Whenever I have a sense of freedom, I feel this desire to write music come through. I noticed this quite a lot last year: when I was in the thick of a busy trimester of teaching, the last thing I wanted to do was sit in the studio and work on music. It just didn’t feel important, or a valuable way to spend my time. I actually saw writing music during those times as a ‘lesser’ activity – instead focusing on reading and writing in my spare time. But when the trimester ends, all of a sudden this flood of inspiration comes, and I just want to write music all day again. I get really enthusiastic about exploring different techniques, pieces of equipment, genres, etc. And I also am excited to find new music to download and listen to. I go on big binges of one particular artist, really trying to understand their language and how their music is operating, with the aim of adapting some of the techniques for my own music.
An artist I fell in love with late last year was Purl, who writes ambient and ambient, dubby techno – all quite long form too, which I really enjoy. I also listened to loads of Deepchord, who is in similar territory, but was a pioneer of dub techno in the 90s. The music of these artists definitely has influenced my writing processes recently, especially in how I’ve been approaching the digiboxes (the Elektron Digitakt, Digitone and Syntakt, and the Octatrack).
This past teaching trimester, I’ve really felt interested again in the music I’ve been listening to. It’s not just ‘background noise’, or silly, unimportant work. Rather, it’s artists engaging in a creative process that is uniquely human and cultural. There’s a magic to it all: they’re engaging in an ancient practice, creating works of communication that exist beyond simple spoken languages. And this is what I’ve been really drawn to the past couple of months – that idea of communication, and how music does what it does.
It has been bringing me back to the study of semiotic ‘sign systems’, and cultural symbols that we have decided mean something. The interesting thing is how the particular sign system of music feels to me. It feels like something beyond the human – part of nature. And it definitely is, in a way. Music is a cultural (man-made) system that is completely surrounded and dependent on the natural (sound, harmonics, acoustics, physics). The natural and the cultural here are so entirely blurred and melded together. Whereas writing describes the world in entirely cultural (man-made) ways: squiggles on a page. There is some very special type of magic going on with music that I’ve always been trying to approach and confront.
It’s something I’ve never really been able to grasp. But that sense of it being an ‘important’ thing to be exploring – a thing worth the time exploring – changes so much, depending on what’s going on in my life. Some days, I feel like a life exploring and understanding music is a deeply valid and worthwhile way to spend a lifetime, whereas on other days, I just think it’s a waste – I think ‘there are way more important things to be focusing on during a lifetime than making patterns of sound.’
But all of this really comes down to the idea of what the metric of success is: if building a lot of wealth is the goal, maybe music (especially in the contemporary industry) isn’t the best way to do that. But if it is to explore the nature of human culture, or to develop abilities in a fairly precise domain of knowledge and skills, music is one of the best ways to do that.
My perspective of music has changed so much over the years, and so it’s obvious now that it will continue to change over the course of my life. There will be periods where I am enthralled by it, and there will be days where I feel like it’s been pointless and a waste. The thing is, I feel like I would probably be having these thoughts about any domain. I think everyone does. But I think that personally I’d rather be having it about this domain over most others.