Music industry

The future sound of Ghent

Greetings from Ghent, where the adventures in advanced studies and research in music continue. (the picture above is of Amsterdam, though)

I’m currently taking very few – and rushed – photos here as there’s barely any time. But sometimes I have to stop and pinch myself to make sure I’m not living in some fairytale town from another era and world.

While I’ve settled well in Ghent, in my office and our studios at the Orpheus Institute I often find myself floating in space: music as we know it – records, streams, songs, performances, composers, songwriters, musicians – suddenly feels like a thing of the past, and we’ve now entered a new period where the function and purpose of music suggest something more expanded and transdisciplinary. Naturally, a lot of this has to do with my own thinking space and reading and research that I’m conducting; we also have composers and musicians firmly rooted in the Medieval and Classical periods (and in-between and after), but also to just observe them interact and collaborate with those working with augmented reality (AR), intelligent systems (AI) and (non-)anthropocentric hyperobjects is hugely exciting: there’s a sense of a continuum – long-term thinking and visioning in regards to culture, creativity and intelligence – that is strangely absent from our current political and economic activity (where it would be needed most).

Occasionally though, I do find myself missing the days when music mostly meant Kate Bush or Prince (et al.) on the radio, and skipping songs meant going to a record shop and skipping through cassettes, CDs and vinyls until you found the ones you wanted to buy and own. Music had a clear cultural function and significance back then – and it sounded unbeatably fantastic!

I’ve been working a lot with the latest AI music generators out there – for 30 minutes in total, to be honest, then I felt compelled to quit (compare this with the 30+ years that I’ve been making music for). Conclusion: they are the most boring thing (after our current economic and political ideologies) in the existence of the universe.

AI music generators can produce utterly perfect and fantastic music in almost every conceivable style in seconds, often surpassing even human creators in quality. Heck, I’d always yearned to hear futuristic arabic punk reggae, but since no one was producing such music, I wrote a short prompt, and in less than a minute I had a fantastic track of, well, futuristic arabic punk reggae! I transformed tracks from my latest album Bloom – pure electronica – into symphonic orchestra renditions in the space of five minutes, and the dubious sound quality notwithstanding, they could potentially be mistaken for the work of some talented classical composer if used in the background of a film, for example.

But that’s not what music is or has ever been about.

If music to you is merely a capitalist pursuit (an end product with the minimum cost), then these AI music generators are perfect – and in my opinion there is nothing wrong with anyone (be they advertisers, companies, creators, listeners etc.) using these tools to get the music they want, instantly for free. Go for it!

If music to you, however, is something more precious and evolved – life, art, philosophy, understanding, progress, journey, intelligence, love, culture/civilization, a deeper and more elevated state of existence perhaps – then I’m afraid the secret to this still lies in the old, long and arduous, process of trying and failing, trying again, failing better. For great music has always been more about the process than the product: the life that has gone into making that final product. Make that process/life count, and the end result will be imbued with music that transcends the shelf life of any capitalist-consumerist product.

Music that just sounds like music is not really music (an old argument of mine which suddenly became a source of an animated debate in our last seminar).

In short: to come up with great music by pressing a couple of buttons feels empty; to come up with great music by learning, trying and actually playing feels like an enlightenment.

From the floatation tank that is my office, I hear medieval church bells ringing alongside distant sirens, footsteps on cobblestones, birds chirping, men arguing, children playing and laughing; my colleague on the phone explaining non-anthropocentric compositional practices to someone on another continent; Brahms being practiced on a grand piano next door; generative NFT (non-fungible token – or “No F*cking Thanks!”) sound art on my screen.

It does feel like the beginning of something exciting, an intellectual as well as creative adventure toward “something that nobody has a name for” (after Kevin Kelly), which simply wouldn’t be possible in a purely artistic or academic practice. I might be wrong, of course – but then that would simply be the start of something new again: a process, a journey, an open discovery.

Within a world containing bloom

A small update.

Currently enjoying my writing residency in Jyväskylä, Finland, enormously. This city of lakes and hills is known as the capital of Finnish hip hop; the Athens of Finland (“the cradle of the arts and sciences”, nowadays a major educational and cultural centre); the capital of the eminent Finnish architect Alvar Aalto; the City of Light (a global pioneer in innovative urban lighting). In the fall I’ll start performing city-sensitive ambient live sets in this local and legendary poetry club. The words are also sprouting: after writing solely in English for so many years, I suddenly discovered a whole new, rich and fertile, “exotic” landscape in the Finnish language.

