Don't Wait
Photo: Bob Gruen
The first Ramones show in England was July 4, 1976—the Bicentennial. Two hundred years after the US broke away from Great Britain, America sent back a gift that forever upended their sensibilities: punk rock.
According to Danny Fields and Arturo Vega, as quoted in Please Kill Me (Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain), the forming members of The Clash and the Sex Pistols were at that first show but hadn’t quite broken out. They were a little taken aback by the Ramones. The Brits were intimidated because they saw these lanky guys in black leather and thought that the Ramones were more than just a band—they thought they were a gang. As Danny Fields puts it:
“Paul [Simonon] and Mick [Jones] weren’t in the Clash yet, but they were starting it. They were afraid to play until they saw the Ramones… But basically, the Ramones said to them, which they had said to countless other bands, ‘You just gotta play, guys… Come out of your basement and play. That’s what we did. You don’t have to get better, just get out there. You’re as good as you are. Don’t wait till you’re better, how are you ever gonna know? Just go out there and do it.”
Publishing is the final step in the creative process. You’ve got to put it out into the world. Without doing so, the work is unfinished and will never be seen. Perfection is the opposite of good. Get it out there and move on. Your work isn’t doing anyone any good locked up on a hard drive, or kept in a basement rehearsal. No one gets to hear it that way. It doesn’t exist until it’s published.
The other important part of this is that you have to finish what’s in front of you before you can move on to the next thing.
Free your mind by putting the work in front of you out into the world. Then you can give your whole self over to the next task—your next adventure. Creating the next thing.
And who knows where that will lead you.
Self Induced Hypnotic State - album release!
Today I’m releasing my new album. Like the last one, I’m releasing it with the good folks at Deep Electronics in Den Helder, Netherlands.
Listen to the album on Bandcamp, Spotify, or Apple Music.
Because liner notes have sadly become a thing of the past (another casualty of the streaming era), I’m including below some of the notes from the release.
Chris Otchy is a Northern California-based composer and music producer. He is interested in sonic experiments with textures, rhythmic noise, and melodies that foster transcendence and aid relaxation or joyful movement and expression.
Chris has been making electronic music in a range of styles since the early 2000s, but began taking a more serious interest in ambient music in 2016. His main tools are modular synthesizers and samplers, which he uses to mold emotional textures and melodies from the sounds around him.
“Self Induced Hypnotic State” is a potent example of Chris’ unique brand of ambient techno. Through these seven tracks, his vision ebbs and flows through deeply psychedelic musical vignettes; subverting established norms and creating atmospheres both alien and resonant.
Hope you enjoy the music!
Popping up!
I’m honored to have one of my favorite producers include a track of mine on a recent mix. Federsen is a native of Scotland but resides right here in San Francisco. His dub techno productions have been instrumental to my understanding of the genre, and I’m psyched to have met him and to have my music cross over into his realm.
This mix includes some really nice selections. Hope you enjoy it as much as I am!
Each Moment Replacing the Last
Today I’m releasing my latest album, Each Moment Replacing the Last, with the good folks at Deep Electronics records in Den Helder, Netherlands. I’m so proud to be part of their family of excellent artists and producers.
The title came to me from a talk by one of my mentors, Sam Harris. I’ve never met him in person, but his podcast and meditation app, Waking Up, has become absolutely critical to my sanity over the past 12 months. His approach to mindfulness meditation is really easy to appreciate and practice. Sam mentioned this phrase in reflecting on the neverending stream of thoughts and experiences we encounter in daily life, and how we can improve our mental health by not holding onto any of them. In other words, by letting each moment replace the last, we don’t hold onto any of the (mainly negative) perseverations or obsessions to which our minds are predisposed.
Because liner notes have sadly become a thing of the past (another casualty of the streaming era), I’m including below some of the notes from the release.
Chris Otchy is a Northern California-based composer and music producer. He is interested in sonic experiments with textures, rhythmic noise, and melodies that foster transcendence and aid relaxation or joyful movement and expression.
Chris has been making electronic music in a range of styles since the early 2000s, but began taking a more serious interest in ambient music in 2016. His main tools are modular synthesizers and samplers, which he uses to mold emotional textures and melodies from the sounds around him.
