Swinging Doors

I’ve been reading Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, which is an amazing and very approachable overview of Zen meditation. It’s kind of the perfect companion piece to the book I was previously obsessed with (and can’t recommend enough) — The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.

I love this passage:

“Our usual understanding of life is dualistic: you and I, this and that, good and bad. But actually these discriminations are themselves awareness of the universal existence.

‘You’ means to be aware of the universe in the form of you, and ‘I’ means to be aware of it in the form of I. You and I are just swinging doors. This is the true experience of life through Zen practice.”

— Shunryu Suzuki

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.”

— Chris McGarry, Authentic Artists

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.

How to start when you can't get started

Photo: Kelly Sikkema

I’ve been in a bit of a creative slump recently. It happens to us all. I thought I’d share something I’ve found that helps get the juices flowing.

This is going to sound a little silly but: start by intentionally creating something bad. Just do something random. If you’re a photographer, start by taking random photos. If you’re a musician. just loop some random audio and work it a little or record some random guitar and lyrics. Do anything you need to do to just get started.

This may not sound like much of a strategy, but I’ve found that once you get the ball rolling, it’s a lot easier to keep going. That jump from zero to one is incredibly more difficult than going from one to two. You’re overcoming inertia and giving yourself license to jam.

By giving your creation no intention, you set the standard by which you can actually create something decent, with intention.

Kill the critic. You need to silence that part of your brain that tells you that you need to create something perfect, or it’s not worth creating at all. Get into that experimental mode of creation.

This technique starts you down the path where anything is allowed, nothing is bad, and it’s all just raw material that you’re creating. it’s an incredibly liberating place to be—and exactly where you need to be to generate something interesting. You can always come back later with your critic’s hat on and slash and burn all the crap. But you need to get that crap out of the way, prime the pump so to speak, in order to make way for the good shit.

Plus, if you start by creating something intentionally bad, there’s only one place to go -- up. Let me know how this works for you.

Unplugging from the Simulation

markus spiske

You’ve likely come across the idea online before — are we living in a computer simulation? Perhaps you’ve seen the clip of Elon Musk telling an audience at a tech conference that the probability of us not living in a simulation is “one in billions.”

I never gave it much thought beyond some leisure reading. But I saw The Truman Show for the first time recently, which immediately reminded me of The Matrix—a far darker version of a very similar story. 

For those who haven’t seen either and without spoiling things, both films deal with a hero who through a series of chance events begins to doubt the nature of his reality. He confides with close friends and family about his doubts, and they all poo poo his silly thoughts. The hero then ventures further to find some of those doubts well founded. 

The films ask the same question philosophers and scientists have been asking for years—how ‘real’ is what we call reality? Is what our senses pick up all there is, or might they deceive us? What’s to say our waking lives are not a vivid dream, or perhaps a very convincing computer simulation? 

For some, these are silly questions—of course we’re living in reality! The difficult part comes when one tries to prove that. 

Early ponderings

Plato is probably the earliest person to raise these question in Republic with the Allegory of the Cave. 

Imagine a group of prisoners chained in a cave, facing a blank wall. There’s a fire behind them and puppets used to cast shadows onto the wall they face. 

For the prisoners, the shadows are reality. It’s all they may ever know. But their reality is untrue. 

Suppose one prisoner escaped. They would see the fire was not sunlight, and the figures on the wall were shadow puppets. If they left the cave, real sunlight would hurt their eyes because they wouldn’t be accustomed to it. They may wish to return to the safety of the cave where things were dark and familiar.

How can a person who knows more return to the old ways? 

Powerful computers of the future

While Rene Descartes and many others have touched on these themes since Plato, Oxford University philosopher and author Nick Bostrom brought the argument into the modern age with “Are you Living in a Computer Simulation?,” a paper he wrote in 2003.

The argument goes like this: 

1. Anyone with even a passing awareness of computer games can see how far we’ve come from early Atari games in a very short period.

2. Assuming any rate of progress at all, Bostrom poses it’s likely our descendants will have extremely powerful computers able to run very realistic simulations. Simulations indistinguishable from reality.

3. Those simulated worlds would be populated by simulated beings.

4. How can we prove we are not one of those beings, dwelling in one of those simulated worlds?

It’s a very difficult thing to do.

michael dziedzic

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

Where this leads

If we assume this argument is correct, there are numerous reactions one could have, among them: 

• If this reality is a simulation, does anything I do really matter?

