I recently ditched my fitness trackers – my Garmin watch and an Oura ring. They started to feel a little toxic, and were bringing me down quite a bit. Towards the end of their use, I began to think about whether the devices were acting as the carrot or the stick. Most of the platforms are set up to be carrots – “motivating” the user to complete challenges, compete with friends, and meet goals for step counts, sleep scores, and stress levels. For some, these might be great incentives to achieve these things, and any failures of them aren’t really dwelt upon. For others, and I am putting myself in this group, they can act as standards that must be met each day. If I fail to meet them, I can feel like I’ve somehow let someone down (I’m not sure if it’s myself or the fitness tracker platform). This constant striving to meet these goals can feel exhausting. Chasing the carrot begins to feel like being hit with the stick; a desperate shuffling along to tick off all the requirements in order to say I’ve had a ‘successful’ or ‘healthy’ day.
I think the strangest and most ironic outcome of fitness trackers is the stress they cause around sleeping. The devices measure your sleep and often give you a score out of 100. I was usually hitting around 80+ most nights – often in the 90s. But any time I didn’t land in that ballpark, I felt like I’d somehow done something bad – like I’d really screwed up. The outcome of this would simply be moved to the following night, where I would need to make up for the terrible sleep score. On these nights, I would really aim for 90+. But how do you actually make yourself have a good sleep? Consecutive sub-80 scores would compound a feeling of dread, as I thought about the severe damage I must be doing, or the way that I won’t be ‘functioning at my peak level’. What this would accumulate to is the ridiculous situation of lying awake in bed, feeling stressed about not being able to fall asleep, fearing that I would wake up with a low sleep score. I can’t fall asleep because of the stress of not being able to fall asleep. My low sleep score is caused by my fear of getting a low sleep score.
So, I thought about ways to ‘healthily’ work with these fitness trackers. I tried committing to only checking it once a day. I tried committing to not checking it when I woke up. I thought about only checking it every 3 months to see longer trends rather than a day-by-day increase or decrease of my fitness levels and various scores. I then finally resorted to deleting the apps altogether, and to just have the data uploaded to the platforms through Wi-Fi. But then I thought, why on Earth am I even wearing the device if I’m not actually going to look at the data? So I’ve resorted to taking off the devices altogether and instead wear a normal dumbwatch.
Fitness Trackers and Our Bodies
Fitness trackers have a way of separating us from our own bodies. They tell us narratives about our bodies and our health that can contradict our own feelings we have from within them. There have been times when I wake up feeling refreshed, but check the sleep score and see, say, 70/100. I then start to think “you know what, I do actually feel pretty drowsy and unrefreshed”. The opposite is also true; I wake up feeling drowsy and unrefreshed, only to see a sleep score of 90, making me consider whether in fact I do feel refreshed and well slept. These technologies make us second guess our own sense of our bodies. They make our bodies something to be read and analysed, rather than felt from within. They cause a strange sensory dissonance, separating us from how we feel, and what a device tells us about ourselves. I’m not necessarily saying that the fitness trackers are inaccurate in their readings – in fact, I believe their accuracy is beside the point. In other words, I’m not saying there is a discrepancy between what is actually the case, and what is represented in the data. Instead, I’m drawing attention to the separation between what is felt from within the body and what is read from the analysis of the body. And, importantly, I feel that often, what is read and analysed is seen as more accurate, or a more authoritative source of information about our own bodies.
These sorts of strange, redundant cycles, catastrophes and feedback loops are a common feature of modern existence. These technologies are sold to us as ‘essential’; in order to reach ‘maximum potential’, or to enrich existence in some way, we must adopt them. But after sustained use, we find that in fact, they are part of, or the very cause of, the problem. This is the case for social media, being framed as the great connector while actually driving us apart. It’s the case for fitness trackers promising good health but instead causing obsession and higher stress. These are two examples of technologies of alienation – alienation from others, and alienation from ourselves.