In “Each Moment Replacing the Last,” Chris takes a special interest in drones and slowly undulating waves of sound. It contains some of his most restrained and minimalist compositions. What arises in the stillness is a keen awareness of both the notes and the empty space around them. As with much of his music, those spaces are usually occupied with some subtle movement—field recordings and the rustle of household objects. “Each Moment” emerges as a meditation on organic noise and silence.
I hope this music provides some respite from the stresses of your daily life.
Listen to the album on Bandcamp.
Dance Performance at Escuela Profesional de Mazatlan
Bethany Mitchell used two of my tracks in a dance performance she choreographed called “Home.” (My tracks come in around the 4:00 mark.)
The performance was developed during her Fulbright Specialist residency at the Escuela Profesional de Mazatlan in Mexico. She worked with these performers in the spring, and this performance took place on June 10, 2022. It was performed by the third year students at the Angela Peralta Theater in Mazatlan.
This program was made possible by Delfos Danza Contemporanea and the Instituo de Culturo Turismo y Arte de Mazatlan.
Thank you to Bethany and to the dancers at Escuela Profesional de Mazatlan! It’s an amazing piece on its own and adds a whole new dimension to the music. I am truly honored.
Why I directly support artists
Directly supporting artists with as few middle entities as possible is very important to me. There are two reasons for this.
First, I grew up in an era where if you wanted to listen to music or discover new music outside of what was playing on the radio or MTV, you needed to go to a store to search for the physical record, tape, or CD. Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but I still get a lot of joy from the feeling of owning music, even if it is only a file on my hard drive. It brings with it a connection with the artist that doesn’t escape me.
Second, supporting artists directly is the most straightforward way to show appreciation for their art. In an era when audio-visual content—especially music—is viewed by most people as disposable or downright worthless, giving cold, hard cash to an artist feels like a revolutionary act.
You streaming?
Yes, I use streaming services. A necessary evil? I’m not sure they’re necessary, but they’re here and they aren’t going away.
From a listener’s standpoint, it’s the most convenient option. From the artist’s perspective, unless you’ve reached the Taylor Swift level of success, streaming makes sense for helping people discover your music.
That said, I understand what’s going on in the streaming game. It’s a nightmare for artists. Our music is being used for free in order for the Spotify and YouTube’s of the world to rake in advertising dollars. But this is the state we find ourselves in, and IMO it’s useless to stand in the way of progress.
Top 5 Bandcamp Purchases of Q4-2021
Today I’m sharing a few of my favorite purchases over the past few months. View my whole Collection on Bandcamp.
Rhucle is an amazingly prolific Japanese ambient artist. I discovered him last year through my new favorite newsletter, Flow State. When someone release 5+ albums a year (not singles -- albums of eight or more tracks each), you start to wonder about the quality of the material someone is putting out. You can’t put that much music out and still retain premium quality, right? Rhucle proved this thought wrong. Everything I’ve heard of his is really nice. It’s one of the most minimal forms of ambient music I’ve heard, but it’s also some of the most sublime. Rhucle is an expert at stripping music back until what’s left is only the essential elements, each of which are irreplaceable to the emotional impact. Of the albums he put out in 2021, this one is my favorite.
Belgian artist Romeo Poirier’s music is tough to categorize. The lack of drums or obvious percussion suggests calling it ambient, but the brand of textures he utilizes and arrangement of loops makes it feel more like avant-garde techno. Not quite as aggressive as Barker, but approaching the same overall feeling.
I’ve long appreciated Rod Modell’s work, in both his Deepchord and Echospace expressions. Immersions was released in 2018 on the excellent London-based label, Astral Industries, but I only recently picked it up. It’s composed of just two extended tracks, 17 and the 18 minutes long respectively. They feel like two takes from the same patch or arrangement of instruments. Modell’s work here is squarely between ambient and dub techno, being characterized almost entirely by an ocean of swirling synths and delicious undulating noise. No attack. Then from the briny deep arises a chugging 145bpm rhythm… It never fully emerges, the kick sometimes imperceptible, deep beneath the surface, but you feel it.
Truly sublime. Excellent stuff for long flights and late nights.
