This blog is about me telling you why my way of making music is better than yours and why you really should be doing things like I do. Because your way is wrong, takes too long, misses the point and doesn't get to the heart of what music really is.
But don't let any of that put you off.
I've written before about how I make music and maybe you have read some of those blogs. This year my way of doing what I do has, as it should, undergone some transformations. If anything, the pre-existing predilections I had have become more extreme. It is in thinking about what has happened and what effects it that I have come to new conclusions about what it is I am doing and why. And it is in talking with other people who do things a different (and far worse) way that I see the sense in what I am doing. So let's unpack this a little.
When I record music I play. In two senses. In the first sense in that I always play in the music I record. I am not a very good player of anything but I am an autodidact. And so I try to do everything myself. I play in drum patterns on pads. I will play in any notes on a keyboard. And if I do it badly then I do it badly. The important point is that a performance was recorded and the dynamics of my playing are recorded too. You don't get dynamics of playing with a mouse drawing on a sequencer. That is to say that the link with a physical performance is preserved my way. As it should be. The second sense of my play is that when I make music I always have fun. It is a game. It is entertaining yourself. A playful frame of mind is by far the most creative. This is demonstrated in that I, in this frame of mind, have a pretty much 100% success rate of musical ideas to finished tunes. It is extremely rare I reject an idea that forms this way.
So why is this important? Because music is a physical thing. Sound is vibration. Physicality is inherent. Music is deliberation regarding sound. That is, music is deliberation regarding a physical process, the process of creating sound. This is why when I have recording sessions I stand up. Forget that these days you can be completely sedentary in a computer chair wiggling your mouse. Forget that microprocessors can simulate the sound-making process. Forget those things because both sound and music are more primeval than that. Instead concentrate on the thrill you get when you press a key, strum some strings, hit a drum or myriad other things, and a sound is produced, one you made directly. That is the vital, primeval connection I am talking about. That is why people prefer to make music with things they can directly affect and know that they did it. Its why people making music using instruments have more fun than people sitting at desks. And also remember that music and sound are physical things in their effects. Music creates and affects emotions and they physically change the state and feeling of your body. There is no aspect of music that is not, and should not, be physical.
So, besides playing and preserving physicality in my music, I also like to improvise. Lately, as you will know if you have read other blog articles, I have even explicitly introduced randomness. What's so good about this? Well, it removes the barrier that is the creator. Or, at least, it puts him or her in the background a bit more. Too much music today is too knowing. It is soaked in cynicism. Many people put forward having an idea in their head and knowing what they want as a good thing. They are wrong. Its a bad thing, a barrier, a limitation - and not the good kind of limitation. It guarantees that you will always sound how you purposely want to. How can that be good? Wouldn't you rather create yourself and make something new, something you COULDN'T have imagined or made on purpose? Wanting to match the idea in your head is ultimately a deeply conservative act and anti an experimentalism which frees you for new musical experiences. It is wanting to shape the music but not yourself be shaped or changed by it.
And that, I think, is a very crucial distinction to make. The dominant model of the musical creator as king over his creations puts in place very many ideas which, I say, are not helpful. I believe that music should change things. And top of that list should probably be the creator of the music themselves. But, it seems to me, not many people want to be changed by their music. Instead, they are obsessed with creating some perfect thing which exactly matches their creatorly wishes. I can't think of anything worse. Not only will it not be perfect (perfection is a mirage and therefore a massive waste of creative energy) but all it will do as a musical act is petrify their musical choices. It is, to me, creating musical fossils. It also remains true that perfection is deeply boring. Its the imperfect things which are the most interesting in this world, the flawed, the accidental, the random. In short, the things you couldn't have imagined but that just happened, that came out of nothing but your creative energies put to use in some time and space. Are you trying to create your little piece of perfection by deliberation? You are wasting your time.
Another area where you are likely wasting your time is production. We live in a computer world now. I can't think of any piece of musical software (commonly called Digital Audio Workstations) which doesn't these days have templates for everything. Its basically impossible for even the most non- tech savvy individual to sound bad. So whack on your master template onto the master channel of your track and there you go. Job done. What's that? You are coming back to me with a load of pseudo-professional BS about sound dynamics, room dampening, phase cancellation and the like? Well, if you want to sound like Coldplay or U2 then, yes, you may be right. But none of that interests me. I want to sound NOT like them. I don't want to sound like the currently in favour "professional" idea of what something sounds like and the sheen of commerciality which that is all about does not remotely interest me. I firmly believe that there is NO SUCH A THING as a bad sound. In fact there are only two types of sound: the sound you want to create and the sound you don't. There are no hard and fast rules, no rights from wrongs. There are just wants and taste: Both are yours. You might not like dull, muddy mixes. But I might want to create them. And, remember, its not as if either you or I are being objective about this. Sound is a subjective matter. What sounds "good" or "bad" is informed by multiple things - not least by what you have been told sounds good and bad. So, please, don't act like there is right and wrong here.
BUT! I will say this. Sculpting your sound IS important. But its important at the beginning of the process not at the end. If you didn't care what sounds you made at the start then no amount of "producing" at the end will be able to save it. Make great sounds BEFORE you start playing and then use those sounds creatively. You will find that works much better. SOUND is the most important thing in music. I have said for years that if you use great sounds then it is virtually impossible to make a bad song. A love of sound, I think, is a necessary pre-requisite to making good music.
And while we are talking about "producing" I want you to ask yourself a question. Is it really realistic to think that millions of people in their bedrooms or back room studios who want to make music are all suddenly fantastic producers? I see a lot of people describe themselves as producers. They call themselves that because it seems to them that they are doing what some professional person who works in a studio facility might do. They aren't. One reason I don't emphasise the production role in what I do (and, to be fair, I largely bypass the process completely) is because I am humble enough to say that I know next to nothing about it. A real producer or sound engineer has studied the craft, maybe taken exams and worked in commercial facilities. The rest of us are just hacks in varying degrees. Now there are those who would quibble with my abilities (I mean you Jeff!) but I must say, in all honesty, that I never produce. What I do is merely organise sounds. That's not sophism. I've made music for decades and never considered things like phase cancellation, noise floors or lots of other things you can read about in professional audio journals. And do you know why? Because where's the fun in that? It is simply not in my music-making mentality to get anally retentive and boring about sound. Sound, for me, is just having fun. Nothing more, nothing less. And anything that isn't fun, in this context, I could care less about.
So perhaps now it makes more sense why my process is about playing, performing and simply pressing record and saying I'm done. All I'm interested in is authentically communicating a personal performance, or sequence of performances, from myself onto some recorded medium. Indeed, lately I've even wondered about the recording part. Recording things is another way to set things in stone and, philosophically, I have issues with that. But maybe those issues are things for another day.
Saturday, 20 December 2014
Sunday, 14 December 2014
2014 in Review: A Look At My Musical Year
There's just two weeks to go in 2014 and its that time of year when you look back and ask yourself what has been achieved. I see myself as a musician, a person who is creative with sound and who looks to combine sounds - primarily in interesting and artistic, if not entertaining, ways. I don't necessarily do this for the general public and certainly not for fame or acclamation. Although, of course, who of us does not like validation from other people? But, I think, I've always been quite clear that I make music for myself as a kind of running commentary on my life, where its at and my more philosophical views. That might strike you as quite a strange motive for music-making. And maybe it is. But its mine and there it is. Certainly I would much rather take that as my motive than a whoring after likes, follows and downloads.