Technology companies often present their products as a form of ‘help’ – whether by promising to keep us social, improve our health, or, in the case of financial services, make purchases more convenient. However, can these outcomes truly be considered ‘help’? Making it easier for someone to spend their money isn’t really helping them; it’s helping companies get into the pockets of their customers. I think it’s important to remain critical of the technologies we use, questioning their promises and the real consequences of their adoption.
Leaving the fitness trackers behind led me to rely on my own sense of my body to get an idea of how I was feeling, how I slept, how stressed I was, how active I’ve been. It turns out I don’t need a device to tell me how ready I am for the day; I can feel that pretty well by myself. Who would have thought!? (My partner, who has been saying this for over a year now while I’ve been complaining about the trackers, rolls her eyes.)
This question might be approached by another question, “What is a well-trained person?” In today’s culture, we ask a person to think about what they want to do as their future career, get educated within that particular field, and mostly disregard everything else. The outcome of this is the person is fairly specialised and competitive in the job market. It is interesting to note the difference between this approach and that of a liberal education, or a liberal arts degree. This approach to education aims to cultivate a more well-rounded understanding of the world, culture, art, history, politics and philosophy. These things might not set the graduate up to be the most ‘valuable’ person in the job market, unless they ‘use it’ to produce some profitable product like a bestselling book. But it will give the student a better understanding of the world. They’ll have far less tunnel-vision on one particular area.
In today’s society there is more value placed on someone who is specialised in a field attached to a profitable industry – resulting in an emphasis on science, engineering and technical training – than someone who has a well-rounded liberal education. Which is “better”? Well, it depends who you ask, which means what is the “right” way to do education is subjective. An interesting thing to bring into this exploration is how the dominant, ruling class are able to influence public perception out of their self-interest. While being an entirely separate discussion, it’s important to note that “power” is wielded here not through physical force, but through the ability to establish what is “right” in the public mind, or even just how things simply are. So what is the “right” way to be educated will be deemed by the most powerful portion of our society. In the 21st century, these are the contemporary leading capitalists of our time. This class wields the power to deem what is the “right” way of doing things – including the approach to education.
Valuable Degrees
How about a liberal education? Students who have done or are doing these sorts of degrees may have faced the question, “What will you do with that?” This stems from the value of utility and efficiency in our modern society: everything that has been achieved through an intense amount of work must be put to some use – it must play a part of a broader plan, otherwise it is wasted work. And sure, I think this makes some sense, but I think what is important is that we realise that there are different perspectives of “use”. On one hand, some believe a graduate should “use” their degree to make themselves more competitive in the job market. In this way, if the degree doesn’t facilitate getting the graduate a job, it was a waste of time. On the other hand, another graduate can use their degree every day by understanding the world around them and its people to a greater degree than most others, regardless of whether they use the degree to get a job.
To many, the point of education is not to build an understanding of the world, themselves, those around them, or to teach them how to think independently and critically. Instead, it is to prime them for the next, most important stage of their life: their career. Why is this stage of our lives seen as the most important, that requires such intense training to prepare for? Some might think ‘of course it is the most important stage’. But really think about that for a second: We are wise monkeys, on a floating rock in the vast nothingness. We are surrounded by other wise monkeys, warmed each day by an enormous, ever-burning space ball. We can roam this incredible planet with its many landscapes, climates, mountains, and other natural phenomena. We can explore others, ourselves, the world we live on, and beyond. And yet the thing that we prioritise the most, out of all of this incredible chaos, is that monolithic cultural construct: our professional career.
The Career and Leisure
Whoever made this part of our lives the most important? Again, look to the capitalist ruling class. Why would they ever want us thinking otherwise? If the masses felt that life should be entirely about leisure – not in the sense of just constant partying and holidaying (though, why not?), but of contemplation, exploration, debate and reflection – the first thing to collapse would be the economy – the lifeblood of capitalists’ power.