Pablo Bolivar – Framework of a Dream and Framework of a Dream Remixes
Spanish producer Pablo Bolivar released Framework of a Dream in June of 2021, and an album of remixes in December. Both are worth a spin. I realized last year there is a strong contingency of excellent deep techno producers from Spain and Italy. Bolivar is one of the rising stars of the genre, and a founding member of both the Avantroots and Seven Villas labels, both specializing in ambient and dub techno.
Another solid release from Jarl. I found him from his previous release on Drift Deeper. This one, on Deep Electronics from the Netherlands, is equally fun, groovy, and chill – exactly the mix of ambient and techno I enjoy.
Meditation soundtracks
Photo by Alexander Schimmeck
I’ve long wanted to create a soundtrack for meditation – something you could use more or less as background music that was timed to allow you to meditate for a specific length.
The attraction of doing this is that it allows you to just concentrate on your meditation instead of checking whether or not you’ve gone past your required time. Sure, you can always use an alarm on your phone, but do you really want an alarm tone announcing the end of your meditation? For those who don’t, feel free to use these soundtracks. I’ve created one that is five minutes long, and one that is ten minutes long. I’ve also made them free downloads on SoundCloud.
Hope you find some utility with these.
Businessfunk
We’ve all seen the Windows 95 launch party, which is incredible in its own right.
But in fairness, the Rolling Stones shouldn’t have been part of the party at all. The rock and roll world was as foreign to Gates and the Boyz as the moon.
What the proud bouncing developers in this video should have been jamming to was “business funk.”
This is truly something special — a genre of Maximum Performance Music I only recently discovered, courtesy of a small link on Datassette’s excellent musicForProgramming website, which is a host of wonderful mixes in itself.
But business funk is something else entirely. Listening to the three mixes, I want to laugh and dance with equal measure. Purportedly compiled from the libraries of several collectors and assembled by Datassette himself, this funky ass music feels solidly rooted in the late 70s and early 80s, with beefy synth brass stabs and hair-tastic guitar solos. There’s what sounds like a whole lot of vintage synths being fully utilized. But there’s also some truly fantastic drum programming that brings it into the modern era, and shows quite a similarity with Datassette’s brand of electro funk.
Well worth a visit and a listen. Check it out here.
Brian Eno: Windows 95 Theme Composer
I love that Eno composed the Windows 95 theme. Here’s the backstory which is pretty interesting.
What’s also interesting is listening the original track — both at original speed (4 seconds), and slowed down by 2300%.
Sacred Mountain EPs
This week I’m releasing the first in a new series of singles I’m calling the Sacred Mountain EPs, which will be released between August and October, 2021. Listen now on my Spotify or Bandcamp pages.
Sacred mountains have always fascinated me. I have had some of my most profound spiritual experiences in nature, especially in climbing mountains, and I know I’m not alone.
Since earliest recorded history, mountains have been places where humans went to experience transcendence, probably because they were physically ascending closer to heaven or what we believe to be spiritual worlds.
Mountains are holy places that are feared, revered, and sometimes both.
Mount Fuji, or Fuji-san, is the highest mountain in Japan and one of Japan’s three sacred mountains. It has been a frequent subject of artists, poets, and filmmakers the world over, but especially those coming from that nation.
The ancient samurai used the base of Mount Fuji as a remote training area, and folk tales tell of ghosts and demons roaming the forests surrounding the northwest face.
A shinto cult called Fuji-kō venerated the mountain as a female deity, and encouraged members to climb it. The paths leading up and around the mountain still host multiple shrines, teahouses, and huts dedicated to spirits of the area.
A well-known Japanese proverb suggests a wise person will climb Fuji-san once in their lifetime, but only a fool would climb it twice.
Emotional circuitry: making music in the 21st century
Photos by valentin müller and slim emcee
Is it easier to create music today compared to earlier generations? One could make the argument it is in light of the technology we have at our disposal.
To begin with, we are no longer restricted to a music studio to record. Mobile technology has made it simple to bring the studio practically anywhere and to record at any time.