I have used a number of pseudonyms this year to make music. The primary ones were The Geeky Disco Experiment, one I had used for a few years, and newer ones Dr Existenz and Herr Absurd. There is not really any difference between them in terms of the music made. They are just names and a chance to carve out different identities.
2014 was another year in which my music got better. This has been happening for a few years now and I like the fact. Of course, I finish the year having just done a big experiment in making music randomly. This started, overtly, half way through my Dark Series of four albums and continued explicitly throughout my Random Series which came about precisely to experiment with randomness. This has given me a new window on the music-making experience, something I have always thought about theoretically as well as doing practically. I am a very lazy person and, as has been noted by Bill Gates of lazy people in general, that makes me good at finding shortcuts to cut down on things unnecessary. Indeed, that was primarily why I had always been an improviser. Thinking about it just seemed like too much hard work when you could set things up and just play.
When I look at my output from the year I am, once again, staggered by some of the tracks that appeared. You need to remember that my processes are extremely tailored to capture a moment. I don't write music with any ideas in my head of what I want it to be. I wouldn't know how to do that. Its a counter-intuitive way of doing things to me. Indeed, its hard to say that I write music at all. I simply record what happens when I am in front of an instrument or another music-making device. That "what happens" is what becomes molded into the song. I have a very, very high hit rate. In fact, its extremely rare that I reject an idea that comes to me. For example, in making my recent Random Series of four albums and thirty one total tracks I only rejected one of the thirty two ideas I had. So that's like a 90+% success rate of ideas being turned into finished songs. I always know within five or ten minutes if an idea is going to work or not. If it gets past this time limitation it will end up being a song. They nearly all do.
I think the reason for that is mostly because my process is now very honed after a number of years. I am simply trying to let out what is inside when I record music or create some track. So I just need to chill, relax and play (as in have fun). If you do that I have found that what is inside comes out pretty easily. It doesn't matter what tools you are using. If its in there to come out then providing an environment where it can should usually be enough. I deliberately play up the fun angle. You need to be enjoying yourself when creating. Its not some dour, serious process although what comes out may be dour and serious if that is your mood. My music is very intimately tied to me and my personality. I can see that clearly and, I suppose, I play up to that fact. I often refer to it privately as a musical autobiography that is constantly being written.
So what about the high points of the music I did. Well, first to mention that there were some not so good pieces - one of which I have never listened to since I did it (the quickly forgotten album "Sordid"). I do have the occasional disaster. But this was more than made up for by the successes. The most notable of these is the collection known as Elektronische Existenz (my most downloaded album) which I wrote mostly around the middle of the year. It had been preceeded by two albums which established a mood for me in "Blue" and "Static Metal". These albums established a melancholic mood and a fascination with certain FM type sounds and they seemed to set me in a groove. Now I can have a prolific output at times (partly due to the circumstances of my life) and this lead to one. I then produced the first of what was to be three collections of thirty one songs. Elektronische Existenz, as a whole collection, (it was originally released as 10 EPs and an epilogue titled EEXIII) is remarkably consistent in terms of its quality. Only one of the songs, as I judge, slips below the standard (and that is forgivable as a reminder to me that things can't always be wonderful). Imagine having such high quality across thirty one songs! Its harder for us prolific guys to be consistent because there is so much more to judge us by.
Later in the year, passing through three albums under the moniker Dr Existenz, I did two more series of thirty one songs - the so-called Dark and Random Series. I never intended to write multi-volume collections but, looking back, I'm glad I did. I am a storyteller and I like reading and hearing mythologies. Elektronische Existenz is even a musical mythology itself about the character "Der Wanderer" - another name I took for myself during the year. I don't know how I could be much more explicitly autobiographical than writing a thirty one track musical and mythological autobiography about a character who is supposed to represent me! I even included a mythology with the complete collection of songs when I released them all together in one package.
In the summer of 2014 I visited Berlin. I was a little lost when I went there and I was hoping to find something by going back to the place that only a year before I had lived in. I ended up only spending a week there. I had planned for longer. It gave birth, in the immediate aftermath, to two albums, Berlinerisch and Bürgerablage. The first was crunchy sounding and very frustrated. Its not a favourite of mine whilst I can, at the same time, see my DNA within it. As an aside, I do not think that all music necessarily has to be good. I think things need to be aesthetically interesting more than simply good or bad. Otherwise everything just turns into a simple popularity contest and that is intellectual poverty of the highest order. If I can be interesting, to myself in what I do and, just maybe, to one or two others whose opinions I value, then that is enough for me. Interesting will always be good.
I have used a number of pseudonyms this year to make music. The primary ones were The Geeky Disco Experiment, one I had used for a few years, and newer ones Dr Existenz and Herr Absurd. There is not really any difference between them in terms of the music made. They are just names and a chance to carve out different identities.
2014 was another year in which my music got better. This has been happening for a few years now and I like the fact. Of course, I finish the year having just done a big experiment in making music randomly. This started, overtly, half way through my Dark Series of four albums and continued explicitly throughout my Random Series which came about precisely to experiment with randomness. This has given me a new window on the music-making experience, something I have always thought about theoretically as well as doing practically. I am a very lazy person and, as has been noted by Bill Gates of lazy people in general, that makes me good at finding shortcuts to cut down on things unnecessary. Indeed, that was primarily why I had always been an improviser. Thinking about it just seemed like too much hard work when you could set things up and just play.
When I look at my output from the year I am, once again, staggered by some of the tracks that appeared. You need to remember that my processes are extremely tailored to capture a moment. I don't write music with any ideas in my head of what I want it to be. I wouldn't know how to do that. Its a counter-intuitive way of doing things to me. Indeed, its hard to say that I write music at all. I simply record what happens when I am in front of an instrument or another music-making device. That "what happens" is what becomes molded into the song. I have a very, very high hit rate. In fact, its extremely rare that I reject an idea that comes to me. For example, in making my recent Random Series of four albums and thirty one total tracks I only rejected one of the thirty two ideas I had. So that's like a 90+% success rate of ideas being turned into finished songs. I always know within five or ten minutes if an idea is going to work or not. If it gets past this time limitation it will end up being a song. They nearly all do.
I think the reason for that is mostly because my process is now very honed after a number of years. I am simply trying to let out what is inside when I record music or create some track. So I just need to chill, relax and play (as in have fun). If you do that I have found that what is inside comes out pretty easily. It doesn't matter what tools you are using. If its in there to come out then providing an environment where it can should usually be enough. I deliberately play up the fun angle. You need to be enjoying yourself when creating. Its not some dour, serious process although what comes out may be dour and serious if that is your mood. My music is very intimately tied to me and my personality. I can see that clearly and, I suppose, I play up to that fact. I often refer to it privately as a musical autobiography that is constantly being written.
