So What Are You Really Making Music For?

I've repeated many times over the years that I hate advertising myself. There is something about it that just makes me curl up into a ball inside and squirm. I have become a naturally private person. I value being left alone and anonymity. I want to be left to my own devices because my chief ability, I think, is having ideas. Left alone I can have these ideas and try and make something of them without interference from other concerns. My idea of hell is to be famous. I literally cannot think of anything worse. I would go crazy very quickly if I was constantly getting requests or comments about not just the things I do but me myself as well. But you're probably wondering what the problem is as you sit there reading this. Surely, you're thinking, there is no danger of me becoming famous anyway? You're right to think this because there isn't. And even if there was I'd probably stamp on it as soon as I noticed it anyway. I've done the fame/money equation in my head a few times and I think the money would not be worth the fame.

My name is Andrew and I make electronic music. I put this music online and, to some, this suggests that I want attention, for it if not for myself. Up until now I would have reluctantly agreed with you. As a girlfriend of mine once remarked, "Why are you putting it online if you don't want people to like it?" This may seem a reasonable question to you and you may think she had a point. I am a fairly prodigious producer of music. Over 3,000 tracks in hundreds of albums in 8 years is my guesstimate for my latest spurt of activity. Pretty much all of that has been online at one time or another. Most of it now isn't save for my latest new album, not yet one week old, and two albums of "greatest hits" that I have let stand on my Bandcamp account as examples of pieces of music I am most proud of. But I find myself asking again why it is there at all.

I had a thought the other day which was pre-meditated by the fact that my new album, U8, received zero attention in the first two or three days it was online. I don't garner much attention really but zero attention is just as rare. I can usually expect a few plays and maybe five downloads for anything I do. If the stars align maybe an album will hit ten or even twenty downloads. The things that get more are rare exceptions. But there are exceptions. I have one album this year with ninety five downloads. It occurred to me in the moment I recognized my latest work had produced no attention that, actually, I was now free, free of having to make music that somebody else, somebody out there, might like. I started to ask myself, yet again, why I'm making this music and if making this music for reasons other than to count my plays and downloads was enough. I had an allied thought too. I considered that if I liked music by some third party then I wouldn't care who else liked it or how popular it was. In that case it would be wholly good enough that I liked it. So why couldn't this be good enough or sufficient with my own music too?

OK, I admit that everyone wants to be popular. Everyone wants to feel loved, liked and appreciated. Why does social media have like and favorite buttons if not to garner cheap appreciation for things you post? But what does it say about the person who finds self-worth in such things? I'd like to believe very much that I'm not so easily pleased. So, to get back to my conundrum, I ask myself again why it can't be good enough that I like my music. I think that now, having had the insight of no plays or downloads, it can be. I'm fairly realistic about my own music, I think. Its not all at the same level and the way I work means that its only in retrospect that I can sift and filter the better from the worse, the stuff that grows from the things that fade. All my music passes a basic "instinct" test I give it before I put anything online and that test is to ask if I'd want to be associated with it. But, over time, I can figure out the really good bits from the rest. My album A Maze of Electronic Sounds is seventy bits of music over eight years that is "better" than the rest. Time has helped me make that decision and I think every track of that album is fantastic. The album currently has twenty one downloads. But I don't care. I play tracks from it every day and it eases my path through this vale of tears called life. Job done.

Of course, there's more to it than that, especially if I want to be seen as some kind of artist and appreciated not simply for "product" but for having a set of skills or abilities or insights. Does the idea of this tickle my vanity? Yes, of course. This plays into ideas of identity and self-worth again. I am a human being. I have a human psychology. People want to feel appreciated and appreciated for definite reasons. My self-image is of an artistic creator. Now its extremely rare that anyone will comment on my music. This is partly my fault in that I've deliberately put it somewhere people cannot comment as they listen. Someone who wanted to comment to me about my music would have to go to the lengths of deliberately going to my social media and expressly addressing a comment to me. It seems that for almost everyone this is a step too far. I've had bad commenting experiences in the past. I made the mistake of putting work some years ago on You Tube and let's just say that You Tube has no filter when it comes to commenters. Some very hurtful things were said which, being the person I am, it was hard to get past. When thinking about comments its strange that we always imagine only good ones. But some are more than ready to give you both barrels without thoughts of consequences. 

