To be is to create - the power of myth-making in music
- Salary transparency project - The addiction economy - Human-centred technological futures - The delicate dance - Offline is the new online
It’s been a little quiet here the past few weeks as I’ve dealt with holidays, work, and personal issues. I’m going to try and pick up the regular cadence of posting on Thursdays again. What’s more, there’s some really exciting collabs coming up again. So keep an eye out for those. Speaking of which, did you already read Brodie Conley’s wonderful take on a more caring form leadership in music? His take on this form of transformative leadership have really got me thinking over the past few weeks. This idea goes way beyond just leadership and involves a capacity to care for yourself and others. Why is always an important question, and very difficult to answer, but to understand the vision behind the why and how to communicate it is arguably even harder.
Take Pete Rango, who founded LIV (Life is Valuable), which has a clear statement of intent:
“Our mission is to empower K-12 Students in underserved communities dealing with poor academic engagement, depression, and mental health issues by providing 1-on-1 Mentorship starting with our pilot program, Dream Labs, centered around a digital music production studio that will develop over time as a full fledged Content Creation Studio (The Dream Lab) in partnering schools and facilities matching students with highly skilled and trained mentors.”
When he works with these kids, he helps them find a vision and how to articulate it. He uses a guide created by Archived Dreams.
What inspired me about this, is how this guide hammers home that point that communication is the key to successfully achieving your vision. Figuring out your why means little if you cannot bring it to others - unless, of course, you’re creating something just for yourself.
Being = creating
The previous may sound like it only reflects on those people who aim to create. Perhaps this newsletter is most prescient for those among us who create, but I argue creating is broader. It also includes everything from family life to cooking and other everyday activities. This isn’t about productivity - as much as all those AI-driven tools want us to increase our productivity - but instead about finding ways to create something meaningful. And that’s hard. In the recent Town Hall from Sublime, the always insightful Sari Azout talked us through their process of building Sublime. She asked what Sublime is: a personal knowledge management tool. But it’s also not that.
We all read and listen and watch a lot of ‘content.’ Information is overabundant as Sari put it. What she envisions is to move from information-gathering to finding the right questions to ask. And, being able to ask the right questions comes back to communication and knowing where you’re starting from.
Another way to approach this is to ask where inspiration comes from. Or, can we find inspiration if we’re continuously inundated with information? Can we even ask ourselves what our starting point is if we are acting on an ever-moving slew of input? What Sublime tries to do is to create those serendipitous moments that allow our brains to disconnect from the overabundance of information and bring us to a moment of inspiration. What I think should happen is: “Hey, what’s this thing that draws my attention?” And then to not have other input to allow me to get distracted again immediately, but to go down a rabbit hole - with focus.
From that moment of inspiration, we can find our creativity and act to create. It appears as if our vision exists and we briefly understand how to communicate it. We want to find out what will happen next.
Myth-making
We know the facts. The streaming economy is broken. Musicians across the board struggle to make a minimum wage income. Along comes Generative AI and suddenly information overabundance becomes an implication of psychosomatic hell. And yet, we see how artists use AI as a tool: create a stem here, or a place a compression there. Musicians are, of course, prime creators. They take various sounds and synthesize them into something that we listen to as music. They are powerful in that sense. Now, we all can create this music - all we need is a prompt. But there’s not magic there, no myths, no stories.
And stories are what makes things travel, across time and space. As Carlo Kiksen put it, we need stories that evoke suspense, curiosity, or surprise. There’s lots of different ways to make this happen, but I feel that to create that evocation, we need to build myths. Myths about how creations came to be.
If we take this definition from Jay Springett at face value, we need myths to help us understand the world. In the talk this slide comes from he also asks what a world is and answers that exists across different media. For music, these are the record, the DSP, the listening experience, a concert ticket, and much more. We’re looking at ways to link all of these myth-making moments together. In a way, to create a grand narrative of a song, an album, an EP. And that, of course, goes back to having a vision which is where such a narrative starts.