Later in the year, passing through three albums under the moniker Dr Existenz, I did two more series of thirty one songs - the so-called Dark and Random Series. I never intended to write multi-volume collections but, looking back, I'm glad I did. I am a storyteller and I like reading and hearing mythologies. Elektronische Existenz is even a musical mythology itself about the character "Der Wanderer" - another name I took for myself during the year. I don't know how I could be much more explicitly autobiographical than writing a thirty one track musical and mythological autobiography about a character who is supposed to represent me! I even included a mythology with the complete collection of songs when I released them all together in one package.
In the summer of 2014 I visited Berlin. I was a little lost when I went there and I was hoping to find something by going back to the place that only a year before I had lived in. I ended up only spending a week there. I had planned for longer. It gave birth, in the immediate aftermath, to two albums, Berlinerisch and Bürgerablage. The first was crunchy sounding and very frustrated. Its not a favourite of mine whilst I can, at the same time, see my DNA within it. As an aside, I do not think that all music necessarily has to be good. I think things need to be aesthetically interesting more than simply good or bad. Otherwise everything just turns into a simple popularity contest and that is intellectual poverty of the highest order. If I can be interesting, to myself in what I do and, just maybe, to one or two others whose opinions I value, then that is enough for me. Interesting will always be good.
Bürgerablage was a different ball game. It was made, primarily, using actual machines, Korg Volcas and Electribes. The Volcas were bought expressly for the purpose and then passed onto another musician. It was good for me to get back to machines, something I had a preference for in previous years and where I started my musical journey decades ago when computer music simply didn't exist. However, a number of bouts of poverty had slowly dwindled my equipment over the years and I had had to keep reshaping what was at my disposal and re-configuring my processes accordingly. Bürgerablage is the sound of physical oscillators at play. One or two good tunes popped out in the fun.
And so maybe you see through the rundown of the year just where my musical instincts lie. They lie in fun, in play, in nothing that is too complex or deliberate or professional. They lie in a simple honesty to record and represent where I am, how I'm feeling, what I'm thinking. In short, how I see my place in the world. My music is describing the outlook of a man thrown into existence and struggling to explain the world around him. At a rough guess I have done at least over 150 separate songs this year. Maybe more. That's one every 2 or 3 days. For the entire year. Maybe now you see why I describe my music this way and why I seek to do experiments with my music to try and understand things more and broaden my experience. I'm basically a thinker and searcher. As I wrote on the description of a recent album, you may think I'm doing music when I upload another album. But I'm not, not really. I'm doing philosophy. I'm recording a mindset, an understanding (or lack of understanding) of something. It needs a little interpretation from the listener. But that's the fun. And the challenge. My music is a challenge. Deliberately so.
The following is a rundown of 20 tracks from 2014 that I think represent my output from the year. They are not my "top 20". I honestly couldn't decide what the best twenty were. As I have explained, I'm a human tape recorder. I don't set out to make a great track a certain way or with an aim in mind. But, nevertheless, they are all near the top of any such list I would make and they represent me fairly as I have been throughout this past year. Many are still available online and I'll give you the places to look, should you be interested to look, at the end.
1. Dataflöw (Chaos Computer)
2. In The Mindgloom (The Fictional Existence of Dr Existenz)
3. Blank Stare (Dark Moods)
4. Pppffff (Static Metal)
5. The Present (Dark Visions)
6. The Wanderer and His Shadow III (Elektronische Existenz)
7. Jötnar (Dark Mythologies)
8. Todmüde (Elektronische Existenz VIII)
9. Digital (Random Machines)
10. Terrible Brutal and Cruel (Dr Existenz)
11. MOWUS (Dark Visions)
12. Bürgerablage (Bürgerablage)
13. Pistograf (Entropy Device)
14. You have Been Industrialised (Blue)
15. Barghest (Dark Mythologies)
16. Steckschlüssel (Teil 2) (Bürgerablage)
17. Loopers/Looping (Random Machines)
18. My Life is Having Its Revenge Upon Me (Dr Existenz)
19. The Future (Dark Visions)
20. Grey Future (Blue)
My work as Herr Absurd and Dr Existenz is still online at drexistenz.bandcamp.com and herrabsurd.bandcamp.com My "The Geeky Disco Experiment" archive is currently not available online but Static Metal, Berlinerisch and Bürgerablage are available at the Dr Existenz site.
PS Thanks to all who have listened to or even downloaded my musical musings throughout 2014. Good to share some of the journey with you.
EDIT: Elektronische Existenz, Blue and Static Metal are now up again at elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com
Wednesday, 10 December 2014
Random Machines and Indeterminacy Engines: My Latest Projects And Other Ramblings
This week I have been conducting some musical experiments. Or writing albums as the rest of you might call it. Recently I had been doing some thinking about how I make my music and what informs that process because I thought that this was an important thing to do. Many people, or so it seems, have a pre-determined notion in their head about this or are informed by supposed "professional" notions of the process. I was content with neither of these things and determined to think for myself through the issues.
I came to the conclusion that I was a major hurdle in creating new and vibrant music. In fact, I came to the conclusion that all of us are. We can only make music as ourselves. We are informed by notions of what is right and wrong and have personal preferences regarding how things should be. We will always favour this synth sound over that one or that guitar tone in preference to another. It is human to have preferences. Let me make it clear that these things, and our choices, affect what comes out of our speakers to a much greater degree than any fiddling or messing with faders as we mix what we have recorded. And yet how much time have you given to this major conceptual premise of any music-making as opposed to the latter? Maybe not as much as you should have.
So its my intuition that people don't think enough about what it is they are doing. A fair chunk of the time you allocate to your project should not be doing anything else but thinking about it, conceptualising it. What are you trying to achieve? What will you use? Is there anything you especially want to try out? Is your music meant to represent, or even reproduce or create, any idea or emotion? The questions you find relevant to your project will be your own. But there should be questions. And there should be some conceptual weight behind what you are doing. Otherwise you are just playing. That's fine. But it is what it is. Work that has pretentions to be art needs to be more than play. Unless "just play" is the artform!
As you may know, recently I have been exploring randomness and chance in music in an effort to escape the gravitational pull of my own choices. I had stumbled upon John Cage and read some of his writings. In more recent weeks I have thought this through in my own context and limitations. Its a necessarily on-going process. In the last week I recorded two projects, Random Machines and Indeterminacy Engine. They are, to lesser and greater degrees, works of controlled randomness. Crucial decisions, ones that a musical creator would usually consciously choose because they wanted to determine what happened in the music, were purposely taken from my hands by utilizing tools which allowed random choices to be made.
In the first project, Random Machines, I conceived of random talking over a musical background, the two not in anyway meant to coincide. This is taken from an idea John Cage and David Tudor utilized way back in 1959. There Cage read out one minute stories in one room whilst Tudor played piano and manipulated tape in another. Neither knew what the other was doing or when. In my case I read out the blog of a friend on Twitter that just happened to be advertised as I was thinking of my idea, taking that as my text to be read out. For the music I set up some random instruments in Propellerhead Reason. And then I married the two together.
My second experiment was more thorough-going in its randomness. I set up what I chose to call an "Indeterminacy Engine", a device (actually 2 devices in the end) that was created with the express intention of allowing as much randomness as possible. I again chose Reason as the perfect environment for this experiment with its proliferation of cables and utilization of CV control in software form. This allowed all manner of things to be connected to a sequencer and controlled using CV curves or gate and pitch events which could be drawn and plotted at random and programmed to change throughout the tracks recorded. Thus, the instruments could essentially be operated at random outside of choosing the sounds they played. This was my concession to the creator's vanity.