I’ll be releasing a special EP of melodic beat-based electronica soon, with an album to follow later. It continues the thread of my debut album Shimmer & Bloom – including a previously unreleased track with poet Rick Holland – but with an added perspective and experience of 12 years. The tracks just continue to sound timeless (and beautiful!) year after year so I might as well make them timely now.

While visiting my childhood home over the Midsummer break, I brought my entire DAT (digital audio tape) archive with me, covering the years 1995-2008. It’s incredible how much novel, brilliant and releasable material there is when it’s no longer your younger, too critical and often insecure ears listening to it. Expect compilations like Proposals for Possible Musics: From Every Imaginable Genre to Every Other Imaginable and Unimaginable Genre + bonus Alternative Realities Mixes coming out soon.

Also, forgotten field recordings of Tokyo, London, Paris and a Finnish summer cottage: from African drumming in Yoyogi park and rainy evenings in a bustling/calm Shinjuku to a salmon being smoked over a lakefront fire and a wood stove sauna being prepared (via London drain pipes and a Parisian café where French, Japanese and English keep forming a new lingual blend).

(The classic ‘Black Egg’ is also here – whoa! – which used to cause serious headbanging when we played it live to an overcrowded audience at the sweaty basement of the now legendary but defunct Foundry bar in Hoxton, London, in 2001. Ours was the first band ever to play live in those old bank vaults, with a long queue extending up the stairs and through the bar above as the space could accommodate only so many. A definite highlight of my musical adventures!)

Next year I’ll start developing a new version of my Future Forest Space composition and sound installation – thanks to Taiteen edistämiskeskus (Arts Promotion Centre Finland) for their artist grant that enables me to continue this long-term project of mine. I’m truly grateful! The work addresses the use of AI and environment in music and sound art while developing a new kind of musical language through a more considerate application of these. The project will be realised in Switzerland, France and Finland together with various research institutions.

The album Radiant City is coming along slowly but well. I love exploring the idea of a city through the abstract energy and pulse of music while sonically revisiting the cities of my past travels. The album threatens to escape the city limits though and diversify into all kinds of directions and environments.

Earth Variations is now finished and waiting for a funding for its mastering. I wish the music industry was more like art world: valuing originality, ideas and content over popularity and familiarity.

Outside the narrow corridors of the industry, life and music continue to expand, diversify and flourish. And that’s all that matters in the long run. Have a beautiful summer! x

On new albums, music industry and post-music

My new album Interspaces is now finished. Hooray! However, I decided to postpone its mastering and release until after my forthcoming “holiday” (always somehow working) in Finland: I want to listen to it against the stillness and freshness of rural Midsummer nights, with my senses quietened and reoriented from the hustle and bustle of Paris, and make any final adjustments if needed; I’ll be also finishing my other album Earth Variations while there, in the same pastoral immersion.

I’ll be working in the very same room, with the same view over fields and forests, where I made my first serious electronic compositions 28 years ago (one of those pieces almost made it onto Interspaces!). Until recently, I’d thought this would be a fitting place to finish these two albums as, for quite a while, I’d been feeling that Interspaces and Earth Variations would be my final works and then I’d quit music, move on to greener pastures like writing – and what a more poignant place to bring my adventures in music and sound to close than the one where the journey started.

Music is a strangely intoxicating and invigorating substance, however, and once you’ve discovered something through it, it’s difficult if not downright impossible to quit. Ideas, inspiration and curiosity keep flourishing, even if your work continues to be ignored by music industry and media year after year, release after release; once you’ve realised that music and music industry are actually two very different and separate things – the former is about creating possible worlds and reimagining the society; the latter is about obsessing over profits and social media hype – none of that industry fuss matters anymore and you’re able to work with greater abandon and scope. In fact, you might be onto something as critic and music historian Ted Gioia illuminates in his recent and poignant, yet solacing essay Is Old Music Killing New Music?: the real progress in music happens now outside the music industry – record companies, media, playlist algorithms etc. – because the latter is no longer interested in innovation, in discovering new sounds and nurturing new talent. “New music always arises in the least expected place.” Personally I have no problem with any of this (I listen to old music more than new stuff, yet I couldn’t make old-sounding music myself because composing for me is a way of researching and understanding the evolving world) – although it’d be great to have some kind of structural support for this emergent new sonic art happening in the margins – and perhaps we could say that music, especially Pop Music, existed happily until its demise around 2010, and now we have something new for which we haven’t found a better name and suitable function yet.

So, on my small plot of land, I recently began to get a sense of what kind of music I want to develop next (it’ll focus on words and voices, listening and performativity, new yet subtle globalities), putting my retirement from music on hold. Meanwhile, Interspaces will be out sometime in June/July while Earth Variations will be released in August/September. Have a great end of the week!

composer / sound artist / writer