This chat with Aaron Funk (of Venetian Snares) has some great quotes about staying real and keeping in touch with what inspires you. He also talks a lot about musical technique and such, and it’s all fascinating, but these quotes are my takeaways:

I just find inspiration in myself, have never cared about genres or what is supposed to be fashionable at the moment … emotion, energies, personal experience – these things are truly far more inspiring to draw from than trying to be a part of some aesthetic, I can’t even relate to that.

Also:

…it’s fucking ridiculous to limit yourself to only creating angry or sad music or only doing silly funny music. The whole spectrum is there … I have known people that limit themselves to making only dark music. That to me is so narrow and unfulfilling. If something is bleak, it should be bleak for a real reason, not out of some aesthetic. Fucking posers.

Then in this interview, there are these these words of wisdom from Tom “Squarepusher” Jenkinson:

… any musician that’s not self indulgent, I can’t imagine that they’d be any good, to be honest. Any musician that puts himself primarily at the service of his audience is likely to quite rapidly become a self-repeating machine … There’s always this tension where you’re trying to create the creative process afresh, to give yourself the best chance of giving something to your audience that they’re really going to love, and actually show them something new. And that entails sometimes pissing them off … I would say: Yes, I am self-indulgent, but it’s a good thing.

Once in a while, I play this game where I try to analyze what the commonalities are between the people whose lives and work I’ve found really inspiring. I’d noticed that most of them are iconoclasts, but I think in that interview, Jenkinson gives it a new formulation that I like better: all my heroes are self-indulgent, in the best possible way. This means putting out into the world the best work you can possibly do, regardless of what you’ve been asked for or what’s expected. It takes courage and a certain amount of hubris, but in the end it’s the only way to go, really.

A random assortment of unfinished tracks of dubious quality, pushing twenty years old. Unlike Melodies from Mars or Analogue Bubblebath 5, this material is not only officially unreleased, it was never intended for release, even speculatively. How does it hold up? There are definitely moments of brilliance: RDJ’s sonic originality and facility with arrangement are in evidence throughout. Although the material is obviously dated, it’s almost impossible to imagine anyone else having written them. Melodic innovation is scarce, but there are snatches of AFX-style tunefulness here and there. I would guess most of these tracks were written around the time of the Ventolin EP or Melodies from Mars. Several tracks seem like they would fit in with the other Ventolin “remixes,” had they been finished.

But that’s the most striking thing about them: these are very obviously not finished tracks. Back when he was at his most prolific (in the mid to late 90′s), I had the impression that Richard D. James didn’t write music so much as … sort of excrete it biologically, the way plants exhale oxygen. This was due not only to the sheer amount of material he released, but also to the effortless feel much of it had. Even though it was often brilliant, it managed somehow always to retain a bit of a raw quality, as though RDJ was so eager to move onto the next thing that he just couldn’t spend the time to sand off the rough edges.

These tracks make that impression seem a bit naive. The Joyrex tape is composed of almost nothing but rough edges and raw material, and what’s not there makes all the difference between this and a finished AFX track from the same period. The man obviously knew what he was doing and pursued his aims deliberately, even if he was having fun doing it. There was work involved, and it was significant. And that is what makes me gladdest that this recording leaked out: like a glimpse at da Vinci’s sketchbooks, getting a to hear some vintage Aphex in its raw form is both humbling and impressive, because it shows the work that went into the complete material.

Now that the show is over, I figured I’d put up some recordings from the solo practice sessions during which I developed the techniques I eventually used during the performance. Geek notes: most of the sound was generated in either Audiomulch or Metasynth, piped into Ableton via SoundFlower for further mixing and processing. This was combined with parameter automation in Numerology. The results are very noisy, so I uploaded them to the noise set on my SoundCloud page. Enjoy!

The work I do as Ukuphambana is, however experimental, always a pretty well-controlled and self-directed process. This is not at all the case with Zero Times Infinity, which is at its heart an improvisational group. Although we rarely play out, schedules and priorities being what they are, I really look forward to it when we do. Not only is the experience itself both different and rewarding, but I find that working collaboratively generates fresh ideas and approaches, which inevitably find their way back into my solo work. It’s also an opportunity to reconnect with my musical roots, in the sense of having no idea whatsoever whether what I’m doing is going to work or not, or where things might lead.

Sometimes it works out beautifully, sometimes it’s a disaster, but it is always glorious and unexpected and loads of fun.

This is another example of the sort of time-travel remixing I described in a previous post, though it is not actually the track I was describing there. (That one has itself gone dormant and awaits another day for its turn.)

This one started out as a live jam six or seven years ago. A year or two after the initial jam was recorded, I took a first stab at editing it into a finished track, adding some squiggly acid-style synth lines and recording some some inspired but very sloppy keyboard jamming. That was about 2006. After that first attempt, the first version of the track sat 80% finished on my hard drive for another six years until I felt ready to give it another stab.