The ruling class have changed the way that we see leisure in society. Leisure is seen as ‘lazy’, the actions of a ‘dropkick’, ‘slobbish’, and (look deeply at this word) ‘unproductive’. Leisure is not seen as a time of inner reflection, contemplation, getting to ‘know thyself’, the synthesis of wisdom, connection with others and the sharing of ideas, as it was in Ancient Greece. We now sometimes phrase leisure as “time off”. But this defines it by what it is not: time on. If instead leisure was considered as time on, the world as we know it would cease to exist; the economies, on their current foundations, would collapse.
If leisure was forced onto us, however, we could get a glimpse of this. This sort of happened in 2020 – 2021, during the COVID lockdowns. I personally experienced something interesting during this time (and I do recognise the privilege of experiencing this). Because the world was put on hold, the fundamental thing I felt was a lack of competition. It was as though I had been running in a race my entire life, and suddenly every competitor had been given a break. The break was nice, but the feeling like we weren’t all racing each other was nicer. Of course, this experience was far from universal – while some found respite, others faced increased economic insecurity, job loss, and isolation. The pandemic exposed deep inequalities in how we experience ‘time off,’ revealing that for many, stepping out of competition was not beneficial, but in fact another layer of the crisis. But, the isolation felt by most during this time was an outcome of not being able to have contact with others. And so instead of this situation, we must consider what a world would be like if the isolation component of lockdown didn’t exist, where people were economically secure, but this unending competition didn’t exist. What if our society valued leisure in the same way that we value work, if not more? Oliver Burkeman describes the idea of the “productivity debt” that some of us feel we wake up to each day – having to do a certain amount of things that day in order to justify our existence. Why can’t we just be? Why are we instead woken into this original sin that we then have to claw our way out of by the end of the day, lest we feel we have been “unproductive”, that we didn’t contribute anything.
The engine of all of this is the messages we see in our culture and have internalised within us. One fundamental narrative of our culture is that of ambition; of “fulfilling our true potential”. Some of our most popular media tell this story, of a character with vast amounts of ambition, a sense that they are capable of more than they are able to produce. (Again, take note of the core words of that theme: “more” and “produce”). We may improve – in fact, we will improve – if we follow the path ahead to master some skill. But the core issue is that we feel that we must follow that path, and not following the path is a “waste” of our potential – an inefficient use of our potential interests and talents. In other forms of media, we see the detrimental effects of this ambition – notably in The Bear and Whiplash – where important features of our lives can fall apart in our quest to be the best in our field, to fulfil our potential, to ‘make it’. Our relationships with ourselves, those who love us, and the world around us, all become neglected and are pushed to the side. Those very things that make us human, that may be studied in a liberal arts degree, are deemed as unsubstantial, unnecessary, put on the back-burner, in order to pursue excellence in our specialty.
The Reality
I’m now 32, and I have a very different perspective of those undertaking a literature, philosophy or humanities degree than I used to have. I find I am very jealous.
Though, I do remember the time after completing my degrees when I was struggling to find a job in my field (music), and feeling like I had utterly wasted my time studying: nine years of my life. The message I felt at this time was “Your degree isn’t able to get you a job; it must have been a waste of time”. This thought and its associated feeling was so horrifying to me. I felt embarrassed to tell people that I had received a degree in music of all things. Not only that, but I couldn’t even say I studied an instrument – I had studied composition.
For someone in their 20s, who has just finished their degree, facing that situation of being unable to get a job with their degree, it’s understandable that it can feel like it was a waste, like you’ve made the wrong decision to do that degree. It’s easy for me to say to you that “Your job is not the most important thing – what’s important is that you’ve cultivated an awareness of the world and our civilisation that plenty of others will never have”. But that will do little to tame the feeling of inadequacy. This inadequacy, though, may come from within yourself, it may come from your parents or teachers. But someone gave it to you, them, and everyone else. It stems from the messages that permeate through our society, and that bind our culture. These messages come from those who wield the most power in our society. Those who have the ability to say what is “right”; what degrees are “best”, what degrees are “a waste of time”, what professions (and thus, which people in society) are “valuable”, and what lifestyles are “lazy”. It is the ideology we wade through every day – that web of understandings and messages about what is simply the way things are. Once you understand these things, once you step outside of the cave, your awareness of them gives you power over them.
