Am I Gonna Show This to Somebody or Not?
The entire Internet wants you to be one thing musically, and it also wants you to follow a path to release music into the void—the void being streaming services. This is, if nothing else, bleak. Sure, there’s never been an easier time for independents to get stuff out there, but where is there? Where are you going? Right?
You have to be so pigeonholed to get anything going. This is what I'm going through right now, but one of the problems that I'm having is I write songs, I do electronic music, I do DJ sets, and if you feature one, and then the other, it hurts everything else. It’s a bit ridiculous.
It’s why I keep this blog pretty much music-themed. I’ve got some other things I want to talk about, but I don’t. The whole Internet is supposed to keep people divided and silent—no conspiracy there—but I think the more divided people are, the easier they are to control.
But if you take Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan, you really should be throwing up fog everywhere, and for somebody like me, there’s no reason not to. I’m hugely unpopular and hard to find, but once people do find me, I get a connection going, which tells me that they’re out there, and I am follow-able to certain kind of people.
And since the stage is now global, that’s obviously pretty huge for me, so it’s not all bad news. It’s just how you use it, and putting yourself in such a narrow category just doesn’t seem to work.
So maybe it’s time to be the mysterious guy I am, and do a bunch of different dumb shit, because the same thing that tells me an electronic song is good, a story is good, a blog post is good, an acoustic song is good, and an OP-1 song is good—it’s all the same thing.
And the more I do it, the better I get at it, and the more I do it across different genres and instruments and mediums, a rising tide lifts all boats.
My electronic set is now closer to the dub-style music that I like to make, and I’m realizing how to make all that work and connect and get it even more organic. I realize these tools I’m making to play generatively—it’s like being a conductor in an orchestra. It’s still alive, it’s still going, there’s still room for disaster and mistakes. It’s unstable, which is good.
But it all boils down to believing in yourself and not creating a story about what someone will tell themselves when they hear it. You have to make **one* binary decision: am I gonna show this to somebody or am I not? That’s it.