After blowing the dust off, the first thing I did was edit mercilessly, removing over two minutes of unnecessary noodling. The second thing I did was meticulously recreate my live jam, note for note, as a programmed sequence. This meant keeping all the quirks and nuance of the initial performance, but removing the awkward, horrible timing which plagued the original version. Then, just to keep things from getting too boring, I decided to leave the original take in as a barely-audible background element; in that role, the dodgy timing winds up sounding more like a sort of subliminally shifting echo of the main version.

After doing that cleanup work, I was ready to finish the remaining 80% of the work required to finish off the track and release it to the listening public. And yes, if you’ve ever completed a long project, you know that this math works out perfectly well. And if all that sounds like more time and energy than any sane person would invest, then … you’re right.

Enjoy!

The same is true of anything really worthwhile. If you love doing it, if you are committed to it, if it is something so important to you that you really can’t help doing it, then you will pour more time, money, energy, and attention into it than any reasonable person would. That is how the awesome happens.

…eventually, other people might notice. Maybe not. If you feel strongly enough about it, it won’t matter either way, not really. Having other people appreciate your work makes it easier to keep going, which is nice and all. But chances are, it won’t matter that much, because you love it so much that you’d do it anyway, easy or not.

This completely describes how I feel about the music I make. I sometimes spend two hours or more getting a thirty section sound which is barely audible in the mix just exactly right, because it matters to me. No sane person would do that. I do it anyway, because I don’t make my music for sane people, I make it for myself.

On the other hand, I spent nearly two hours finishing it up last night, and most of that involved adding elements which are essentially subliminal, or at least not audible unless you really, really focus on details I don’t expect anyone other than me to bother with. So there’s that.

Anyway, hit the link to transfer the ones and zeroes to your listening apparatus of choice. From there you may manifest it as the periodic displacement of air molecules. Your Cochlear nuclei will thank you for it!

This is very different from what I normally put out, and part of me was tempted to leave it on my hard drive as an unreleased learning exercise. But in keeping with my 2012 resolution to be less precious about my work…here it is. Hope you enjoy it. The next track will have some proper tunes and beats and such, I expect, but no promises about “normalcy,” whatever that involves.

Some tracks clearly come together from the bottom-up: first the sounds, then beats, then sections, then overall structure. It’s like building a wall, one brick at a time. You start with nothing, then add elements one piece at a time until it’s done. Free As a Neutrino… and Leisured Forfeit were both done this way, for example. It may be a hasty generalization, but I think most of my more listener-friendly tracks use this technique.

Other tracks start out with broad washes of sound or noise, and the structure comes from carving away layers where they’re not needed, creating space and motion. In The Future We Shall Know Less was done this way. My noisier tracks tend to be, the ones that are a bit heavier on texture and less on structure.

Then there are some that combine the two approaches. The way these work is a bit like hand-sculpting chunks of masonry, mortaring them together, hacking away at the results and repeating the process again over and over until a shape gradually emerges. The low-level details and wide scale structure emerge together out of each other. These are without a doubt the hardest tracks to finish, because I spend a lot of time while I’m working on them lost as to exactly what I’m doing and where it’s going to wind up.

All the same, I find them the most satisfying to complete, and the most mysterious: these are the tracks I find myself coming back to years later, scratching my head and saying, “I did this, really?” Bleem is one of these. I had no idea what I was doing through most of it, and it still puzzles me how it ever got done.

I might make a conscious effort to combine these approaches more in future work, if it doesn’t slow me down too much. In any case, I think it’ll be helpful to have identified a new axis along which I can place things, another degree of freedom in deciding how I can work and what directions I can take.

I love breakbeats; but I’m bored by most jungle;
I love wobble bass; but I’m bored by most dubstep;
I love a solid kick drum; but I’m bored by most house music;
I love squelchy 303 basslines; but I’m bored by most acid;
I love old video game sounds; but I’m bored by most chiptunes;
I love sonic accidents; but I’m bored by most glitch music;
I love distortion; but I’m bored by most “noise”.

I may not always do the most original work in the world, but genre art bores me, always has. Genres, at least electronic music, tend to be defined by an impossibly narrow proscription of sounds or techniques which themselves started out fresh and interesting, back before anyone decided what the rules for using them were. But once a genre crystalizes, everyone knows what to expect: the people who self-identify as genre artists know what they’re supposed to do, the people who self-identify as genre fans know what it is they want to hear, and genre critics know what criteria to apply when deciding whether a piece is good.

There’s always a place for refinement and virtuosity, sure. But to do anything really interesting, you need to break the rules and abuse the tools and techniques you’ve come to love, or at least place them in some unfamiliar context, so that they can be seen from another angle and become fresh and new again. “Like an apple on the moon,” as Stockhausen put it.

It’s true that you can’t rewrite the definition of art with every project you undertake (and people who say they’re doing that are usually boring, too), but you must also find your own voice, and the only way to do that is by screwing up. Respect your history, learn your technique, trace the footsteps of the masters who came before you. But remember to wander from the path once in a while; you can be sure they did, when they were in your shoes.