As was stated, I created two Indeterminacy Engines, one for synth sounds and one for percussion sounds. The percussion engine was centred around two drum modules with the sounds individually wired into a mixer so that send effects could be used on individual drum sounds in varying amounts. However, as the drum kits and patterns were to also be randomized how this might work out in practice was another unknown. It was a neat but controllable way of allowing the randomness to happen. With all this set up, I randomized the patterns and changed sound sets between pieces in order to create the 8 track album.
But the question is what, if anything, do I learn from this?
One thing I learn, and talking to my friend Jeff who is currently mixing every frequency of his latest project to within an inch of it's life this is confirmed, is that the idea is to get the sounds as right as they can be at the start of your project rather than at the finish. This also informs how I create my projects. You will never find me running 60, 80 or 100 tracks. I usually can do it in under 8 because I don't wish to complicate matters, either deliberately or undeliberately. This, you might say, is my iconoclastic or eccentric approach to things. Yes, I will quite happily tell "the professionals" to go and stuff themselves and take their received wisdom with them. All the genuinely creative people did it their own way anyway. And doing it "like a pro" guarantees you nothing but that you sound like someone else's idea of what correct is. Big deal. "Being pro" is the excuse of someone who doesn't have the nous to think for themselves. (Too harsh?)
I have always believed that when it comes to music you should really just keep it as simple as possible. For years I never touched a dial. I just recorded what I did and that was it. Over time I learned that a bit of reverb added some presence and that to keep your music from sounding dull you emphasize the high frequencies a little on your master output. I'm not advising anyone here. To be honest, I don't think its that important. What you decide to record, the ideas you have, matter much more to any music than tinker's tricks at a mixing desk. And no one has ever told me my music sounded bad for all my lack of "professional knowledge" (which I regard as dogma in any case). Some have told me it sounded good though. And for avoidance of doubt I'm making music for my ears anyway.
So I don't go overboard with a million tracks and 5 effects for each sound source. I don't spend 5 days trying to get just the right amount of convolution reverb. I set it and forget it, usually using the same settings for any and every project I do. It works. I keep it simple and I look for good sounds to use. "Always get your sound right as near to the sound source as possible" was something I once remember reading. Its really good advice I think. It saves a lot of the interminable hassle of recording. And have a good idea, I would add.
As far as all the randomness goes I am learning that you need to control it. We live on planet earth but how many other planets, that we know of, could we live on? The point in that example is that randomness may provide staggering beauty quite by chance but more often than not it supplies inhospitable conditions. Clearly, when applied to music, uncontrolled randomness could supply 100 million terribly sounding tracks. And one good one. But none of us have time for that so my experiments are teaching me that it is about finding ways to tame the chance elements and utilize and control them to produce musically pleasing results. You have to ride the wave of chaos. That's an on-going journey I am making and my experiments are encouraging me to do so. The end game is to widen and deepen my musical world, to go places I could never consciously go because my preferences would always lead me down similar paths. I don't want to keep repeating myself and so I must always try new things and move on.
We musicians need to remember that there is truly no right and wrong way to do things. I see and hear so many people burdened by how they think it should be done who would never have it occur to them to question or even explore the possibilities for themselves. Arguments from authority (which is all all the "pro" talk is) reinforced by magazines, media and professionals themselves have never impressed me because I am basically anti-authoritarian. So do what works. Do what sounds good in your ears. Do what you enjoy. You cannot go wrong. You can't. You might even write a Tubular Bells, Oxygene or Dark Side of The Moon one day. Because no one knows what will come out of their speakers as they sit down to write. Mike Oldfield, JMJ and Pink Floyd didn't know either. Until they checked their bank balances. Music is the world of the possible, of the being bold enough to dream. If you are lucky you might capture that dream but you have to be prepared to dream in the first place.
And that leads me to my last point. If you make instrumental music don't let anyone tell you it isn't popular. As I tweeted a day or two ago, there are instrumental albums that have sold in 8 figure numbers. The world record for the greatest concert attendance has been held by Jean Michel Jarre numerous times (and still is at 3.5 million for a concert in Moscow). This is not indicative of music that is "not popular". I believe that electronic instrumental musicians actually choose a harder and better job for themselves. Singing is for the mainstream where people only want to sing the words back. But when you have no words the tune or, as with my interest, more especially the sounds must carry much more weight. That is what interests me and its not a lesser form of music. It is, for my money, a more interesting one.
Should you wish to, you can hear Random Machines and Indeterminacy Engine at herrabsurd.bandcamp.com
I came to the conclusion that I was a major hurdle in creating new and vibrant music. In fact, I came to the conclusion that all of us are. We can only make music as ourselves. We are informed by notions of what is right and wrong and have personal preferences regarding how things should be. We will always favour this synth sound over that one or that guitar tone in preference to another. It is human to have preferences. Let me make it clear that these things, and our choices, affect what comes out of our speakers to a much greater degree than any fiddling or messing with faders as we mix what we have recorded. And yet how much time have you given to this major conceptual premise of any music-making as opposed to the latter? Maybe not as much as you should have.
So its my intuition that people don't think enough about what it is they are doing. A fair chunk of the time you allocate to your project should not be doing anything else but thinking about it, conceptualising it. What are you trying to achieve? What will you use? Is there anything you especially want to try out? Is your music meant to represent, or even reproduce or create, any idea or emotion? The questions you find relevant to your project will be your own. But there should be questions. And there should be some conceptual weight behind what you are doing. Otherwise you are just playing. That's fine. But it is what it is. Work that has pretentions to be art needs to be more than play. Unless "just play" is the artform!
As you may know, recently I have been exploring randomness and chance in music in an effort to escape the gravitational pull of my own choices. I had stumbled upon John Cage and read some of his writings. In more recent weeks I have thought this through in my own context and limitations. Its a necessarily on-going process. In the last week I recorded two projects, Random Machines and Indeterminacy Engine. They are, to lesser and greater degrees, works of controlled randomness. Crucial decisions, ones that a musical creator would usually consciously choose because they wanted to determine what happened in the music, were purposely taken from my hands by utilizing tools which allowed random choices to be made.
In the first project, Random Machines, I conceived of random talking over a musical background, the two not in anyway meant to coincide. This is taken from an idea John Cage and David Tudor utilized way back in 1959. There Cage read out one minute stories in one room whilst Tudor played piano and manipulated tape in another. Neither knew what the other was doing or when. In my case I read out the blog of a friend on Twitter that just happened to be advertised as I was thinking of my idea, taking that as my text to be read out. For the music I set up some random instruments in Propellerhead Reason. And then I married the two together.
My second experiment was more thorough-going in its randomness. I set up what I chose to call an "Indeterminacy Engine", a device (actually 2 devices in the end) that was created with the express intention of allowing as much randomness as possible. I again chose Reason as the perfect environment for this experiment with its proliferation of cables and utilization of CV control in software form. This allowed all manner of things to be connected to a sequencer and controlled using CV curves or gate and pitch events which could be drawn and plotted at random and programmed to change throughout the tracks recorded. Thus, the instruments could essentially be operated at random outside of choosing the sounds they played. This was my concession to the creator's vanity.