The thing is that we usually take what we do very seriously and we imagine that others will too. But to others what we do might be a joke. Are we ready to hear that? What we do is for us often a very personal matter. In my case this is very true. My musical work is basically a narrative about my life experience in sound. It is "honest not good" as I have phrased it on my Bandcamp biography. To criticize it is basically to criticize my experience and say there is something wrong with it. So, for me at least, there are stakes involved here. I imagine this is true for other musicians, painters, poets and all types of artistic people too. But this only makes me go back and ask myself the "What I am doing this for?" question all over again. It makes me ask what role "the general public" have in this scenario. Do I need other people to value my experience of life expressed in sound? No, I don't. My experience is what it is whether you like or agree with it or not. And all genuine experience is valid as well. So I don't need anyone to say that what I did has any validity. The fact I did it is all the validity it will ever need.

So I find myself thinking that I need to start seeing my own music like someone else's. If I like it that's good enough. No one else's validation is needed. Its perfectly fine for it to be my secret if that's what it is to be. It can be like that record you hear which no one else has and it feels a little special to you because of that. If the music has its effect on me then its work is done. As I write I'm listening to my track "Sad Song" from the album Lousy Marketing Strategy. This track always gets under my skin. Not only is it one that I actually play keyboards on (rare), but it expresses perfectly my own sense of melancholy that I carry with me everywhere. Yet, at the end of this track, a dance breaks out. It, thus, tells me a little story about myself. No one else has this relationship with this piece of music for no one else realizes or experiences this. It occurs to me now so strongly that this is enough. It doesn't need to be appreciated by others or seen for what it is by someone else. Every time I hear this track it tells me this story of myself again. That is its work and it does it well. 

And yet, even after all this realization, I still feel pangs of vanity. "This is all true but, still, if a few people liked it and told you how great it was that would be OK, no?" I suppose it would. But its neither necessary nor sufficient. If I made music just so someone else would tell me they liked it (assuming I could even do such a thing) then I would feel so hollow and fraudulent thereafter. I'm only making music at all to give expression to my experience of life. It absolutely must be true to that or the process of making and listening would be a destructive one for me personally. I suppose this leaves the question hanging in the air of its worth to other people. Apparently, that worth is not much. I cannot say I have any fan, not one that I'm overtly aware of anyway. Clearly some few people are in that five people who seem to download most things I do. Thank you if that's you. Its just that I think I need to make sense of my music without factoring in outside influences. To be prey to "likes and faves" is to be a cork in an ocean I do not control. I'd rather make sense of what I'm doing in a more stable atmosphere if that's at all possible. The world is fluctuating enough already as it is. Indeed, as Nietzsche knows well, all things are flux. (Nietzsche himself, I'm reminded, was not popular in his own lifetime. His books sold only a few hundred copies each. He would be amazed at what a philosophical superstar he has become. And probably also appalled.)

I don't know what this means for the future or whether I will just stop putting music online. I've been less than motivated recently. However, the Bandcamp counters don't lie: I know how many plays I get and how many of those are barely 30 seconds of my track that might be fifteen minutes long! Do I really need the distraction of that in my life like some silent, anonymous critique of my art's worth? Is it true that it would be better not to know? Of course, there may be those reading this who are thinking "No, don't take your music away, blah, blah, blah....". But you already know my reply to this: if you value it then why isn't it being listened to and downloaded? Now I'm coming across like some bitter and disappointed fellow who is sad because no one likes his music. But, truly, I'm not sad at all. Quite the opposite. I know my music's worth to me. I know how hearing it back tells me things about myself, how it helps me explain my experience of the world and that is a huge help to me. The rest of you listeners out there don't even enter into this equation. Other listeners are, as it were, a side issue.