• Am I the only “real” being in this simulation, or are there others?

• If there aren’t other “real” beings, do I have license to behave immorally?

Sadly, things have already gone in this direction.

In 2003, a teen with undiagnosed mental illness became obsessed with The Matrix. Thinking he was living inside a simulation, he decided to shoot and kill his adoptive parents with a shotgun. The trial spawned what’s now called The Matrix Defense.

Some have made the point that simulation theory is merely a 21st century spin on religious ideas, some of them quite ancient — our relationship with a higher power, living within its Creation, etc. A new film explores these themes — I’m curious to check it out.

Conclusion

When it comes down to it, even if it’s true, does it matter if we are living in a very convincing simulation? 

Only if we realize that this is as real as it gets. As far as we know, this reality is all we have. But there’s a very good chance a lot more is going on than what our senses tell us. 

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? 

Oumuamua and the Fermi Paradox

illustration by paul sahre

If the universe is unimaginably large, why aren’t there more signs of extraterrestrial life? 

The question was made famous by Enrico Fermi, who at lunch one day in 1950 turned to his colleagues and asked, where are they? 

With billions of stars in our stellar neighborhood, there’s a high probability some of the planets surrounding at least some of those stars must be Earth-like. Chances are, at least a portion of those life-fostering planets must have developed civilizations with the capability to leave their planet, just as we have.

Since there exists many stars similar to our Sun, but that are billions of years older, the theory holds that humans should have been able to detect some sign of an alien civilization. 

But we never have—at least, not convincingly.

The strongest argument against the Fermi Paradox, at least according to Avi Loeb, author of the book Extraterrestrials, unfolded over 11 days in 2017. That October, a telescope in Maui captured an exotic spec careening across the sky. They called it ‘Oumuamua (which translates roughly to the Hawaiian for “scout”). Scientists assumed it was a comet or asteroid. Loeb disagrees. 

The former chair of Astrophysics at Harvard, Loeb has reason to believe ‘Oumuamua was an alien craft propelled by a lightsail — a thin reflective object that harnesses light to push a vehicle across space in the way a sailboat is pushed by the wind. 

What evidence does Loeb have? Three compelling facts. 

First, ‘Oumuamua was not shaped like a normal comet or asteroid. It looked something like a pancake the size of a football field. 

Second, its trail was minimal. For a comet going four times faster than average, scientists expected there to be a large tail of debris behind ‘Oumuamua — but no carbon-based molecules or space dust were detected.

Lastly, ‘Oumuamua was moving away from the sun much faster than gravity’s pull would provide. What provided the extra push? 

david steinberg

Planetary sailing

In 2015, Loeb worked on a project to bring a tiny probe to Alpha Centauri, a star system about four lightyears from our Sun. He and a team of researchers worked through several possible designs, and eventually landed on the lightsail — a craft propelled by a strong laser light. That laser could ignite in short, powerful bursts, which would propel the craft up to 100 million miles an hour — a fifth the speed of light. Moving at that speed, it would take only about nine days to reach Pluto from Earth. 

Loeb believes ‘Oumuamua may have been a craft using similar technology.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

— Carl Sagan

Whether he is correct or speculative remains to be seen. It’s certainly beyond my pay grade. By Sagan’s standard, ‘Oumuamua sadly falls short. But it does give one hope. 

It’s only recently that we’ve developed the technology to have telescopes as powerful as the Pan-Starrs1, which originally detected ‘Oumuamua. The object was passing at a distance from us roughly equal to our distance from the Sun. Now that we have this level of tech, Loeb expects sightings of unusual objects to become more commonplace. 

Perhaps the reason we haven’t seen any alien life up until now is because we didn’t yet have the technology to detect it.

Epicureans vs Stoics: two approaches to living

chris otchy

There were under the early Roman Empire two rival schools which practically divided the field between them—the Epicureans and the Stoics.

Epicureans are those who followed the example of Epicurus, a philosopher devoted to the study of happiness. He believed the greatest good was to seek modest, sustainable pleasure. Those who follow him feel life is short and therefore to be enjoyed. They indulge in all the sensorial things in life – food, drink, massage, fine clothes and fine wine. They relish in all the world has to offer, and try to enjoy life to the fullest. In extreme forms, Epicureans can be sappy and overly sentimental. Living in the wake of their emotions and passions, they can also be quite unpredictable.