The most ironic thing of all, is that the people most equipped to be aware of this state of things are those with a liberal education.
One of the most terrifying scenes in a film I watched as a child was in Gore Verbinski’s The Ring. In it, a girl in rags with black hair over her face is being watched on the TV after a character finds a collection of suspicious homemade videos. The girl, Samara, walks right up to the camera before water starts leaking from the TV, and she begins to crawl out of it, into the room with the characters.
Samara creeping out of the TV in Verbinski’s The Ring
I was always horrified by this as, to me, it represented a break in the promise that what I see on the screen is separated—disconnected—from the world in which I live. The worlds of reality and fiction can never meet, right? I was more suspicious of my family’s TV after watching that scene, wondering if creatures of fiction were actually able to crawl out and join me in reality. I wondered if they ever would.
But I’ve realised recently that, very often, we actively try to make our reality into fiction. We seek to ‘elevate’ reality and our view of the world to the realm of stylised, ‘cinematic’, fiction.
Screens, Social Media & Depersonalisation
In particular, content we see on screens makes elements of reality seem fictionalised. When we see real-world events on a screen, it often doesn’t feel entirely real; there is a gap between us (the viewers) and what we’re seeing. The screen is a form of mediator. Similarly, a common symptom of anxiety disorders is depersonalisation, or derealisation, which feels like one is viewing themselves from a distance or through a screen. There is a detachment from reality that is felt during depersonalisation, even though viewing it through one’s own eyes. An image used to represent this feeling depicts a person viewing reality through the screen of their own eyes. With screens now so pervasive in our existence, we see so much of what we deem as reality from this removed, mediated position.
Social media has played a role in drastically ‘fictionalising’ reality, furthering this detachment. The situation is greatly amplified in the current times with content creation techniques such as the ability to lay music over real-life footage. War footage shot on smartphones is overlaid with dramatic music from or inspired by film scores, reminiscent of dramatic scenes from cinema. Footage from the Russia-Ukraine war and the conflict in the Middle East, shared on social media, have demonstrated this, as have videos of flattened villages from landslides and other natural disasters. Footage of atrocities is fictionalised by overlaying it with dramatic or sad music before uploaded to social media, stripping it of its realism. People’s own important personal moments—graduations, completing races and challenges, reuniting with family after years apart, nights out with friends—are posted online, overlaid with music to give it the cinematic gloss we see in films.
The fundamental role of music in films is to lift a scene from the territory of the mundane real into a transcended territory of stylised fiction. Placing music over footage of ourselves attempts to do the exact same.
What does this do to reality?
Since the early days of Instagram, we’ve been creating high standards that actual reality struggles to live up to. Placing filters on images of ourselves and our lives’ curated showreels, we’ve been creating online Doppelgängers1 of ourselves for years now that we’ve constantly felt we’re failing to live up to. We see the fictions of other people’s lives and wonder why ours don’t feel so exciting.
The mundane everyday often simply isn’t ‘good enough’. Instead, it only meets our expectations when it is captured, stylised, fictionalised, and if it is approved by (mostly anonymous) ‘followers’ through their likes.
Make it “Cinematic”
The news is an industry that thrives on this fictionalising of reality. We see this especially in commercials for news programs. In these, we see ‘exciting’ scenes from past news reports used in the same way that exciting scenes for an upcoming film or TV show are used in trailers. Shots of a reporter at a real (often tragic) scene, saying things like “authorities are still searching for survivors,” are used to advertise and market the news—it operates by turning reality into a form of entertainment. News organisations use sound and music that is intentionally ‘serious’, ‘cinematic’, because, just like social media platforms, most rely on advertisement revenue, incentivising them to “add a sense of drama to hook in viewers and keep them watching”.2 Reality (footage) is paired with aspects of entertainment to decouple it from the mundane—or, perhaps more accurately, to place it within the dramatised territory of entertainment.
