This week’s song is an improvisation with overdubbed vocals from 2015 or so.
You may have noticed a short break between posts. On the face of it, there’s no good reason why. I have a folder with over a year’s worth of music still to share, not to mention many works in progress. All in all, I could easily clear three years of once-a-week music.
If I’ve hesitated to post lately, it’s perhaps because the longer this method of sharing music goes on, the more the tunes become something I finished ‘yesterday’ or a decade ago. Perhaps that gap is a little unsatisfying? Or perhaps it’s because I’m finding the trip down memory lane quite generative, and am playing with ways to combine the spirit of early work with the more developed skills of later years.
It’s also because I’ve been mulling over a longer essay that, in some ways, I’ve been working through and touched on throughout this Steve on Steve experiment. I thought I might finally write it during these last few weeks, but it seems to be growing into a larger research project. Whether I’ll ever finish it…¯\_(ツ)_/¯? Still, if one plans to skewer a few shibboleths, one may as well make a proper effort. Project-based learning, right?
For those desperate to know what political and artistic modernism, prostrate technophilia, theories of rupture, the libidinal excesses of 90s CCRU-related theorists, and folk politics and practice have to do with one another—you’ll just have to wait. For now, I’m sure we can all agree: many people are misguided.
Regardless, writing this blog has been a useful way of clarifying my thoughts during a period where I’ve been mulling over a few different artistic directions and approaches. Even if I never publish the fruits of this longer research project, it’s already helping me get my mind clear on what’s most promising.
That was then…
A quick recap of where we’ve been: I started this as a way to add some context to my work. Once upon a time, I hated the thought. I liked the idea of somehow being able to beam my music, contextless, directly into people’s brains. Pure perception, unmediated by the baggage of who, where, when. Something akin to that was possible in the 1980s and 90s, when electronic producers would release tracks under bewildering arrays of pseudonyms.
But times change, and with the dawn of generative AI, streams of unmediated bleeps and bloops born of no human composer can be beamed to your brain 24/7. Clearly, the future lies elsewhere. Plus, I realized how much I myself would seek out the context of artists I admired. It seemed silly to persist in a silence I didn’t actually honour and which had been rendered pointless by AI—even if there is a perpetual temptation to let the work speak for itself (that I’m not alone with). Those ‘90s producers partially used so many monikers so they could release loads of music without saturating the market with any one alias. Mystery can be creative freedom, but it’s also good branding.1
You choose what and how to share
AI art makes romanticism and craft, for all their baggage and tradition, feel inescapable: what is art if not a container for personal expression, or a well-won workmanship? Performance, communion, and transcendence are some obvious answers. Maybe we should think of culture rather than art. The stakes can be low, and still kinda resonate.
A couple of years ago, I realised that the more ironic, wry parts of myself hadn’t really made it into my music. I self-consciously tried to fix that, although it also felt like the natural next step. Before long, the belligerence migrated to the Substack, which now feels like a piece of the art itself. Different media for different vibes seems a good approach. Perhaps music better suits naive, relaxed, and earnest, while text carries the archer tonality. I’ve ideas for visual components, too. Maybe they will be in another mood entirely. Or not, I’ll make it up as I go along.
But taken together, the different media allow for a greater range than a single manufactured artifact. And the strengths of one can mitigate the weaknesses of another: it’s easy to strangle the spirit of a demo, so maybe the contortions can be worked out elsewhere? When the constraints of analogue media no longer apply, why not embrace it all, fragment through composition?2 It’s certainly fun poking and prodding you all.
You choose your influences
The idea that you choose your influences isn’t the truism it should be known as. I’ve long felt uneasy with the critic’s insistence that biography and influence are the Rosetta stones of interpretation. They’re also obstacles to seeing and hearing what’s right in front of you.3 Thankfully, others feel this unease, too. As Austin Kleon puts it,
much of what we call “influence” is active, not passive. The way we talk about artistic influence is backwards. When we say, “Basquiat was influenced by Van Gogh,” that isn’t really correct, because it implies that Van Gogh is doing something to Basquiat, when actually the opposite is true.
Kleon quotes K.K. Ruthven’s Critical Assumptions:
Our understanding of literary ‘influence’ is obstructed by the grammar of our language, which puts things back to front in obliging us to speak in passive terms of the one who is the active partner in the relationship: to say that Keats influenced Wilde is not only to credit Keats with an activity of which he was innocent, but also to misrepresent Wilde by suggesting he merely submitted to something he obviously went out of his way to acquire. In matters of influence, it is the receptor who takes the initiative, not the emitter. When we say that Keats had a strong influence on Wilde, what we really mean is that Wilde was an assiduous reader of Keats, an inquisitive reader in the service of an acquisitive writer.