As was stated, I created two Indeterminacy Engines, one for synth sounds and one for percussion sounds. The percussion engine was centred around two drum modules with the sounds individually wired into a mixer so that send effects could be used on individual drum sounds in varying amounts. However, as the drum kits and patterns were to also be randomized how this might work out in practice was another unknown. It was a neat but controllable way of allowing the randomness to happen. With all this set up, I randomized the patterns and changed sound sets between pieces in order to create the 8 track album.
But the question is what, if anything, do I learn from this?
One thing I learn, and talking to my friend Jeff who is currently mixing every frequency of his latest project to within an inch of it's life this is confirmed, is that the idea is to get the sounds as right as they can be at the start of your project rather than at the finish. This also informs how I create my projects. You will never find me running 60, 80 or 100 tracks. I usually can do it in under 8 because I don't wish to complicate matters, either deliberately or undeliberately. This, you might say, is my iconoclastic or eccentric approach to things. Yes, I will quite happily tell "the professionals" to go and stuff themselves and take their received wisdom with them. All the genuinely creative people did it their own way anyway. And doing it "like a pro" guarantees you nothing but that you sound like someone else's idea of what correct is. Big deal. "Being pro" is the excuse of someone who doesn't have the nous to think for themselves. (Too harsh?)
I have always believed that when it comes to music you should really just keep it as simple as possible. For years I never touched a dial. I just recorded what I did and that was it. Over time I learned that a bit of reverb added some presence and that to keep your music from sounding dull you emphasize the high frequencies a little on your master output. I'm not advising anyone here. To be honest, I don't think its that important. What you decide to record, the ideas you have, matter much more to any music than tinker's tricks at a mixing desk. And no one has ever told me my music sounded bad for all my lack of "professional knowledge" (which I regard as dogma in any case). Some have told me it sounded good though. And for avoidance of doubt I'm making music for my ears anyway.
So I don't go overboard with a million tracks and 5 effects for each sound source. I don't spend 5 days trying to get just the right amount of convolution reverb. I set it and forget it, usually using the same settings for any and every project I do. It works. I keep it simple and I look for good sounds to use. "Always get your sound right as near to the sound source as possible" was something I once remember reading. Its really good advice I think. It saves a lot of the interminable hassle of recording. And have a good idea, I would add.
As far as all the randomness goes I am learning that you need to control it. We live on planet earth but how many other planets, that we know of, could we live on? The point in that example is that randomness may provide staggering beauty quite by chance but more often than not it supplies inhospitable conditions. Clearly, when applied to music, uncontrolled randomness could supply 100 million terribly sounding tracks. And one good one. But none of us have time for that so my experiments are teaching me that it is about finding ways to tame the chance elements and utilize and control them to produce musically pleasing results. You have to ride the wave of chaos. That's an on-going journey I am making and my experiments are encouraging me to do so. The end game is to widen and deepen my musical world, to go places I could never consciously go because my preferences would always lead me down similar paths. I don't want to keep repeating myself and so I must always try new things and move on.
We musicians need to remember that there is truly no right and wrong way to do things. I see and hear so many people burdened by how they think it should be done who would never have it occur to them to question or even explore the possibilities for themselves. Arguments from authority (which is all all the "pro" talk is) reinforced by magazines, media and professionals themselves have never impressed me because I am basically anti-authoritarian. So do what works. Do what sounds good in your ears. Do what you enjoy. You cannot go wrong. You can't. You might even write a Tubular Bells, Oxygene or Dark Side of The Moon one day. Because no one knows what will come out of their speakers as they sit down to write. Mike Oldfield, JMJ and Pink Floyd didn't know either. Until they checked their bank balances. Music is the world of the possible, of the being bold enough to dream. If you are lucky you might capture that dream but you have to be prepared to dream in the first place.
And that leads me to my last point. If you make instrumental music don't let anyone tell you it isn't popular. As I tweeted a day or two ago, there are instrumental albums that have sold in 8 figure numbers. The world record for the greatest concert attendance has been held by Jean Michel Jarre numerous times (and still is at 3.5 million for a concert in Moscow). This is not indicative of music that is "not popular". I believe that electronic instrumental musicians actually choose a harder and better job for themselves. Singing is for the mainstream where people only want to sing the words back. But when you have no words the tune or, as with my interest, more especially the sounds must carry much more weight. That is what interests me and its not a lesser form of music. It is, for my money, a more interesting one.
Should you wish to, you can hear Random Machines and Indeterminacy Engine at herrabsurd.bandcamp.com
Sunday, 30 November 2014
Be An Explorer!
My blog today concerns why people make music at all. If you have read many blogs from me before you will expect two things: a stream of consciousness and that it be existentially coming from my own life and experience. You should expect the same things here.
The question I've been asking myself lately is "Why do people make music at all?" I can well understand people who are interested in making music make it because they have an irresistible urge, an itch they need to scratch. I feel that too. Perhaps they are someone who is paid to make it because they have a job as a paid musician. The reasons, I suppose, could be as great as the number of people who want to make music.
I wonder, however, if anyone makes music to challenge themselves? Now, whether it is true or not, I like to see myself as some kind of goad or irritant to better habits in those around me. I'm the person who will ask you the questions that maybe you won't ask yourself or the one who will suggest a contrary way, method or motivation to the ones you currently have. I was educated, academically I might add, in biblical studies (the exact number and type of degrees I have being lost in the mists of irrelevancy) and I'm very used to the idea of prophets - not people who foretell the future but people who are a pain in the ass of human conventions. I guess I have absorbed the historical characters a little too much.
So what do I want to criticise here? Well, I guess its musical laziness, habit, resting on your laurels. Now let me add straightaway that this will be more of a problem for the prolific than the studied and steady musicians amongst us. If it takes you 3 years to produce one song then your problems are more than that you repeat yourself. And I know that in music there is no law and people are free to do exactly as they wish. Even if its remake the same track for the rest of their lives.
The thing is, why would you want to remake the same track for the rest of your life? And its not that I see musical development as linear from bad to better to best either. In my own musical timeline there are failures and successes all along it. I've done bad, good and excellent work this year in my own mind. But at the same time I think and believe that we should be trying to develop ourselves in terms of musical education. This is in at least two senses: by broadening our experience of what is out there musically and by developing our own sound, methods and techniques. After five years of making music you should be someone who can make music that the person five years earlier couldn't have dreamed of making.
Strange things have been happening to me lately. A couple of weeks ago, via listening to, and learning about, the soundtrack to the classic sci-fi film "Forbidden Planet," and its composers Louis and Bebe Barron, I came across John Cage, the experimental American musician of the middle to late 20th century. Just last night I spent around 8 hours listening to what is termed in the English-speaking world "Krautrock" (but by Germans themselves as Kosmiche - "cosmic") - bands such as Can, Neu!, Popol Vuh, Amon Düül ii, Ash Ra Tempel, Faust and Cluster. Two more well known bands that began slap bang in the middle of the same genre are Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk. They would later become much more famous for other things.