Stoics on the other hand are people who refrain from indulging their senses. They aim to be detached emotionally, experiencing neither extreme pleasure nor pain. They lead lives of restraint and moderation… lives of quiet desperation indeed. Seneca, one of the most famous Stoics, was a lifelong teetotaler and chastised the vices of money, liquor, and materialism. He abhorred all inebriation. He would only take dry, stale bread for food and glorified the virtues of roughshod, simple clothing and cold showers. The Stoics idealize temperance, sobriety, courage, and justice. They recognized that certain emotions—anger, fear, resentment, and envy—are useless expenditures of energy and get one nowhere. Therefore they try to not waste their time with those feelings, and rise above them in order to enjoy life in a more raw manner. Moderation—doing the right thing at the right time in the right amount—is their modus operandi. Like the early Christians, they think that every person’s task is overcome oneself and be stronger than one’s base impulses. Spock is the ideal Stoic — devoted to logic and reason, somewhat cold, detached, half-human and emotionless.

“Let us set the axe to the root, that we being purged of our passions may have a peaceable mind.”

— thomas a kempis

Up until this point in life, I have been very much an Epicurean. I indulge my senses. I give into emotionality. I recognize life is brief and often painful, and therefore try to enjoy what life has to offer. I try to live in a moderately stylish manner, as my means allow. 

But as I read the meditations of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, I see the wisdom in this way of life. I see how their sense of pratyahara, that detachment from your emotions, can really serve you in making the most reasonable decisions in life.

What good has come from anger and envy? None. And so by acting in a manner that is removed from those emotions, I see how I could live in a much more beneficial manner to myself and those around me. 

Nothing in excess. Doing the right thing in the right amount at the right time — that resonates. It reminds me of the Buddhist principle of the Middle Way. 

Am I going to start eating stale bread and taking cold showers? Not likely, not everyday at least. (Though I do occasionally take cold showers in light of the multiple health benefits). But see now that taking a stoical approach to life has its merits, especially when we are faced with difficult circumstances, like loss and the death of loved ones. 

Taking a stoical approach allows one to not indulge in sentimentality, but rather to move on and continue being productive. Yes, there is certainly a time for sadness and remembering and mourning, but only to a point. After a short period of time, there really is nothing you can do about many of the terrible situations we face. At the end of the day, fear and frustration and sadness are a waste of your time and energy. Concentrate on what you have right now in front of you and what you can do with it. That’s how you move on.

“Even the wealthy are continually met and frustrated by difficult times and situations. It is in no man’s power to have whatever he wants. But it is in his power not to wish for what he hasn’t got, and cheerfully make the most of things that do come his way.”

— Seneca

Stoicism tells us to do the job in front of us rather than thinking we’re better than our tasks or the things we’re facing, or that life is unfair. Seneca tells us it is, and we’re no better and no worse than any other human, so get down to the business of living. The task that seems beneath you, the coworker who annoys you, the job you feel you’re better than—nonsense. Excellence is what we should aspire to.

“We are what we repeatedly do,” so said Aristotle, “therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit.”

All our goals are attainable by making excellence our goal in everything we do. How you do one thing is how you do everything. Words to live by.  

Leading and Following

elena de soto

“[One of the troubles that beset us as humans] is the way our lives are guided by others’ example. In this manner, we lust after what isn’t ours and what we don’t actually need. We think we must do the things that everyone else is doing, have the things everyone else has, simply because they are doing them and have them. We are attracted by wealth, pleasures and good looks, and we are repelled by exertion, death, pain, and disgrace. We would do better to not crave the former, not be afraid of the latter.”

— Seneca

Who's the Genius - the Artist or the Observer?

jean-michel basquiat

“All human creativity is a desperate attempt to occupy the brief space or endless gap between birth and death.”

What’s the difference between good and bad art? 

I’m reading A Year with Swollen Appendices, Brian Eno’s 1997 memoir. (In February, a 25-year anniversary edition is being re-published.) 

It contains a terrific essay about placebo cures. Eno explains how though there are believers and critics, the fact remains — placebos cure about 30% of patients scientifically administered the false cures. 

He then recounts the story of Melody Maker music critic Richard Williams, who in the 1970s was sent a John Lennon + Yoko Ono record to review. The first side was normal enough—five traditionally arranged songs. The other side was more unusual—20 minutes of a pure sine wave. Just a long, unwavering, unaccompanied tone. 