This fictionalising more shamelessly plays out in reality TV shows, an act that is exaggerated and critiqued in stories such as The Hunger Games and Squid Game. Susan Collins conceived of the idea for The Hunger Games as she flicked between war coverage on the news and a reality TV show, linking these two forms of ‘entertainment’.3 In the not too distant future, perhaps she wouldn’t have had to see the reality TV show: more and more the news alone makes reality into a thriller.
(I point out that I am not referring here to the “fake news” ideas of Trump and the more conspiratorial ends of the political spectrum.)
This is not only done by entertainment corporations—anyone with a smartphone can take part in it. News organisations for decades have picked which events and places in the world to build narratives around. Now, however, it is the individual lives of the public that can be fictionalised—and we do it to ourselves. The fictions are bespoke to us, and we are the ones writing, producing, and directing them.
We harvest everyday reality using cameras and microphones, manipulate it, and reconstruct it into a fictional showreel. Experiencing a beautiful landscape is one thing, but filming it, maybe stylising it with a filter, and overlaying it with some ‘cinematic’ music is what really gets us going. It’s no wonder there is a wash of YouTube tutorials describing how to make footage more ‘cinematic’ and an entire market of ‘cinematic’ LUTs and music to go along with it all. In this way, the reality in which we live is a sort of mediated territory that only acts as a means to get somewhere else. Everyday life holds the raw materials that we capture, enhance, and share to build our fictions. It is merely instrumental.
Life in the mundanity of the everyday is not glossy enough to satisfy our expectations. This is the main concept of various speculative fiction stories that involve virtual reality technologies—Neal Stephenson’s ‘Snow Crash’ and Ernest Cline’s ‘Ready Player One’, for example. The temptation to immerse oneself in a stylised, exciting virtual reality trumps the desire to remain unplugged in the real world.
AirPods and Isolation
For myself, the feeling of fictionalised reality also often comes from listening to music while on public transport.
I listen to a lovely ambient piece of music through noise-cancelling headphones while the golden sun sifts through the train windows, across people’s faces, the train walls, and the advertisements. With the sound of those around me blocked out, I feel like I’m in a movie scene—that I’ve reached some higher level of existence. My reality has been altered in this moment—coloured in some way. Reality seems to glow.
I feel like I’m a (main) character in a film. I feel like I’m the only one experiencing it. I recognise the narcissism, but it’s often difficult to think that anyone else on that train could possibly be having the same type of profound experience.
This is exactly how these technologies are marketed. An advertisement for Apple’s AirPods Pros shows a woman experiencing this form of ‘enhanced’, self-focused, individualised reality before switching on ‘transparency mode’ to let the world in—to rejoin reality.4
Technologies like these are sold to us in ways that acknowledge their ability to fictionalise reality and to centre the world around us.
Though, just as they separate us from the real, our technologies also play a role in isolating ourselves from the presence of others. We would prefer to stay in our own little bubbles than immerse ourselves in the presence of others. We feel like wearing noise-cancelling headphones is a necessity in any situation where we are surrounded by strangers. Noise-cancelling literally “blocks out” the sounds of others, which is so much a part of their presence. We actively pursue ridding ourselves of it, avoiding it as much as possible. This ultimately atomises society. Just as echo chambers on social media create ideological separations between us and make us struggle to fully understand and relate to those with views contrary to our own, noise-cancelling headphones do a similar role in separating us from each other through stripping away elements of their physical presence.
Do We Demand to be Separated?
Is this a result of higher-density living? In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff draws on the work of pioneering sociologist Emile Durkheim, who pointed out at the dawn of the twentieth century that technologies are summoned into reality by the “causal power” of the “perennial human quest to live effectively in our ‘conditions of existence’”.5 Technologies, being summoned by the demands of the public, tell us something about the culture into which the technology is delivered.