These new auditory experiences in the last couple of weeks have radically altered my musical bearings. They have changed for me what music means and had an affect on how I understand how one type and period of music is connected to another. David Bowie now makes a lot more sense to me, how he could exist and why he sounds like that. More modern bands like Goldfrapp are suddenly contextualised for me. I feel that I have suddenly found a missing link and things that were just there before now make a lot more sense. This is all part of an on-going musical education. And, in me at least, I want that to be overt. I actively want to learn about different types and styles of music, different time periods. Its about understanding the musical terrain and understanding, to your own satisfaction at least, where you stand and where everything is in relation to you. You can only utilise the sounds and experiences you are aware of. So increasing awareness is a basic step it seems to me.
This leads into my second concern: developing your own sound, methods and techniques. I hope I don't have to argue here that people should want to develop and, to their own satisfaction at least, "get better" - however you might want to quantify that. I don't want to be prescriptive about how anybody might do that. That is for each one of us to decide. But I do think we should be doing it as creative people. And its in that context that I regard habits as bad, as traps. There is an attitude which I often see of simply being happy to make the same thing over and over again. Whilst realising that it is phenomenally easy to do this (and that some people seem very happy with it), I can't be and since this is my blog I can write here that such an attitude irritates the hell out of me. Repeating yourself over and over lazily makes you an irrelevance in my mind. If I've heard it once I might want a re-hash once but ten times is probably too much. Some people make careers out of it, of course. But not from me they don't.
In my own musical life this opening up to new musical sources leads into a thinking about my own methods and practice and to an exploration of experimentalism. This is not to say I'm doing things no one has ever done before. But it does lead to things I have never done before. And that, surely, is the point. "There is nothing new under the sun" is a saying (and a biblical one too if I remember correctly) but there can be something new for each of us as musicians - if we seek it. Hence why my last album "Dark Visions" was made using a Cagian exploration of randomness and chance - and a number key was used to make all the musical decisions for me. The results were startling. I made music I never could have made previously. I feel like I have moved to another level. It was only possible because I was not content to stay the same, doing the same things over again. But, of course, having done that I must now make a new move. For the explorer there can only be forwards motion.
And so what I myself seek to be is an exploratory musician, an experimental musician, one not content to repeat myself. I want my next album to be something you would never imagine I could make. I want you to hear things from me and think "He never did that before". I want to challenge myself to be different because this is an aid to creativity - creativity being the highest good. This is not to be novel for novelty's sake. It is to be experimental, to be a musical explorer, to not be content with what I can do with my eyes closed because I've done it so often before. Try it. You might be amazed where it takes you.
The question I've been asking myself lately is "Why do people make music at all?" I can well understand people who are interested in making music make it because they have an irresistible urge, an itch they need to scratch. I feel that too. Perhaps they are someone who is paid to make it because they have a job as a paid musician. The reasons, I suppose, could be as great as the number of people who want to make music.
I wonder, however, if anyone makes music to challenge themselves? Now, whether it is true or not, I like to see myself as some kind of goad or irritant to better habits in those around me. I'm the person who will ask you the questions that maybe you won't ask yourself or the one who will suggest a contrary way, method or motivation to the ones you currently have. I was educated, academically I might add, in biblical studies (the exact number and type of degrees I have being lost in the mists of irrelevancy) and I'm very used to the idea of prophets - not people who foretell the future but people who are a pain in the ass of human conventions. I guess I have absorbed the historical characters a little too much.
So what do I want to criticise here? Well, I guess its musical laziness, habit, resting on your laurels. Now let me add straightaway that this will be more of a problem for the prolific than the studied and steady musicians amongst us. If it takes you 3 years to produce one song then your problems are more than that you repeat yourself. And I know that in music there is no law and people are free to do exactly as they wish. Even if its remake the same track for the rest of their lives.
The thing is, why would you want to remake the same track for the rest of your life? And its not that I see musical development as linear from bad to better to best either. In my own musical timeline there are failures and successes all along it. I've done bad, good and excellent work this year in my own mind. But at the same time I think and believe that we should be trying to develop ourselves in terms of musical education. This is in at least two senses: by broadening our experience of what is out there musically and by developing our own sound, methods and techniques. After five years of making music you should be someone who can make music that the person five years earlier couldn't have dreamed of making.
Strange things have been happening to me lately. A couple of weeks ago, via listening to, and learning about, the soundtrack to the classic sci-fi film "Forbidden Planet," and its composers Louis and Bebe Barron, I came across John Cage, the experimental American musician of the middle to late 20th century. Just last night I spent around 8 hours listening to what is termed in the English-speaking world "Krautrock" (but by Germans themselves as Kosmiche - "cosmic") - bands such as Can, Neu!, Popol Vuh, Amon Düül ii, Ash Ra Tempel, Faust and Cluster. Two more well known bands that began slap bang in the middle of the same genre are Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk. They would later become much more famous for other things.
These new auditory experiences in the last couple of weeks have radically altered my musical bearings. They have changed for me what music means and had an affect on how I understand how one type and period of music is connected to another. David Bowie now makes a lot more sense to me, how he could exist and why he sounds like that. More modern bands like Goldfrapp are suddenly contextualised for me. I feel that I have suddenly found a missing link and things that were just there before now make a lot more sense. This is all part of an on-going musical education. And, in me at least, I want that to be overt. I actively want to learn about different types and styles of music, different time periods. Its about understanding the musical terrain and understanding, to your own satisfaction at least, where you stand and where everything is in relation to you. You can only utilise the sounds and experiences you are aware of. So increasing awareness is a basic step it seems to me.
This leads into my second concern: developing your own sound, methods and techniques. I hope I don't have to argue here that people should want to develop and, to their own satisfaction at least, "get better" - however you might want to quantify that. I don't want to be prescriptive about how anybody might do that. That is for each one of us to decide. But I do think we should be doing it as creative people. And its in that context that I regard habits as bad, as traps. There is an attitude which I often see of simply being happy to make the same thing over and over again. Whilst realising that it is phenomenally easy to do this (and that some people seem very happy with it), I can't be and since this is my blog I can write here that such an attitude irritates the hell out of me. Repeating yourself over and over lazily makes you an irrelevance in my mind. If I've heard it once I might want a re-hash once but ten times is probably too much. Some people make careers out of it, of course. But not from me they don't.
In my own musical life this opening up to new musical sources leads into a thinking about my own methods and practice and to an exploration of experimentalism. This is not to say I'm doing things no one has ever done before. But it does lead to things I have never done before. And that, surely, is the point. "There is nothing new under the sun" is a saying (and a biblical one too if I remember correctly) but there can be something new for each of us as musicians - if we seek it. Hence why my last album "Dark Visions" was made using a Cagian exploration of randomness and chance - and a number key was used to make all the musical decisions for me. The results were startling. I made music I never could have made previously. I feel like I have moved to another level. It was only possible because I was not content to stay the same, doing the same things over again. But, of course, having done that I must now make a new move. For the explorer there can only be forwards motion.