As I finish writing this blog it occurs to me that there was one comment a couple of years back that really did touch me. It was by someone who has now sadly died and he was a musician himself. A couple of years ago in 2014 I made a track called "Lament for Existenz". It was as emotional and melancholic as you might imagine from that title. This other musician, a young man half my age, went out of his way to tell me that this track really touched him. It meant a lot to me that he did that because, knowing a little about him, I knew that he had health issues of his own and so knew something of the personal struggles that life can bring. So I felt, upon hearing his comment, that, somehow, my track had managed to communicate to a like mind. I've always remembered that I treasured this about the track whenever I hear it again. I suppose I hope that this is what my music can do for others as well. But I'm not doing it for that reason. It was touching to know that I had created something that someone else could feel though. Because most of all I think I'd like to believe that what I'm communicating in my music is something real. Because if its real then who cares what anyone else thinks?

Music as Identity

In my last blog I mentioned noise and noise in that blog was a kind of music. You may be one of those people who doesn't consider that noise is music but I would disagree with you. John Cage defined music as the arrangement of sound and silence so it seems to me that if you accept that noise is sound then any arrangement of it must also be music. This seems reasonable to me and those who make the kind of music I would call "noise" vary wildly in any case. Noise, for me, would extend from the abstract sound collages native to early 1970s "Kosmische" music to the glitchy "IDM" beats of Autechre to the ingrained, experimental, industrial randomness of Throbbing Gristle (and much else besides). Noise, for me, encompasses the abstract, the random, the non-standard, the unpredictable, the incoherent, the absurd. It is not merely shouting into a microphone whilst strumming your guitar with the volume on full - although it could be. Noise, in my estimation, is made by those who are very artistically involved and invested in the music they make. There is usually some overt point or purpose behind it. I would also argue that noise makers have a fascination with sounds and do not merely want to create unending variations of the same ones.

The recent history of my music-making goes something like this. In the Autumn of 2013 I returned to the UK from living in Berlin, Germany. I was at a low point and the music I made then was uninspiring and formulaic. About six months later, in the Spring of 2014, I began to emerge from this malaise by experimenting with metallic sounds. In this period I was still thinking kind of melodically and I made poignant tunes that were, perhaps, a hangover from the low point I had been at. It was in the Autumn of 2014 that my musical philosophy received a fresh influx of inspiration when I discovered two now constant and abiding influences. These were John Cage and Kosmische music. It was not so much the case that I liked this music (such a thing as musical taste is largely irrelevant) but more the case that these people had ideas about what music is at all in the first place. I was struck by the fact, in the case of the Kosmische musicians, that they expressly wanted to make a new music, a music that could be theirs, something that wasn't beholden either to a tradition or to totem figures of the past. This showed that music is part of a culture and that you place yourself inside a tradition when you make it. Music becomes about identity. It says who you are. With Cage it was very much his compositional attitude, approach and ideas that were key. Music is organizing sounds and silence, nothing more and nothing less. Isn't that just a refreshingly simple definition, something that sets you free as a musical creator?

The track Discipline by Throbbing Gristle is, for some, not the easiest thing to listen to. Feel free to listen to it on You Tube if you've never heard it before. It is charitably described as a vocalist shouting over sounds. I'm not going to tell you its the greatest song ever made but that's not the point anyway. The point for someone with an inquiring mind like me is why would someone make a song like that in the first place? This leads into another question which is why does anyone make a song the way they do? Everyone who makes music has forbears and knows of other music and so its true to say that everyone has influences. But it might not always be thought that musical writers have ideas or identity behind their music when they make it. I think they do. I think the music you make says something about you, who you see yourself as, where you think you fit in, what you want to be and how you see the world. I could at this point furnish lots of examples that I think make this point but I'll leave it to you to think about my suggestion for yourself instead. 

My point in mentioning this is because I want to encourage people to think both more widely and deeply about music in the first place. At one level music can just be taken as another composition that you either like or don't like. I increasingly find this shallow and you have my influences to thank for me thinking this way. Music has long been used to influence people however and not just at political rallies for mainstream candidates trying to hook you in with a catchy tune. Even if one thinks back to more primitive times music was used, for example in cultic rituals, to engender an atmosphere and create  a mood conducive to the activity concerned. One thinks of the Dionysian feasts in ancient Greek culture where revelers would whip themselves up into intoxicated frenzy. Music there helped to achieve this and had a purpose. I think that more often than we might like to admit music does have a purpose. Its incredibly narrow thinking to regard music as merely "entertainment". Its much more complicated than that. For example, did John Lennon write "Imagine" (which I think is the worst song ever made) to entertain or to make a point? At the very least it is a bit of both.