Williams wrote his review, concentrating the bulk of it on side B, noting how bold Lennon and Ono were for putting out such brashly stark, minimal music. He later learned the second side was a test tone, used to calibrate and detect abnormalities in record players. 

Was Williams’ experience with the test tone any diminished, knowing the sound over which he rhapsodized was unintentional? 

What composes a satisfactory art experience? What makes it good for some observers and poor for others? I’ve explored this topic before.

Thinking about the believer and the critic, it becomes clear—it’s less about the stimuli and more about the experience going on inside the patient/observer. 

“We can say that there is nothing absolute about the aesthetic value of a Rembrandt or a Mozart or a Basquiat,” Eno writes, just as there’s nothing special about the sugar pill the doctor gives the anxiety-ridden office worker. In the end, anyone who can convince you by any means, including outrageous fakery, that what you are about to experience is THE CURE to your issues can be called a healer. Anyone who can convince you that this thing in front of you IS art is by definition an artist.  

Art says as much about us as it does about the artist. We as observers believe the myth. We drink the Kool-Aid. We willingly give the art its power and we’re under its spell. It’s a dance between the artist and the lovers, the creators and the observers.

“Is the act of getting attention a sufficient act for an artist, or is that a job description?”

— Brian Eno

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.”

— Don Cherry

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.

Why do some artists fly and others flail?

Why are we attracted to the music we like? What makes the art we appreciate and consume interesting to us? What distinguishes it from the art and media we dislike? When art doesn’t speak to us, why is that? Is it ‘bad’ art? Can we blame the artist, or is it a fault of the viewer—a failure to ‘see’ ourselves in the work?

I have a theory that all art is valid, and can even be popular—it just needs to find the right audience. It needs to find its ideal group of people, and once it does, it can blossom in that community of like-minded folks. But finding those people takes work.

Let’s say there are two artists, Poppy and Margaret. They both make very similar brands of competent folk music, play the guitar beautifully, and even sing in a similar, attractive intonation.

Poppy has one million followers on her streaming platform of choice, Margaret has 70.

Putting aside the politics of streaming platforms, what’s the difference between these two artists? On the surface, the only difference is that Poppy is very popular, and Margaret is not. 

But why? Does it come down to marketing, PR, promotion? Perhaps. Or is it the way Poppy executes her music—the chord changes she uses, the tones she employs, the subject matter of her songs? Does Poppy’s art speak to people in a way that Margaret’s does not?

What can Margaret do to achieve a wider audience? Invest more heavily in promotion? Perform in more venues? Gain wider exposure by fostering more relationships, investing in playlists and radio? Does she just need more runway, and to keep on doing what she’s doing, or is there something inherent to the music that she makes that just doesn’t resonate with people?

In the abstract, it’s impossible to judge. But this is a real conundrum for many artists, and all humans, frankly. How do you get along in life without comparing what you do to others—and is that comparison even valid? Can we listen to it, should we listen to it—or would it be better for artists to just put their heads down and keep plugging away at creating beautiful work?

What is the balance between creativity and self-promotion—and at the end of the day,  which is more important?

I have a lot of questions today, and very few answers. These are things that have been bouncing around in my head for years. I still don’t have clear solutions. All I know is that when I make music, and it sounds good to me, it feels good to me. And that feeling is everything. Everything. It’s what all artists are chasing after. And honestly, that should be enough. But it rarely is.

We want more. Artists want recognition. And that requires work—work that many of us don’t enjoy or would rather not do. Self promotion for feelers like myself is tough.

I can happily promote others. Hell, I do it professionally. But ask me to write a bio or artist statement about my most recent work… yikes. I just bottle up. The words disappear. But none of us can deny that this is a really important part of this whole artist thing. You got to get out there. You have to represent yourself because no one else will. At least, not until you can find the right kind of person and pay them what they ask.

So today I’m working on finding that balance, and finding an audience, and making work that speaks to people. It’s all about amplifying the voice and finding the people who want to hear it. 

Acknowledging our shadow selves -- and tapping into their power

Photo: Martino Pietropoli

“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”

— C.G. Jung

We all know things about ourselves we rarely choose to acknowledge or exhibit publicly. Our inner selves are intimate parts of our consciousness that may or may not be expressed in our dealings with the world at large. And yet, they are important to who we are as people. Without them, we would only get part way to understanding our true nature. 

