It was going brilliantly until 2004, somehow I had a semi-functional recording studio and a group of talented people enthusiastic about about using it, when someone brought in an iPod, and with it the ‘so what?’ problem.* I’ve been thinking about that, sifting through the ideas, trying to distinguish between the good and the bad, and figure out where the magic has been disappearing to and what we can do to get it back ever since. I was wrong about a lot of stuff for a long time.

A big part of my thinking was along the lines of rejecting ‘selling out’ (even before spotify and apple music), and the evils of digital production and compression (especially that which was done badly, which at the time was a lot of it). However, I don’t think either of those, or even both together, account for the problem.

Whatever the problem is, is not helped by the medium we work in - imagine Van Gough being rudely interrupted by a felt tip salesman. ‘You don’t need all that hassle with pigments! Ew, what’s that - it stinks! Stop grubbing around in the hedge! Have 1000 felt tips! Imagine what you can do with ONE THOUSAND COLOURS! And it’s so convenient - almost no effort required at all! (By the way, I’m selling the same set to everyone on earth who thinks they may be interested in making any sort of picture, for any purpose at all).’

MUSIC ≠ CODE.

Stop making code! Use the code to record the music… to make a record of it. Make. A. Record.

By extension, you have to have some music to record before you start.

The music doesn’t fit in a phone. The phone is merely a window to the music. This needs to be not only understood, but lived. Most music is made to fit in the digital matchbox that is a phone. (Every audio component of a phone was designed and then has evolved for 15yrs for speech clarity. No wonder music sucks).

Ever since ‘new sounds’ started to come in algorithmic form, what is deemed new/exciting/fashionable is the latest algorithm, creating sounds no-one has heard before. Before music was digital, algorithms came in weird rack mounted black boxes, and before that in organs with lots of knobs and buttons. The Prodigy in the 90s, for example, were the first people to make a record with a Korg M1. Jean Michell-Jarre was waiting for the latest Farfisa organ to make his next record, pre-dating midi. I’m not disrespecting these people - they did good things with the new tools. These things have their place, but they aren’t everything.

The music shouldn’t fit in a phone. The phone, if it has a role at all, is merely a window to the music, the way a tiny transistor radio was back in the day. It didn’t have to be explained to anyone that the actual record didn’t sound like that.

‘Take the music out of the machine. Put it back in the air, where it belongs. That’s what it’s for. It’s not only to make your brain sing, that’s a byproduct.

It’s to make reality move and vibrate; it becomes part of that reality, shaping it in real time and space.

It’s those interactions with reality making your brain sing - that’s what music is.’ **

The problem is also in a lot of musicians mindsets, and the assumptions they don’t even realise they are making; the presumed substrate that they are building their creative process on, which guarantees a boring end result before one even begins. I hasten to point out this isn’t their fault, they have just learned in an environment that is driven by (fiat) monetary/time efficiency and convenience. Even those who reject those things then are swimming against them; they are the current in which we all swim. Staying still then becomes a calculated effort of pushing against the current just the right amount - which takes effort and attention, meaning that effort and attention can’t be used elsewhere.

It’s all about the people. (Fellow musicians). It’s nothing without the people. The very best music is rarely, if ever, a solo endeavour. Even that which appears to come from one person usually has crucial input from others. Brahms had an orchestrator. Most solo acts from last century had a band, or collaborator.

The magic is in the blend of attention, ideas, skill, freedom and trust between a group, enabling a collective flow state rarely achieved in recent times. In my experience, the only way to get there is by trying, and trying at length; therefore, the results being crap for longer than is comfortable is unavoidable. There has to be collective faith that the perseverence will yeild some magic - and that comes from the people. In these days of zero privacy, instant playback and short attention, this has become entirely socially unacceptable; and in the minds of those who live in that reality, impossible, or at least unconscionable.

A few other rambling truths I have stumbled upon over the years:

The difference between 0 and 1 is infinity. Not 1, 128, 44,100, 48,000, 96,000 or even 192,000. Infinity is infinitely bigger than all those numbers.

It currently feels to me like we listen through a 16 colour monitor.

I don’t listen to music through phones, ever. And almost never through headphones.

Almost every piano on a record after a certain point in time is the same sterile Steinway in a studio, or an equivalent of it, a copy of it, or a deviation from it. Every electronic piano sound programmed is also copying or derived from that.

Boring. Listen to a piano recorded in the 50s, or earlier. Ashkenazy, or Errol Garner. Or a bit later, Penguin Cafe Orchestra.

Imagine trying to make a movie, but starting by getting the best looking shot and camera angle of each actor, so they look their absolute best, at the beginning. Then, you don’t move the camera, but use CGI to move the characters around the screen, to interact with each other, to create the story, to create all the various visual scales, atmospheres and environments.

That’s how algorithmic music production appears to me. Some people will become astoundingly good at using this technique, and undoubtably are today. But I’d rather watch something shot on actual film, filming real people being humanly brilliant.

Anyway, I’m good at pontificating at length and probably going nowhere…

Where I am now

The idea evolved to ‘Musicians come to my studio, magic is captured/made, leave with a bunch of code and a hard drive’ - so they properly own the finished product, can attach the hard drive to the intermet, and the code they could configure however they wish to distribute/monetise/stream/whatever. This was in the days of coloured coins, MAIDSAFE and before transaction fees were a realistic concern, or lightning existed.

Fast forward a few years, and Nostr brings many more possibilities to this, and some version of it needs to be in the world.

What @Aaronofessex and others are doing using V4V and with @New Music Nudge Unit is the closest thing to the bones of that idea I have yet come across in real life.

Modern version: band has new music. Practice until they can play it. Well. Add any juicy live real time (analogue?) production if they want. Real noises in a real space. (we can cheat a bit with time dilation if necessary). My studio can hold an audience of around 20. Come and perform it live to Nostr. That performance is the product. Those musicians actually creating it together in real time, the way a lot of the best music was made.

Also, encode the current block height in the end result.

If this semi-coherent rambling sounds interesting, I’d love to talk about it further… I’m aiming to be at Penny’s on the 29th.

*Aside from the issues referred to in this writing, suddenly musical scarcity, and with it the complex and exhilarating web of musical discovety was also rendered obsolete. This is adjacent to, but not a direct part of, the same problem.

**Me, about 10 years ago, probably in an inebriated frustration I managed to write down.