Additionally, for those making electronic music and music with the computer, we now have all sorts of gadgets that make it easier to sound good. Scale filters ensure our melodies hit all the right notes (if we’re playing keys). Quantizers help lock our rhythms to a grid, so no percussion strays out of time. We even have autotune, so singing can be artificially locked into key.
All this adds up to an easier, more streamlined process of finishing songs, right? Absolutely.
But are those songs any better than those created by previous generations? Not necessarily.
While technology has allowed people with little to no musical training to jump in, it doesn’t necessarily mean ‘hits’ are being cranked out any faster than they have in the past. I’m not trying to be elitist or to cast shade on people making music without “proper musical training.” Nothing of the sort. These little technological helpers have lowered the bar of entry to a point where anyone with the will can begin making music with a little self education and an exploratory mindset. This has given an immense amount of people a lot of joy and stress relief. Music is medicine, both for the artist and the listener.
What I’m trying to get at here is that just because composing and finishing a track is somewhat easier than it used to be with the shortcuts technology affords doesn’t mean you can more easily strike creative gold.
Yes, technology can give us some shortcuts, but what makes music memorable is rarely what these devices can deliver.
The x-factor that makes music cherished by others is the emotional force behind it. Emotion comes strictly from the human mind — at least it has up until now (that may change in the future). Emotional substance is what lies behind the hooks that grab us and pull us along for the ride.
Emotion is heard most easily in vocal melodies because they use the human voice and language, both of which can readily transmit meaning in an intuitive way. But emotion can be transmitted by any instrument if the musician plays it the right way.
Sometimes something really simple can have a lot of power. A well thought out sequence of two or three notes in the right placement can transcend simplicity to speak deeply to us.
It all starts with the timbres used and the melodies assigned and deployed with care and feeling. That’s where the magic comes from, and has from the beginning of human creativity - an artist making conscious choices of what they wish to say and how to say it. Sure, technology gives us a few shortcuts, but if emotional resonance is what you’re after, it all starts with you.
The last generation of human musicians
photo: andrew petrischev
How far away are we from artificially intelligent artists replacing human artists? It’s within our lifetimes, for sure. Some say it’s as close as five years.
Google’s Project Magenta proved that machine learning/artificial intelligence can study Bach fugues and compose music so similar, musicologists can’t distinguish them from actual Bach fugues. The project has effectively proved that machine learning can study and then replicate the compositional patterns of even the most intricate and learned composers, with a high degree of sophistication.
Startups like Authentic Artists are creating AI-powered, virtual artists, armed with AI-generated music that they can control and that listeners can interact with in virtual environments.
“We are very intentionally not trying to create a digital facsimile of what already exists... We want to use new tools to create new art, new experiences, new culture. The appeal is that these artists can really be vehicles for collaboration with the audience, so that [audience members] can selectively shape the live show.”
I’m all for new creative and artistic experiences. My worry is that once people can’t tell the difference between music created by a human and that created by a machine, it’s a slippery slope to cutting them out of the process altogether.
Think about the fact that Spotify effectively eliminated thousands of working artists’ careers, virtually overnight, by replacing the royalties paradigm with the streaming paradigm.
Think about the fact that the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek, is paid more per year than all the fees the company pays to artists annually—combined. And that Spotify, at 155 million paying subscribers at time of writing, is still losing money most quarters.
I don’t mean to pick on Spotify here (and I hate that I probably sound like that guy from Metallica). I’m simply making the point that if profit and convenience are the driving factors pushing in the music industry forward today—and they certainly seem to have been from the Napster era onward—it’s a very small step to simply pushing those artist fees to an emerging company like Authentic Artists to replicate the style and sound of every original artist out there.
How many fans would actually care? I hope a great many would… but you never know.
Sidenote: jump to the 1 hour mark of this Mylar Melodies interview with BT for a detailed discussion of this topic - with some potential solutions.
Perhaps music will continue to be a hobby for humans in the future—something we like to amuse ourselves with. But commercially, can humans compete with AI? It remains to be seen. Without a doubt, the era of AI musicians is upon us.
I’d love to be wrong about this, but I don’t think I am.
For Jeff Tweedy, Writing Songs IS Finding Meaning
Great podcast here: Malcolm Gladwell interviewing Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy about how he writes songs, supporting his recent book on the same topic.