For me music is a lot of the things I've mentioned above. It is certainly something which says something about you. The kind of music you choose to make is a choice as are the conditions that you choose to make it under. This can demonstrate if you intend to be a person who wants to "fit in" or if you see yourself as an outsider. It can show that you want to be seen as part of one culture but not another. It can indicate if you regard yourself as traditional or avant garde. It can also show if you are content to use standard tropes or want to take a non-standard approach. My recent albums have very much been trying to fit into non-standard tropes, being abstract collages of sounds, often dissonant, that require the effort of listening to them as a whole to appreciate what I was trying to do. Here we do not talk about "good" and "bad" for these are superficial judgments of likes and dislikes and these things are of no importance. There is more to be said and to be heard about music than if you personally happen to like it or not in the moment you hear it. I wonder, for example, if you ever purposely listen to forms of music that you don't like to think about why you don't like them? This is something I have done and its helped me to formulate what I think music is and what its for by doing it. I think that music is something that can be learned about and in listening to it you learn about yourself, others, and the world. The thought here, again, is that music is about much more than either entertainment or your likes and dislikes.

This, I think, is why my own music has inevitably become more random, non-standard, abstract and self-conscious about use of sounds right up to today with my last two albums, Texture and Adrift, being first and foremost sound collages. They invite you to a world outside of pop music, rock music, mainstream tropes, standard sounds, things that would sound nice on the radio or something that you would listen to at a family gathering. They are albums which demand attention on their own terms and for many that might be too big of an ask, something too jarring to contemplate. Of course, having said what I've said above, you would imagine they also say plenty about me and how I see the world. That's very true. But I'd turn that back on my readers and ask what does the music you make and/or listen to say about you and how you see the world? Listening back to my album Texture, as I am as I write this blog, I'm struck how very much like Kosmische music it really sounds. If you told me it was from 1971 by someone with a German sounding name I'd believe you. I say this not to take pride in the fact but to note how much my recent influences have insidiously taken me over. I didn't set out thinking "My album must sound like Kosmische music". And yet it does and it makes me jump to realize it. I then note that I do identify with the purposes and use of sounds that those people had who made that kind of music did. I see myself being influenced by my appreciation of the world and then writing blogs that try to influence it back.

A question occurs to me at this point: does any of this matter? Does it matter what music you make, what music you like? On the one hand, no, it doesn't. But people act as if it does. More than once I've stupidly got involved in arguments about what music is good and what music is bad. But this is absurd. No music is inherently good and no music is inherently bad. Its all a matter of taste and taste is a matter of identity. People get heated about whether you like this or that because they have invested some of themselves in the judgments they have made about things. To say this song I cherish is rubbish is, in a way, to say that you think I am. And vice versa. Music is sometimes portrayed as this trivial thing that is commercial, disposable and throwaway. These days there are stories almost every day of how it is now a valueless commodity that many people won't even pay for, either as consumers or as those who want music for their projects but won't pay musicians to provide it. Something is certainly going on there but, argument after trivial argument on the Internet shows, people are still very much invested in music and particularly in what they consider as their music. Music is a matter of identity, it is a personal and cultural marker.

So, since this is my personal blog, what of me? Well, I'm happy to keep on being the non-standard, dissonant, abstract, non-conventional person I seem eager to be. I've stopped chasing likes, follows and downloads. Believe it or not I did once try to be a person who made music people would like! Thank the non-existent gods I saw the light on that one! The music I made then was lame, insipid shit. Making music to please an audience is a hateful business. You must be yourself. Authenticity is key. Now I just think that my music is there. Listen or don't. My music is and always has been a musical statement of something more than pitches and scales and as I write I think its getting more interesting as time passes by. "Being interesting" is my musical threshold in making an album and since I make it for me then if it interests me that is the standard. All I can hope after that is that it maybe interests one or two others as well. I make music that is a journey and an experience. It is for listeners to decide if its a journey they want to take and an experience they want to have. Even if its not I hope my blog today encourages my readers to think a bit more about any music they make or listen to and that they ask themselves wider questions because of it.

