There’s a difference between music I like and music I feel most compelled to share… while I usually like what I share, the reverse is not necessarily true.
What I share is that which is already caught up in a broader purpose or calling. I do not feel this as originating inside me, rather in the best of circumstances I let it appropriate me. I let it bring me into what is proper, that is, into my own. In that way, I also bring the sound into its own. Being already “in” the sound, I simply reveal it as that which it already is.
Ideally, what I share would be 100% the work of others – in reality though, this work can almost never be found. This gap then naturally becomes the space in which I create. Creation is simply to be of service and has nothing to do with uniqueness and least of all “innovation” or “distinguishing myself” … Better to not distinguish myself, better to promote others instead because then there is a community that can be a real force in the world.
[I really need to heed my own advice and set up a mixcloud or NTS show or record label or live events which… and then only create when I cannot do otherwise… There are all sorts of ways I am failing right now, but if I ever turn things around this is the form things are likely to take…]
‘Uniqueness’ is a dangerous trap – it is not the phenomenon, but a distortion thereof, an attempt to ground the groundless in a neoliberal ‘I’… I must take pains that the ‘thatness’ of my circumstance not become a ‘whatness’… Which is all to say – of course there’s a radical specificity – I come from a specific place, with a specific history, and only certain things are meaningful at any given moment – perhaps really only the one thing to which I have been called is meaningful. But this lack of universality should not be mistaken for individualism. To take this radical dependence – on that which I am ‘in’ and that to which I have been delivered over – and push it inside the ‘I’ is to convert dependence into its opposite – independence, the autonomy and self-sufficiency of the ‘I’, it is to destroy the connections, historical and social, human and non-human, which sustain all creation. And it is only because there are such substantializing forces that there is even strife… that creation is even a battle to begin with… But the battle is never against ‘others’, rather always for and with them – always fighting on their side.
The one who heeds the call may end up being ‘different’… but all the better if this is not the case, all the better if we all heed the same call and come forth together.