Like a lot of artists, what stitches Tweedy’s songs together is intuition — linking the seemingly random events of life; drawing together the themes to create a tapestry that somehow makes sense to him. This bit at the end really jumped out at me. Jump to about 40:00.
As Tweedy mentions, often, we are too busy, stressed out, and worried to actually observe what is going on around us. We have a million things vying for our attention, and many times, they succeed in distracting us from our immediate reality.
But when we do take the time and make the effort to actually see and experience reality, it’s often telling us a strange, fascinating, and beautiful story.
That story is being told all the time — we just need to stop what we’re doing and pay attention.
I’ve always believed we as humans are meaning-seeking creatures. We need to make sense of the world we live in. We need to let our brains do that — to find the meaning. Meaning makes sense to us — far more sense than randomness and ambiguity and chance. We’re designed to do that.
So don’t be such a nihilist, ok?
Living Music - Don Cherry, 1978
Screenshot from “Don Cherry Swedish TV Documentary 1978”
The Don Cherry documentary created by Swedish television in 1978 is a wonderful exposition of the jazz musician and his approach to life. The soft spoken man was best known for being a trumpeter with some of the great jazzers of the 1950s-70s, but the film shows there was more to Cherry than his rapid fire trumpet. His whole approach to music and to life was both beautiful and radical.
Just viewing bits and pieces of the doc, you quickly pick up that Cherry was more than just a horn player, or a piano player, or a flutist, or a bird caller. The guy’s approach to life was music. Anything and everything he came across was music. Life was a song and Cherry sang it out loud.
I especially enjoyed how he viewed competition in music.
“I don’t believe in competition in music. I don’t think of music as better or worse. It’s just different… and that brings a lot of ego and keeps musicians from coming together, because everyone wants to feel like they’re doing something different. Everyone wants to be an innovator. And all the innovators I’ve ever known—Coltrane, Ornette, Eric Dolphy—they all were playing their music and trying to develop in music. It wasn’t to try to be an innovator. They were innovators but they weren’t intentionally trying to be innovators.”
Wonderful. The doc also features some killer shots of NYC in the 1970s… worth a shot.
What is Ambient Music?
photo by dan sealey
I’ve been self-describing my music as “ambient” for the past few years, simply out of habit. It’s a convenient reference point for instrumental music with little or no percussion. But “ambient” is quite a loaded term. It brings up connotations of relaxing synth and guitar timbres, well drenched in ‘verb and delay, mainly used to aid concentration, focus, relaxation or Eastern practices.
I love that type of music and sure, some of the music I create could be accurately defined or categorized that way. But more and more, I feel uneasy with the term.
The music I’ve made on Recursive, and definitely the music I’m releasing on Merlin’s Voice really doesn’t fit into that mold. Some of it may be light on percussion, and yes it features synths and guitar textures that tend to be a bit wetter on FX--but it’s not exactly relaxing. There’s a certain density to it, a certain darkness that would probably distract a person trying to meditate. Listening to it now, trying to remove myself from the act of creating it, it sounds a bit more like experimental dance music.
I’ve recently come across artists with sounds similar to myself calling their music “modern classical,” which is a more accurate description, but still is not quite right. “Classical” evokes the idea of classically trained musicians, extremely proficient on their traditional instruments, and well versed in the arrangement and stylistic tendencies of everyone from Mozart to Cage.
What we’re doing is more like creating sonic textures that evoke certain moods. We’re mood merchants. The music may be relaxing, or it may be dark and noisy and aggressive—what it does is communicate a mood or a feeling. But what music doesn’t do that?
What is the correct term to describe this music? Do we really need one?
Back in the early 2000s, I was in a band that made retro-sounding electro pop. The term we all resisted at the time is the descriptive term that actually stuck – electroclash.
Perhaps time will define this ambient-ish music in the same way. For now, I’m calling it experimental mood music.
MTV Generation of Heck
I just watched the 2015 Kurt Cobain documentary Montage of Heck, which is probably the most satisfying biopic of the late star and of Nirvana, at least as far as I have seen. Highly recommended (at time of writing, it’s streaming on HBO Max).