The key, as Ian Leslie puts it, is thinking about “how to be influenced”:
Each of us…has to try and strike a balance. Be impervious to social influence and you get closed off from the best that your fellow humans have to offer. Be defenceless against it and you become easily manipulable, boring, and unhappy….For almost every decision we have to take, bidders line up to take the contract.
So curate carefully, and consider which inputs are useful for which outputs.4
Kindred spirits
Lately, I realised that many artists I ‘choose’ to be influenced by (even if that influence hasn’t made its mark shown just yet) share a kind of percussive looseness. Drums that eschew the standard forward-motion of rock’n’roll for more circular or textural approaches. You can hear this in Yeasayer’s first record, Ry Cooder’s (I guess you could say Jim Keltner’s) work, Jay Bellerose’s drumming, as well as the klanging jazz drum samples of James Holden. Re-listening to Yeasayer’s first album recently, I immediately grasped that teenage Steve and current Steve alike would both feel a pull to it, encountering it anew. I vividly remember the first time I heard Red Cave’s vocal rounds, psychedelia, forest of sounds, spooky samples, and loping, cacophanous drums. I was on a bus from Essaouira to Marrakech. They appeal now as then.5
On the same trip, I heard an amazing CD in Marrakech that I couldn’t for the life of me find anywhere online, but a few years later managed to describe enough of on a world music forum to, somehow (genuinely: how!?), stumble across a friendly Andrew who then picked up the album on a trip to Morocco, and burnt and mailed me a CD copy in exchange for about $10.6 I can’t find the album online now, though it seems to have had a similar effect on other people.
I just dug up the email thread, too, and it’s charming:
Hi Steve,
I just got back from my trip yesterday and have already copied that Oud disc for you. You scared me into making a copy for myself too…I don’t want much money to speak of, maybe just a few bucks for postage…The power of the Internet. I’ve looked for references to the disc elsewhere myself, and it doesn’t come up anywhere.
Many of my chosen influences are also quite obviously pulling from multiple genres, whether from open-hearted or rat-a-tat-tat curiosity. Earlier this year, I fell into Judee Sill’s music. She released just two studio albums: a body of work condensed into a few hours’ listening. But it was immediately obvious that she was pulling from a number of traditions: Bach, gospel, and American folk at least.
For whatever reason, much Anglophone 70s folk seems to share that curiosity. In the work of John Martyn, Joni Mitchell, and Joan Baez, jazz, blues, and Celtic traditions are neatly bowed with then-newfangled effects like synthesizers, drum machines, and delays.7 Fruitful sonic explorations and great-sounding recordings with strong songwriting. I guess something was in the air.
Just a lyric or voice can be enough. Because what you’re really seeking is spirit. That’s the name of the game. Transmission of personality and presence—the way Greg Brown, described, may sound a little unremarkable, but heard, transmits a gentle, good-humouredness:
You say that you're weary and you don't give a damn, Well, I bet you never tasted her blackberry jam. Peaches on the shelf, Potatoes in the bin, Supper ready everybody come on in, Taste a little of the summer, Taste a little of the summer, Taste a little of the summer, Grandma put it all in jars.
Curiosity in the service of spirit. Bring more to bear on the work than merely the tradition you most absorbed. Influence is a two-way process: you seek it out, but it also finds you, retroactively justifying choices you made before you even knew the material existed.8
Even outside music, influence works this way. Many of the teachers who shaped me most did so precisely because of what I sensed of them outside of their work. I studied English because of a high-school teacher who played us Woody Guthrie tracks while teaching Of Mice and Men, breaking to regale us with stories of seeing Jimi Hendrix live. I tended to most closely follow the work of university professors actively engaged in student and union politics, elucidating clearer lines between abstraction in the classroom and activity in the world outside it. All these teachers were usually generous and open-hearted, not worn down with cynicism. Influence is reciprocal: yes, you learn from them, but because you choose to.
Liam Kofi Bright says a similar thing about his mentor, Charles Mills:
This element of Mills, the ability to take things seriously while laughing at them, made me feel more at home in the field than anything else. I often feel in philosophy, even and maybe especially the bits of the field I like, there is a kind of dour protestant sensibility of moral seriousness. It’s not that I think this is wrong per se, but it’s just deeply unfamiliar to me.…Mills’ sense of humour, and unselfserious down to earth way of being in the field, was a visible proof that I could make it; I could work on the things I care about while still retaining elements of my personality and upbringing that feel essential to being me.
My absolute favourite memory of Charles Mills is also the last time I saw him in person, three years ago….We met up for lunch at a conference and went to some basement cafe somewhere a bit out of the way. We laughed and gossiped and lamented the state of the field. Towards the end of the meal with a serious look on his face he told me that given that there are so so few black professors in the UK I had a responsibility to represent black philosophy, and then after a beat followed it up with “well, at least until we can find someone better”. I will miss him so much.