It comes down to
The ability to create and communicate a compelling vision is always important but especially so when it comes to music. Myth-making and storytelling bring life to ideas and can help inspire others. This path is not always clear, but by staying focused on "why" and finding ways to share this effectively, we can overcome the distractions and information overload that muddy everything.
LINKS
💷 The salary transparency project (Christine Osazuwa)
“I’m sure that it comes as no surprise to anyone that gender minorities and people of colour are paid, on average, less than their white and/or male counterparts. In fact, men make more money on average in their median base salary than people of colour and gender minorities make in their total compensation (including bonuses, outside work revenue and other primary role compensation, such as equity).”
✘ I hope everyone who reads this will share this with at least 3 other people. We need everyone to be aware of this. We know how this works, but we need to be confronted with it and then act on it.
💉 The Addiction Economy - Addicted, overwhelmed, oversubscribed: How technology hooked the world (Evan Armstrong)
“We are past the point where everything must be invented from scratch in software and are mostly improving on things that have come before. Best practice articles on game theory, optimized system design, and user growth are everywhere. There are formal and informal networks of mentors who teach the lessons of the previous generation of software to eager new entrepreneurs. The combination of stagnant technology plus sociological conditioning has created a class of digital entrepreneurs that have absorbed the lesson of the 2000 crash and the 2008 recession by the time they launch their first product. What won yesterday is table stakes today.”
✘ There are many ways to look at addiction and tech. What’s clear is that addictive elements range across apps from food to stocks. Evan’s take here is to explain how these things work and why they continue to expand while also showing that we retain personal agency.
⚜️ MUTEK Forum as temporary utopia — crafting human-centered technological futures & showcasing the future of digital creativity (Sarah McKenzie)
“Fast-forwarding from Fuller’s 1960s vision to 2024, we find a push towards robotic transhumans. Futurist and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil predicts a social utopia where the lines between human and machine, reality and virtual reality, blur, leading to a ‘technological singularity’ where human consciousness merges with machinery. Despite its contributions to progress, technology alone cannot create a utopia, and techno-utopianism often fails, placing us on the edge of a dystopian abyss even as it advances.”
✘ It’s always impressive what they build at MUTEK - and we’ll get another newsletter takeover from them soon. Sarah gives an insight here into this year’s theme and how it impacts the physical festival and Forum. Technology blends and bleeds into the somatic more and more.
💃 The delicate dance: The multifaceted relationships between artists and their teams (Renske van Kollenburg)
“One of the biggest challenges in this delicate dance is communication. Artists, focused on their creative work, often see administrative tasks like weekly meetings as a distraction or a waste of time. Yet, these meetings are crucial for the team to maintain a smooth workflow and to align on expectations. If the artist is reluctant to engage in these discussions for example, it can create friction, making it difficult for the team to support them effectively.”
✘ This one resonates hard with my piece above because of Renske’s emphasis on communication. It’s a must-read to understood how important it is for artists to find their people. They need the right context in which to fail.
🙅 Offline is the new online (Rachel Haywire)
“The longing for past glory on mainstream platforms may tempt some of us "ex-influencers" to return, but their diminishing relevance dissuades us. Also, nobody believes you when you tell them that you used to be an influencer. It's like saying that you used to be a celebrity. Sure you were, kitten. So, as we contemplate our online futures on alternative platforms like Substack, the likelihood of substantial engagement for most of us appears slim. This realization has led us to an acceptance of our collective fate and a desire to go entirely offline to create better social experiences.”
✘ A good piece to contemplate your own online existence on. If we’re currently all very-online-people, what’s our next stage or iteration?
MUSIC
There’s something about the piano. It’s a string instrument and a percussion instrument and something all to itself. The notes that come from it’s body reverberate through us differently than those of other instruments. If you ever get the opportunity, try and experience a piano piece while laying underneath a piano - it’s like you’re embodied with the piano. One of my favourite pianists is Michael Mizrahi, he plays differently. I’m not sure why, probably because of the weight he places on the keys and the way I feel he captures the physicality of the piano. His new album Dreamspace really captures this in a kind of 3D mode as if we’re listening to his playing from different directions.