#21

This is so cool to read - thanks for sharing - could you say any more about what you are doing in all of this? I feel like you spoke in an abstract way. And I agree with your abstractions but what about you - are you doing these things you write about?

#22

I think I try my best to make my musical experience be about removing myself from the picture (but also still being completely there - I know I could program something and hit go - but I want the opposite - self absence (maybe) but also complete physical interaction leading to sound manifestation) - I think I read somewhere once that Joyce was trying something similar - to remove himself from the writing process - does that idea make sense at all to you? Is getting you out of the way drawing your subconscious closer to becoming the actor or the music maker? Or is that something else entirely? I dont think I have any idea what the/my subconscious is (or where it is). On the other hand - yes - everything I do is an accident - I think. A boulder tumbling through a large cavern with me on top me as the boulder me falling down - this was a recurring childhood nightmare of mind that I have accepted as just the lived experience.

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#23

I think I was just trying best to respond to your initial post, that in some ways I agree with the sentiment, that when right in the locus of music making, the whole collaborative process itself is about forward development. That’s not to say music making can’t be somewhat idle, for instance, noodling on an instrument while watching TV. Or even a session that doesn’t bear much fruit. I guess I was referring more to those ‘flow’ moments, where the self and the music are something of a feedback loop, not only revealing musical direction as u go, but also pointing toward your best aspirations for your life or self. I’m sure you are aware of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi‘s famous text on the matter, which is something of an upward spiral. Life direction can propel forward or plateau, depending how the perceived challenges are engaged. Still, I’d think a kind of deep listening is going on when engaged in the mode I was referring to above. I guess it’s about all the senses coming together and ‘being in the zone’, to put it more candidly.

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#24

I’m interested in these questions, but I don’t know whether I’m actually developing an aesthetic in the narrow sense), or rationalizing after-the-fact the stuff that already interests me. The modular occultism thread did give me a lot of food for thought (despite not doing the modular thing nor the occult thing)… I’ve become interested in apophasis, which introduced me to emanationism, and I was struck by the notion of creative potential as a microcosm of divinity. I don’t know what I think about the ontological status of any of it, but it certainly changes my perspective on what I do when I do the musicking thing, and what my responsibilities might be, so to speak. And what I need to do outside of musicking in order to have anything to express when I do. I want my music to live within tensions like the “axis” you mentioned, void/silence/self-annihilation vs presence/awareness/will… how to sustain both…

I don’t think I’m succeeding; I’m aware in negative terms, attitudes I want to avoid, but I don’t really have a sense of ever getting it right. (Although maybe this is appropriate to the issue?) And it’s hard to believe I’m “making meaning” when I don’t think the meaning of music exists outside of the act of listening, and nobody likes my music. Buuuut anyway, I’m drawn to feedback networks as only-partially-controllable processes that aren’t simply random, and using the timing of sound-events within field recordings to determine large-scale structure, for some concrete examples.

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#25

For me, unless I an trapped in a theory-brain and concept-brain hangover from too deep a focus on my academic day job, it is at the very least driven by the subconscious. I think the most worthwhile (both in the sense of worth experiencing the birth of it AND in the sense of worthwhile for the listener) work is not a matter of my MAKING music, but more of me and sound MAKING each other. It knows - whether from my subconscious or somewhere else - something I don’t. If I battle this, if my ego gets in the way, the process as well as the results are painful.
I rarely know what my work is REALLY about until after I’ve made it, even if it is something conceptual in origin. EG I set out to make an experimental film about flags after 9/11 happened - only a month after finishing it did I realize it was a film about the experience of paranoia from a static place as metaphorical waves crash and recede repeatedly over our lives. There were still flags in it, but halfway through filming it I realized the film knew more about why I was making it than I did. Same goes for the best musical generation experiences I’ve had.
In the end its a relationship just like a human-to-human one: artist and instrument/tools/equipment, and then in a collaborative setting, artists bringing that relationship into a more complex relationship with other artists and their tools / processes.

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#26

I listen to and enjoy many styles of music of basically all types. I spent many many years working on music where I would try to specifically emulate something about a particular style or genre. It was more of an exploration of music as craft than anything else. Could I convincingly make something in the vein of a genre I like? The answer was yes for the most part, but it never really felt satisfying.

After my old group broke up, I took some time over a few years to think a little more in depth on what it is that I really care about and what I thought I needed to do to explore a more personal side of music making. I began to feel the slipping away of disdain at how difficult it was for me to make something the way say Dego from 4 Hero would. I started to think about what kind of general aspects of music really mattered to me.

I’ve been a DJ and vinyl collector for over two and a half decades, since I was a teen. The physical aspect of handling the music and all of the surface noise and this kind of thing very much were a major appeal to me. Despite using samples in my music before, it was not really the center piece of the ideas for the most part. I decided to change that up.

The lack of feeling of realness in a lot of modern music making was a turn off, so I decided to use only physical instruments and recording devices, especially ones that impart their own sound into the recording. And to do single long takes with no editing with as much “live” and unquantized performances in the parts and mixdowns etc as I could.

The other thing is that despite being a fan of a lot of dancefloor related music, I realized that much of what I like most is artists who have a defined process and method, usually putting an abstracted or experimental edge on things.

Once I let these ideas bounce around in my head for a while, I went back to making music but in essentially a totally different way than I had before. The results were immediately more satisfying and interesting.

Am I all the way there? Not yet. But I see the path and understand better what I need to get from myself to make music that sound and feels like me.

It’s much more interesting to me to use essentially a very limited set of possibilities and try to filter the many things I like through myself and those possibilities than it is to have a wide open constantly changing approach. For me this alters the results to have more energy and immediacy, essentially the things I feel are missing from a lot of modern music.

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