Then, do we demand to be separated? In his 1845 novel, Sybil, or The Two Nations, Benjamin Disraeli wrote of the loneliness of urban London life during this period. People were “not in a state of cooperation, but of isolation”.66 For many, urban life introduces the often unwanted mingling of strangers, creating a demand to separate from them when possible, summoning technologies such as noise-cancelling headphones into existence, which may cause further isolation.
Is it an issue that we experience this discomfort? Will repeatedly ‘treating’ these symptoms broaden the gaps between us?
Are we lonely because we have been sold the idea that it is desirable to separate ourselves from one another?
Who Benefits?
There are, of course, people who benefit from this industry of fictionalising reality through the entertainment enhancements of filters, edits, and music. Social media platforms certainly do, through their users creating, sharing, and engaging with this content, all while soaking up advertisements. News corporations also. Musicians in some way, but only through growing ‘popularity’ if their music is used—very rarely in direct monetary compensation.
We recognised very early on that social media paints unrealistic representations of people’s lives and that this causes mental health issues for users.7 But we haven’t made any real efforts in fixing this problem. In fact, it has grown with new platforms and is carried out in even more sophisticated ways, making for even more unrealistic reflections of reality. The owners of the platforms don’t care about this deconstruction of reality and what it does to both the social fabric and the minds of individuals. As long as it is addictive and can facilitate flooding users with advertisements, they seem fine with it.
I tend to think about that often. Social media use—this experience of being washed in content and advertisements, in messages and coercions for the sake of generating revenue for the advertisers and platform’s owners, and the obliteration of any clear sense of a true, unmanipulated self—is what reality is for a very large portion of the lives of much of the world’s population. How can that be? How could the nature of twenty-first century existence have gotten this manipulative and unkind? How have we consented to it?
Technology and Divisions
In these two instances—noise-cancelling headphones and overlaying music with real-world footage—technology is creating divisions: divisions between us and those around us and between us and our reality. Do technologies inevitably have this effect? Technological innovation has played a role in world history in advancing certain civilisations to be able to dominate and maintain dominance over others. This continues today, as this position is what is strived for in technological arms races. But the technologies owned not by states for warfare but by ourselves for ‘convenience’, ‘entertainment’, or ‘comfort’, assert a power over us in complex ways, changing our understandings of and relationships to ourselves, others, and reality. This ought to be recognised and challenged.
Though it seems trivial, I find myself thinking about the concept of wearing noise-cancelling headphones on public transport fairly frequently. I’ll admit—I take part in it very regularly. But I often ask myself if I should be doing it. Sure, it is comforting in the moment, and I have had those transcendent experiences with the sunlight and the ambient music, etc. But there is a tension I feel: Is this what we should be doing? Should we so actively be separating ourselves from one another? Should we be actively engaging with each other more?
Are we feeling the pains of becoming the archetype of neoliberal individualism—what Zuboff describes as the “mythical, atomised, isolated individual”?8
I think it’s important to recognise reality and the mundane as simply themselves—not as fodder for content or the waiting room for the next exciting thing. Yet, I don’t think it’s possible to entirely avoid this construction of narratives in and about our lives. Perhaps it’s the level of stylising involved.
What’s clear to me is that reality is not entertainment. It’s one thing for entertainment to reflect and stylise reality and the stories within it, but that doesn’t mean we need to completely collapse reality and entertainment onto the same plane.
Personally, I would like to keep Samara behind the screen.
Gorvett, Z. (2020, May 12). How the News Changes the Way We Think and Behave. BBC; BBC. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200512-how-the-news-changes-the-way-we-think-and-behave ↩︎
Sellers, J. A. (2008, June 8). “The Hunger Games”: A Dark Horse Breaks Out. PublishersWeekly.com. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20080609/9915-a-dark-horse-breaks-out.html ↩︎
Apple. (2020, April). Flume feat. Toro y Moi – The Difference (Apple x Matilda Sakamoto Dance Video). YouTube. ↩︎
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books, 32. ↩︎
Sacks, J. (2021). Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times. Hodder & Stoughton, 322. ↩︎
Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation. Penguin. ↩︎
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books, 33. ↩︎
‘To Dream of Substance’ marks a move into a deeper territory of experimental electronic music.