It’s funny: I wrote my master’s thesis on the idea that the spirit of a piece of political writing matters. David Graeber was the case study: his work sometimes lacks the rigors of academia, but nonetheless appeals to, welcomes, chastises, and connects with readers across the world. It is spirited political writing, and what he thinks about animals playing becomes as important as his history of debt in Sumerian societies.
At the time, I kind of just wanted to finish the damn thesis and didn’t really know what I thought. It was weird to realise years later I actually agreed with it. Sometimes you only recognize your true influences in hindsight, when they mirror back something you were already circling. It’s a conversation across time, and the trick is to keep listening for the voices that sound like they were always already speaking to you. There’s that circular logic of influence again: a sense for the person is attractive if you like the sense of the person. Neither fate nor freedom.
Do you choose yourself?
You choose mediums, influences, and approaches. But who chooses the chooser?
Obviously, I don’t know. But I do know that, taken in aggregate, it feels more like unearthing than choosing. As Jung supposedly put it, “I do not create myself, rather I happen to myself.”
That’s one reason early demos and experiments feel so refreshing: they’re unburdened by histories of paths taken and not taken. It’s a step closer to curious unearthing, freeform happening. Some people are able to unearth it all right away, while others chip away for years before making notable progress.
You probably can’t escape your tendencies. I admire the Cathedral-like approach to album-making of Jon Hopkins, the single-minded, aesthetic wholeness of Burial’s albums, and the level-headed consistency of Gillian Welch. But in practice, I find myself sprawling toward a more magpie-like model. In some sense, this was conscious: I desired to create a large body of work, pulling on various of my interests, more than hone any single or album. But I’m not sure I could have done otherwise.
A couple of years ago, my friend Brett gave me a lovely compliment about my music, after a short time consuming several albums in short succession (the courage!): “It reminds me of Arthur Russell, in that you’re kind of off doing your own thing.” Don’t worry, dear reader, he was quick to add, “I’m not saying it’s as good as his music, it just reminds me of that idiosyncracy.” I love some works of Russell’s, but he was always more of an inspiration in terms of spirit, drive, output, and openness rather than a sonic model or lyrical model. I guess Brett got it right.
Exploiting readers, “provoking them with contentious and belligerent ideas.” And running out of time.
In response to a piece of too-surreal-to-be-satire I wrote pseudonymously for my old student paper, university administrators, their outrage only adding to our amusement, demanded the paper reveal my identity. In their words, I was exploiting readers, “provoking them with contentious and belligerent ideas.”9 For a brief, beautiful moment, every member of the editorial board changed their Facebook name to my pseudonym.
So perhaps the path of explaining that you all get it wrong was one from which my spirit couldn’t truly stray. Long may I provoke you. If the blog is part of the art, then why stop there? There are more media to try, archives to dig through, and traditions to study. I recently face-palmed my way into the insanely obvious fact that various national libraries hold amazing archives of rare music. There are performances to hone, books to read, and written and visual projects to unearth. Life is short, impossibly short. We need UBI (or, if I must make a generous compromise, the four-day work week) yesterday.10 Until then, we can return to the expected recipe of musical offerings (even if they are often quite old), occasionally combined with flawlessly wise observations that don’t require a research project to pull off.
Especially for the youth, though the lure of the recluse appeals to many.
I’ve probably already mentioned this, but I’ve always loved sketches in galleries, often more than the final images. The canonisers and artists alike get much wrong.
Which is one reason sometimes you have to learn how to hear friends’ music, as it comes unencumbered with the critical and promotional apparatuses we’re used to, which frame a work as ‘proper.’
What are the limitations of the algorithm’s dopamine?
Unfortunately, the tune seemed to be less popular among Yeasayer fans. I’m sure I annoyed several people by loudly (drunkenly) yelling out for it at different Yeasayer shows, to no avail.
And in so doing, unfortunately called time on the internet’s glory years…
Before the tech demos of the 80s…
Sometimes the search for kindred spirits can lead to premature judgment. But that’s also part and parcel with navigating today’s endless stream of media. When I check out an electronic record, I’ll often skip to the middle of a track, and if all I hear is a stack of Roland sounds looped, I close it. “If you’re communicating mostly with texture, then an open-hearted spirit ought to seek new noises,” I think, closing my heart. I don’t apply the same standards to performed music, where personality can come through in a single shaky vocal line. Excellence exists, of course, but excellence without spirit is clinically boring.
I believe I portrayed them bathing in a giant fruit salad. If that’s your idea of contentiousness, no wonder your heirs would want to redraw the boundaries of dissent to better control and discipline students.
In the meantime, something will have to give, and perhaps the answer is just to work in a more stripped, back, decisive fashion. That’s probably a better route to spirit-communication, anyway. My neurotic meddling likely makes things worse, most of the time.