My music is available at https://elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com/ 

The Worst General in the World

Its not at all difficult to find. I found it yesterday so much that I'm sitting here now typing out this blog. That's how much it has animated me. I can immediately think of at least 4 or 5 examples just from conversations I happened to stray across or take part in yesterday just watching my Twitter timeline scroll by. The subjects weren't necessarily remotely related and yet they were by having a common bond, a poisonous thread, running through them. Its a thread that is insidious and, to my mind, dangerous. Its a way of thinking, a lazy way, a closed-minded way. But what has this to do with generals? A lot when the worst general in the world is generalization.

Think about it and I'm sure you'll very easily be able to come across these generalizations in your own conversations too. Maybe it is someone asserting that ALL the people from this country or that are dangerous. A favourite one right now in my part of the world is Syria. Maybe you take part in gender debates. In that world lots of statements are made, and beliefs held, about men and women. It often seems that activists hold many generalizing statements to be true. They even have hashtags for it #notallmen, #allmen, etc. I find it somewhat enraging. Another area where the generalizations occur is black/white race relations. Here generalizations are held on both sides. To some whites all blacks are crooks, thieves and criminals. To some blacks all whites are racist descendants of slave owners who want to kill them. The point to me is not which side you take but how you think.

So let me be clear. Wherever you come across the generalizations and whatever debate you are watching, reading or taking part in, I'm not here to take sides in any of them. Of course, I will have my opinions just like everyone else. Having opinions is something people do. And people also decide which things in their world they think are important enough to have opinions about. It is true that something some other person thinks is vitally important you may find to be barely important enough to think about. That's allowed. Each person has their own set of attitudes and beliefs and, as far as I can tell, this is how it should be. Mandating people to believe the things that you happen to believe is called fascism and is generally thought to be a bad thing.

But human beings are also persuasive beings, social beings, communicative beings. And one aspect of belief, and holding beliefs, is that they can (or, should be) able to change. I'm not sure how many people in the real world have views about beliefs and how they work or have mused on patterns of thought. But, as one who is interested in philosophical discussions, I have. In my thinking about that I have come to be persuaded by a pragmatic view of beliefs. This view, briefly, is that human beings cannot help holding beliefs in normal circumstances and that this is just something they do. In order to hold beliefs they would normally be able to give some kind of justification for why they believe something and how it fits into their overall scheme of things. And a current belief, or a new one, must have some way of attaching itself to other things you believe. But it is also the case that over time these beliefs can change. There is a sort of mysterious open-endedness to holding beliefs. They modify over time. Beliefs are things we feel justified in believing and can provide reasons and evidence for. It may not satisfy someone else but it satisfies us in some way that we can explain.

But there is another aspect to beliefs. And this is that they can be questioned. Beliefs are not absolutes. That is why they are called beliefs. But the problem with many of these generalizations I see every day, generalizations that make a lie of the world and demonize people by treating them as a member of some (negative) class rather than as individuals in their own right, is that they are beliefs that are unquestionable. They are shibboleths for their holders. ("Shibboleth" is from a story in the Bible where one side used "shibboleth" as a password because their enemies could not pronounce the word correctly. "Shibboleth" thus served as a way to detect their enemies much as some beliefs do today for various social groupings.) I do not believe that ANY belief should be beyond question. Beliefs are not things that are beyond question. Beliefs, on the contrary, are things which should always be in question, in doubt, up for debate, things to be further refined, things that can change.