I’ve been feeling a pull into this new musical territory for a while, and with that comes a pull out of some previous territory. I wanted to mark this point with this piece. At its core is the theme of ‘endings as beginnings’. The starting point for making this piece was the idea to create an opening that sounded simultaneously like an ending and a beginning.
From here—and consistent with this theme—the piece is built on feelings of pressure, accumulation, force and catharsis.
I teamed up with Mica Studios, who conceptualised and brought to life these insane visuals to support the track. It was a real joy collaborating with a bunch of talented legends.
released April 19, 2024 Written & Produced – Pat Carroll Mixed & Mastered – Matt Curtin Artwork – Will Stephenson @ MICA Studios
Video Credits
Executive producers: Will Stephenson, Matt Little & Pat Carroll Directors: Will Stephenson & Andrew Dempsey DOP: David Longden Producers: David Longden, Will Stephenson & Curtis Sweet Production company: Mica Studios Artist: Pat Carroll Production designer: Will Stephenson Set design: Olivia Thomas Set build: Seb Palmer, Fogel Watkins, Will Stephenson Photographer: Curtis Sweet Edit/colour: David Longden Fire safety advice: Jack Simmonds Set transport/BTS: Alex Nicolas Equipment: The Front Special thanks: Sonny Costin, Curtis Sweet and the Sweet family
‘Plight’ was written in mid-2023 up at Macmasters Beach on the NSW central coast, where I’ve written plenty of music in the past. Macmasters is a very special place, as it can be very quiet and allows for plenty of solitude and introspection. The atmosphere always finds a way into the music I write up there.
This piece is really one big process of expansion. I wanted to create something that starts small and gradually grows to envelope the listener completely.
I was interested in exploring the two opposing types of material, the note and the noise, or the tone and the texture. Specifically, I was exploring how these two elements play roles in creating instrumental timbres, but also can act independently from each another. (I was very inspired by some of the music of Loscil and Tim Hecker at the time.)
Emotionally, I hear a big sense of release or surrender to this piece; a release from something like frustration or despair. I feel that this piece is one for those harder times, hence the title.
‘Is Yours, Is Mine’ revolves around a single, simple melody. This is something I’m really interested in in music – how different parts and themes can be painted in different colours to give them these new emotional qualities. What I wanted to do here was to have a melody that the record keeps finding its way back to, but have this melody altered, transformed and presented in different ways. At the start of the record, it is dark and haunting, and by the end it is more cathartic and open.
There is no one more important to a music project than the artist making it.
Protect your creative time like it is time spent with your child.
Choose wisely whose feedback you take onboard.
Do not ever think that you know all you need to know.
Your goal is not to share your best art, but to share your journey towards creating your best art1.
Shamelessly identify as an artist who thinks in artistic ways.
Build connections with likeminded artists, and always give AND receive help.
If you were happy with a creation at the start of the day, but not so much at the end, trust that listeners will feel as you did at the start of the day.
Know that what you are doing is valuable, and find ways to create even more value through other means (teaching, mentoring, giving advice, building community).
notes:
I heard this one from an interview with Chet Faker. ↩︎
‘Earthsea’ is a collection of pieces recorded on the central coast of NSW. It aims to capture a particular sense of stillness and space up in that region. Inspired by the ocean, shore, and birdlife up there, the pieces undulate to create wave-like environments of droning material.
‘The Mason’ was written when I felt a need to create something that mixed the ambient and textural music I love with heavy percussive layers. This type of approach fit well with the time, when I felt an energy returning to everyday life after lockdown, but was still spending a lot of time at home listening to ambient music.
