that’s all they need from their art.
Sometimes I share.