This is why closed-minded people really frustrate me so much. It is not that they hold beliefs and find certain things to be true that I don't agree with. I expect that. People's views of the world are molded, at least to some degree, by their own experiences of life. But I'm not sure the generalizers think that. They seem to think that all people should think what they think and that it is some moral failing to think otherwise. But this cannot be true. Its simplistic and, worse, closed-minded to think that way. I really do see it as a new anti-intellectualism at work today in, it must be said, first world societies. In these societies debate is not driven by justifying your beliefs, conversation with those who take a different point of view (which may well influence yours) and the simple act of persuasion by giving good reasons for why you think what you think. Instead, we see ranting and raving, generalizing hashtags and the splitting of societies into a million subcultures, each with their own beliefs, attitudes and shibboleths. Beliefs are much less likely to be open to question, able to last a meaningful debate or withstand good natured questioning if you hold on to them tightly as badges of identity in your cosseted ivory tower. But it seems that that is what some want to do. They are, incidentally, probably not very good beliefs if they can't be questioned either.

So what do I want? I want people to be viewed as individuals and not members of some class be that men, women, black, white, arab, jew, etc, etc, etc. Call me naive if you must but I think we are all people first and foremost. I think our humanity is much more fundamental than any of the differences we can make up, and the generalizations that are made of them. I think that what we share is much greater, and always will be much greater, than what divides us. But I also think that in many first world places today people have become masturbatory and inward-looking. They care more about their own identity, which may be based on a few cherished and unchallengeable beliefs, than the mass of humanity and the good of all. There are Twitter accounts, Tumblrs and Facebook pages dedicated to the stupid, unchallengeable beliefs of others. Feel free to go and read some to educate yourself about the anti-intellectual corners that people will willingly back themselves into.

For myself, I find myself always wanting to challenge those who put their own identity first. Not only does it seem egotistical on their part but it also always seems based on silly generalizations, ones damaging to human polity and social cohesion. I tend to do this generally but if you're reading this already trying to work out which side I take in various debates then you've probably missed the point. The point is that yes we all have views. But they should be open and debatable. There is no place for shibboleths, not when people's lives depend on it. And in many of these debates they ultimately do. When presidential candidates judge people based on their country of origin, when races judge and condemn other races based on skin colour and when one gender categorizes another gender based on lazy sloganizing these are not issues we can just pass over as "the way of the world" or with some such other lazy epithet. How we think matters and we have a duty to ourselves, for the health of our own beliefs, but also to everyone else, as fellow human beings, not merely to believe whatever we want to but to do it in ways that make sense of others too. A private belief is a contradiction in terms and, in my view, a terrible belief. The more light you can shine on it, the better it becomes. 

In closing, I'd like to mention one last conversation I took part in last night. It was with a shepherd on Twitter that I follow who tweets his daily shepherd's life. He put up a picture of his three beautiful sheepdogs. They sleep in pens in his barn and the picture was of the dogs in their pens which looked somewhat like cages or prison bars. This ruffled the feathers of a few of his followers who (I generalized!) seemed like town dwellers not used to the outdoors and country ways. For them, dogs are pets who live in the house. The shepherd seemed a bit exasperated with this response and pointed out, as calmly as he could manage, that these are not pets but working dogs. He explained that two of them don't even like being petted and stroked that much. So they work outdoors all day and then go back to the barn at night. 

What struck me about this little exchange was that, for most people, the limits of their world is the limits of their own experience. And they never look any further than this. This is where the beliefs are fostered - within the safe world of "my experience". My point is that we need to make an effort to understand the experience of others too. We also need to be able to explain ourselves and our beliefs to these people too. This benefits not only us but them as well and, by extension, everyone. I hope you would agree with me that a community that can discuss its beliefs and experiences one with another is much better than one in which everyone believes what they like and keeps it to themselves. The first would seem to me to be a much better, and safer, world to live in. And that's what we want, right? You will never foster peace and harmony based on division and difference. The nasty generalizations I see in discussions online every day are based on the latter and not the former. They are based on keeping to your own version of the world and refusing to interact with others. Identity trumps the multiplicity of reality. 

The best thing I ever did in my life (from an admittedly small selection of things) is live in another country. It opened me up to so many new people, new views and new attitudes. Perhaps that's why I'm writing this now. But the experience has stayed with me. And the conviction that what we see is only skin deep. But we are so much more than what we can see. Let's have a little understanding, the ability to share and the vulnerability of having to accommodate others in our beliefs.