C.G. Jung makes a clear distinction between these different elements of our selves by calling the primary personality we show the world our “No. 1,” and our secondary, hidden personality our “No. 2.”  

“No. 1 was the bearer of light,” he remarks in his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, “No. 2 followed him like a shadow… Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”

With No. 1, we must go forward “into the world of study, moneymaking, responsibilities, entanglements, errors, submissions, and defeats.” 

No. 2 is a link to our more primitive animal instincts, which are suppressed in our early development and superseded by the conscious mind. But our shadowy side is nevertheless critical. Jung writes No. 2 is inextricably tied to the creation of dreams, both in terms of life aspirations, and our sleeping reveries. 

Many of us choose to disregard No. 2 as the refuse of the mind—but such a view is foolish. If, as Jung says, our unconscious is composed of, “everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten,” then No. 2 arguably has a deeper knowledge of the greater world than our primary personality.

How can we tap into the power of our shadow selves? The quickest way, Jung contends, is by listening to it when it speaks to us through our dreams, and carefully analyzing their contents.

Our No. 2 uses the same timeless language as myth, religion, and legend—with imagery and symbols that our conscious minds may find confounding. It’s dense, richly-layered material, but worth our time if we wish to understand our deepest drives, desires, and neuroses. “Dreams are,” Jung writes, “after all, compensations for the conscious attitude.” 

I used to have trouble remembering my dreams. Then I started writing them down every morning as soon as I woke up. I’m genuinely surprised how much more I remember now. It’s as if I’ve given my No. 2 the microphone, and now he’s starting to speak. 

More over, I’ve found that if I pose a question to my unconscious mind before I fall asleep at night, the dreams I do remember bear some deeper wisdom or commentary on the topic. I suggest anyone wanting to tap into their unconscious give this a try. 

No. 1 and No. 2 are inextricably linked—two parts of a single mind. Why not try to use this connection to benefit your wellbeing and goals? I’ll leave you with this choice quote.

“Although we human beings have our own personal life, we are yet in large measure the representatives, the victims and promoters of a collective spirit whose years are counted in centuries. We can well think all our lives long that we are following our noses, and may never discover that we are, for the most part, supernumeries on the stage of the world theater.”

— C.G. Jung

We're all just amateurs, and why that's a good thing

blazing sun, playa cerritos by c.o.

Being an amateur is important. It’s not a mark of shame, it’s just reality. That’s where we all are when we start out—amateurs. We’ve got very little experience, but we have heart, and passion, and very defined palettes. That’s why beginners are in a terribly good position. You can always get more experience, but you can’t easily manufacture (or beat) pure and genuine drive coupled with good taste. 

Austin Kleon has covered this pretty succinctly in Show Your Work, but it bears repeating. 

“Because they have little to lose, amateurs are willing to try anything and share the results. They take chances, experiment, and follow their whims. Sometimes, in the process of doing things in an unprofessional way, they make new discoveries… Amateurs are lifelong learners, and they make a point of learning in the open so that others can learn from their failures and successes.”

— Austin Kleon

There is a very real latent energy or untapped potential that lies inside each of us, if we are open to it. If we listen to the little voice. And once we start listening, it begins to get louder and louder… and if we foster it—if we let it get loud enough to be heard by others—then real changes starts to happen. It all starts with listening to ourselves and believing in what we hear. 

I re-watched Rushmore for the 100th time last week and re-discovered this. 

from shoot angle

Just because we don’t have experience in something and feel like we have no idea what we’re doing doesn’t mean we can’t make a meaningful contribution. 

“I have no concept of knowing how to be a musician at all what-so-ever... I couldn’t even pass Guitar 101.”

— Kurt Cobain

The very act of creation is sometimes so alienating and strange, especially when we begin to craft a discipline around it and force ourselves to do it when we don’t feel like it. That’s when we start facing the inner obstructions—our limitations, our frustrations, our distractions, our addictions… It can all come out when we sit down and try to do that one thing. This is why creation can be difficult. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the struggle.

“Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position. ”

— Stephen King

Good craft doesn’t always feel great at the moment we’re bringing it into the world—ask any mother around. But we keep doing it with knowledge our skill and end product will improve with time.

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. 

We know so little

We know so little about ourselves. Just enough to want to be almost anyone else. 

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.