While I applaud Gus Van Sant’s effort to depicting a misunderstood and alienated musician who might or might not be Kurt Cobain in Last Days, I ultimately didn’t really connect with that film at all. Montage of Heck does a great job at showing the sadness of Cobain’s early life, his rise to stardom in a scenius of forward thinking musicians and bands, and the tragedy of his later life, addiction, and suicide.
Aside from reminding me how utterly earth shattering Nirvana was in the 1990s, both culturally and musically, I really appreciated that they had some cool animated sequences showing (what the filmmakers imagine) his lone songwriting process might have been. I’m not sure if it’s at all accurate, but seeing a young Kurt playing guitar on a couch by himself, screaming lyrics in a closet, and whispering weird noises into to a tape machine really set me thinking about the 10,000 hours he put in finding his voice, writing songs, and defining a sound that would ultimate change rock music forever. Nirvana and the grunge movement was kind of the last big thing to happen to rock and roll before its ultimate self destruction.
Speaking of self-destruction, the MTV appearances in this movie reminded me of how gargantuan that TV station was in the 1990s. I mean, MTV truly was a force of nature back then. MTV controlled youth culture to a degree that is really hard to understand for people that were born after 2000. I can’t even think of a modern analog. TMZ, BuzzFeed maybe? But those comparisons really don’t get at the power MTV held, though.
Then there was Tabitha Soren, Kurt Loder, Bill Belamy, Riki Rachtman… they were more than just news anchors or VJs—they were kind of celebrities in their own right and part of the scene. MTV also organized a lot of events that artists performed at, including the Unplugged series, the movie and music award shows, and more. MTV was a cultural behemoth that didn’t survive the Extinction Event that was the internet.
Lastly, Montage of Heck is a great encapsulation of what celebrity looked like pre-internet vs post. By and large, artists and celebrities now are PR machines, with well oiled social media content engines pumping out on-brand messaging 24/7/365. They are on, all the time, and their look and style and sound is very calculated, at least it feels that way to me.
Nirvana, and bands in general in that pre-Internet era, had a much more punk ethos. There are some really great interview moments in the film where it’s clear the band is intoxicated and really doesn’t give a crap that the cameras are rolling. It’s refreshing to see that. I wish there was more of that today, to be honest.
Downsizing and upscaling
This week has been one of re-focusing my creative practice.
I am pairing down my modular set up (it’s always changing, so that’s nothing new) and at the same time I re-acquired the Elektron Octatrack MkII.
The OT MkI was kinda what got me back into making music after taking about 10 years or so off. The MkII actually feels quite different, which I like. It feels better, smoother. The MkI was a bit clunky. I noticed that the moment I unboxed it. It didn’t have a nice “feel” to the buttons and sliders. There was a certain… clicky nature to it that didn’t feel as “put together” as other equipment. I immediately compared it to the MPC 2000, which was the first “professional” piece of audio gear I got early on in my career. It was super put together and felt solid in comparison to the OT. The software and workflow, too, was vastly different from the MPC, which was also a sampler, but one that approached sampling and audio manipulation from a very different angle.
That said, I kept the Octatrack MkI for 5+ years and used it extensively. After moving to SF, I did have a period with the Maschine, but the fact that it used it’s own software that wasn’t quite a full-fledged DAW always put me off. It had weird limitations in terms of importing samples and using it to, say record guitar or outside instruments.
The Octatrack had an insane learning curve, and was also limited in different ways. That led me to Ableton, which is by far the most unlimited instrument out there. You can do anything and everything with it. But playing with hardware is a hell of a lot more fun.
Getting Modular
Starting off with modular was like a revelation. It forced me to think about music differently. I was finally collaborating with something outside myself.
I’ve now made 3 albums with the modular, in conjunction with Ableton, and I really am proud of them. But now I want to move on.
Coming back to the Octatrack, I’m seeing it as a different tool. Before, I was basically treating it like a DAW, where I was trying to do EVERYTHING in a track with those 8 tracks. Now that I have other synths to work with, and I want to try to use the Octatrack more like a tool for looping, sequencing, sampling and processing audio and midi. I’m excited to get into it, and especially to use it in conjunction with the OP-1, Cocoquantus, and modular.