And so what I myself seek to be is an exploratory musician, an experimental musician, one not content to repeat myself. I want my next album to be something you would never imagine I could make. I want you to hear things from me and think "He never did that before". I want to challenge myself to be different because this is an aid to creativity - creativity being the highest good. This is not to be novel for novelty's sake. It is to be experimental, to be a musical explorer, to not be content with what I can do with my eyes closed because I've done it so often before. Try it. You might be amazed where it takes you.
Friday, 28 November 2014
Herr Absurd - The Dark World: An Insight into the Making of "The Dark Series"
Well its November 28th 2014. I wake up and realise that in this musical year I have written music for 17 projects, 13 of which I rate highly by my own eccentric standards. Two projects stand out for me and both are multi-volume. The first was the overwhelming success that was "Elektronische Existenz", a 10 volume work (with an epilogue, EEXIII) that encompassed 283 minutes and 31 tracks. It was a musical or opera in many ways, a musical accompaniment to the mythology of "The Wanderer", a character based on myself. It was and remains my Wagnerian epic.
And then there is my most recent work which I know as The Dark Series. This is also 31 tracks long and 4 hours 36 minutes in total. Dark did not start out as a multi-volume work. Neither did Elektronische Existenz. In both cases there was an original album which took on a life of its own and led to a whole project. Perhaps, as befits a project about the dark and darkness, it is rather amorphous what The Dark Series is actually about. I hope to try and flesh that out a bit as we go along. There are, however, many very real concerns unwrapped within the making of this project. These things would maybe stay secret and hidden were I not to make them overt. And that is reason enough to write about them here.
Let's address themes first. Dark is about the things we don't want to think about, things that lurk, feelings that are disturbing to have, ideas from which we shy away. This was overt in Dark Mythologies, the first of the four volumes in the series. There my songs were related to mythical beings that live in belief or legend from crazy vampire creatures to wild dogs that roam dark moors. People are scared of the dark and so, in some ways, The Dark Series is about musically addressing fears. Through Dark Rhythms, Dark Moods and Dark Visions the themes of fear are still present but perhaps more subtly so. Some titles are suggestive but the darkness, overt in Dark Mythologies, clothes itself in the night and wanders unseen throughout most of the collection.
Perhaps here is an apt moment to mention the sound of The Dark Series. Naturally enough, if you have followed my work at all, it is an electronic series. There is a modular feel to much of it due to the heavy use of sequencers and I have deliberately tried to create that sort of sound. That's not necessarily in an overt way. Its just what comes naturally to me. I shall have more to say about this when I get to the procedures I used in making the series. Rhythm is hugely important to the sound of my music and it is always heavily emphasised. Some people define their sound by their use of melody or harmony. My signatures are more based in rhythm and fascination with sound. Here I have used drums and percussion which mix electronic sounds with real drum sounds. I have also tried to utilise larger sounds rhythmically. The most notable example here is Ragnarök, the very first track from the series, which chugs and churns its path through destruction and rebirth. Particularly in the second half of the series, in Dark Moods and Dark Visions, I have used some waves from signature synthesizers to create bass sounds. If you are familiar with them you should hear sounds from the Arp Odyssey and Korg MS-20 in there. Reflecting, I think maybe the fact that I always try to use interesting sounds means that I concentrate less (or not at all) on melody. The sounds themselves (and how they complement or contrast with each other) are the most fascinating and interesting things of all!
And so we come to HOW The Dark Series was made. To background this you need to understand that mid-series I came across the writings of that great American musical experimentalist of the 20th century, John Cage. Cage was a Zen Buddhist and tried to put the principles of that faith into practice in his music. This meant "emptying" the music of influence much as, within that faith, one seeks to empty oneself. At the start of the 1950s he began to overtly use chance and randomness to write music. He used the I Ching, something used for divination as a sort of key for making decisions. And he wrote music this way for decades thereafter because it removed much of his influence from the music he was making. Cage, of course, is primarily known in the popular consciousness for his "silent" work 4' 33", a work in which the pianist sits at the piano, as in its first performance, and plays no notes. The point Cage appears to be making here is that the piece is any and every sound that happens during the 4' 33" of the performance, a radical redefining and blurring of the lines between an authorial performance and an audience passively listening.
I had myself, during the making of The Dark Series, been thinking theoretically about the process of making music, as I often do. This is often salted and stimulated by the thoughts of fellow musicians on Twitter. When I came across Cage's work this thinking really went into overdrive. I have always been suspicious of authors. They cannot be trusted. Authors are unreliable. They lie and they are biased. What's more, they have blind spots. You will always make music like you and, in former times, that was a good thing. I hate artists and bands who set out to try and sound like their heroes and sounding like yourself, I think, is the first duty of any musical artist. But hold on. That itself is a binding limitation. If I always sound like me then I am always subject to all the flaws, bad choices and blind spots that I have. I will, in short, sound the same, forever contained within a narrow band of habits or things I like to do. And I don't like that idea. I don't like it at all. I'm a living thing. I'm capable of change. I want to grow. I want to reach out my neck, like a tree growing towards the sun.
My methods have always been open to, and embraced, both randomness and arbitrariness. Partly this was determined by my anti-authoritarian leanings. Basically, if you tell me something should be done a certain way I will do the opposite. It was also based in laziness. Doing things "right" takes time and effort. But I just want to have fucking fun! So I have always ordered my various setups over the years to promote the making of instant fun. I'm all about the instant gratification baby! But what I found, over the years, was that this could also be deeply honest, authentic and satisfying long term. I feel now that this method is like recording your actual living soul. There is, I think, no pretension, no artifice, no deliberation in this method. Or, at least, there is less. And, to me, that means its less false, less manufactured. I have issues with manufacturing things. I find them fake and unreal. To touch the living, moving, genuine, stream of consciousness is what I seek to do. And that brooks no falsity or artifice in the process. So I naturally came to the position of recording what happened in a performance and leaving it at that with no touching up, mousing or cosmetics later to make it perfect. Life isn't perfect, reality isn't perfect. And music should not be perfect. Much better that it be real. Honest.
But now in making The Dark Series I wanted to incorporate ideas which would remove my influence from the creation process. This happens most overtly in Dark Moods and especially Dark Visions. I found the process to be revelatory and I cannot recommend it enough. To hear myself making music I could never have made deliberately myself was staggering. It was like a window to a whole new layer of reality had been opened. Possibilities were now there that had never existed before. Basically, I introduced overt chance through the use of a number key. The numbers were given to me by five kind souls on Twitter. I used the numbers they gave me to give me answers to questions necessary to make the music. For example, if I came to record a piece and asked "How many beats should be in this measure?" I went to the numbers provided and saw that the first number there was 19. And so I wrote music that utilised a 19 beat (or four bars and three beats) pattern. This was not easy and many of the numbers provided were either odd numbers or, worse, prime numbers! (For those light on musical theory I should explain that the problem here is that prime numbers can't be divided by either 3 or 4, the number of beats most often used in making "standard" Western music. This would lend any music made using such a pattern a disturbing "otherness". ) But, and this is very important, that was good. It forced me to do things differently, to embrace things I never would have done by myself. It has stretched and changed my musical possibilities. It has also created music you never could have heard from me before. So what we have here is new musical territory.
And so in making The Dark Series I find myself changed as a musical being at the end. I have had, for want of a better description, a revelation. I am naturally experimental and prefer to find my own path (and, perhaps, repeat all the old mistakes) rather than do "what you are supposed to". In this I find that I have inadvertently wandered into the path that giants like Cage have trodden before me. My music, as my life, is, and should be, an adventure. The Dark Series started out as an album about some mythical creatures, just more of the same music on a new subject. It ended up being so much more.
You can hear all four albums from The Dark Series at herrabsurd.bandcamp.com
And then there is my most recent work which I know as The Dark Series. This is also 31 tracks long and 4 hours 36 minutes in total. Dark did not start out as a multi-volume work. Neither did Elektronische Existenz. In both cases there was an original album which took on a life of its own and led to a whole project. Perhaps, as befits a project about the dark and darkness, it is rather amorphous what The Dark Series is actually about. I hope to try and flesh that out a bit as we go along. There are, however, many very real concerns unwrapped within the making of this project. These things would maybe stay secret and hidden were I not to make them overt. And that is reason enough to write about them here.
Let's address themes first. Dark is about the things we don't want to think about, things that lurk, feelings that are disturbing to have, ideas from which we shy away. This was overt in Dark Mythologies, the first of the four volumes in the series. There my songs were related to mythical beings that live in belief or legend from crazy vampire creatures to wild dogs that roam dark moors. People are scared of the dark and so, in some ways, The Dark Series is about musically addressing fears. Through Dark Rhythms, Dark Moods and Dark Visions the themes of fear are still present but perhaps more subtly so. Some titles are suggestive but the darkness, overt in Dark Mythologies, clothes itself in the night and wanders unseen throughout most of the collection.
Perhaps here is an apt moment to mention the sound of The Dark Series. Naturally enough, if you have followed my work at all, it is an electronic series. There is a modular feel to much of it due to the heavy use of sequencers and I have deliberately tried to create that sort of sound. That's not necessarily in an overt way. Its just what comes naturally to me. I shall have more to say about this when I get to the procedures I used in making the series. Rhythm is hugely important to the sound of my music and it is always heavily emphasised. Some people define their sound by their use of melody or harmony. My signatures are more based in rhythm and fascination with sound. Here I have used drums and percussion which mix electronic sounds with real drum sounds. I have also tried to utilise larger sounds rhythmically. The most notable example here is Ragnarök, the very first track from the series, which chugs and churns its path through destruction and rebirth. Particularly in the second half of the series, in Dark Moods and Dark Visions, I have used some waves from signature synthesizers to create bass sounds. If you are familiar with them you should hear sounds from the Arp Odyssey and Korg MS-20 in there. Reflecting, I think maybe the fact that I always try to use interesting sounds means that I concentrate less (or not at all) on melody. The sounds themselves (and how they complement or contrast with each other) are the most fascinating and interesting things of all!
And so we come to HOW The Dark Series was made. To background this you need to understand that mid-series I came across the writings of that great American musical experimentalist of the 20th century, John Cage. Cage was a Zen Buddhist and tried to put the principles of that faith into practice in his music. This meant "emptying" the music of influence much as, within that faith, one seeks to empty oneself. At the start of the 1950s he began to overtly use chance and randomness to write music. He used the I Ching, something used for divination as a sort of key for making decisions. And he wrote music this way for decades thereafter because it removed much of his influence from the music he was making. Cage, of course, is primarily known in the popular consciousness for his "silent" work 4' 33", a work in which the pianist sits at the piano, as in its first performance, and plays no notes. The point Cage appears to be making here is that the piece is any and every sound that happens during the 4' 33" of the performance, a radical redefining and blurring of the lines between an authorial performance and an audience passively listening.
I had myself, during the making of The Dark Series, been thinking theoretically about the process of making music, as I often do. This is often salted and stimulated by the thoughts of fellow musicians on Twitter. When I came across Cage's work this thinking really went into overdrive. I have always been suspicious of authors. They cannot be trusted. Authors are unreliable. They lie and they are biased. What's more, they have blind spots. You will always make music like you and, in former times, that was a good thing. I hate artists and bands who set out to try and sound like their heroes and sounding like yourself, I think, is the first duty of any musical artist. But hold on. That itself is a binding limitation. If I always sound like me then I am always subject to all the flaws, bad choices and blind spots that I have. I will, in short, sound the same, forever contained within a narrow band of habits or things I like to do. And I don't like that idea. I don't like it at all. I'm a living thing. I'm capable of change. I want to grow. I want to reach out my neck, like a tree growing towards the sun.
My methods have always been open to, and embraced, both randomness and arbitrariness. Partly this was determined by my anti-authoritarian leanings. Basically, if you tell me something should be done a certain way I will do the opposite. It was also based in laziness. Doing things "right" takes time and effort. But I just want to have fucking fun! So I have always ordered my various setups over the years to promote the making of instant fun. I'm all about the instant gratification baby! But what I found, over the years, was that this could also be deeply honest, authentic and satisfying long term. I feel now that this method is like recording your actual living soul. There is, I think, no pretension, no artifice, no deliberation in this method. Or, at least, there is less. And, to me, that means its less false, less manufactured. I have issues with manufacturing things. I find them fake and unreal. To touch the living, moving, genuine, stream of consciousness is what I seek to do. And that brooks no falsity or artifice in the process. So I naturally came to the position of recording what happened in a performance and leaving it at that with no touching up, mousing or cosmetics later to make it perfect. Life isn't perfect, reality isn't perfect. And music should not be perfect. Much better that it be real. Honest.
But now in making The Dark Series I wanted to incorporate ideas which would remove my influence from the creation process. This happens most overtly in Dark Moods and especially Dark Visions. I found the process to be revelatory and I cannot recommend it enough. To hear myself making music I could never have made deliberately myself was staggering. It was like a window to a whole new layer of reality had been opened. Possibilities were now there that had never existed before. Basically, I introduced overt chance through the use of a number key. The numbers were given to me by five kind souls on Twitter. I used the numbers they gave me to give me answers to questions necessary to make the music. For example, if I came to record a piece and asked "How many beats should be in this measure?" I went to the numbers provided and saw that the first number there was 19. And so I wrote music that utilised a 19 beat (or four bars and three beats) pattern. This was not easy and many of the numbers provided were either odd numbers or, worse, prime numbers! (For those light on musical theory I should explain that the problem here is that prime numbers can't be divided by either 3 or 4, the number of beats most often used in making "standard" Western music. This would lend any music made using such a pattern a disturbing "otherness". ) But, and this is very important, that was good. It forced me to do things differently, to embrace things I never would have done by myself. It has stretched and changed my musical possibilities. It has also created music you never could have heard from me before. So what we have here is new musical territory.
And so in making The Dark Series I find myself changed as a musical being at the end. I have had, for want of a better description, a revelation. I am naturally experimental and prefer to find my own path (and, perhaps, repeat all the old mistakes) rather than do "what you are supposed to". In this I find that I have inadvertently wandered into the path that giants like Cage have trodden before me. My music, as my life, is, and should be, an adventure. The Dark Series started out as an album about some mythical creatures, just more of the same music on a new subject. It ended up being so much more.
You can hear all four albums from The Dark Series at herrabsurd.bandcamp.com
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