When I started this project a year and a half ago, I began with newer music—stuff I might actually listen to now. But as the weeks trickled by, I’ve had to reach further and further into my archives. While much of this music feels distant to me now, every so often, I find something I’d completely forgotten about, and it’s become quite heartening to see a common thread running through my archive. A stitch linking pieces that, on the surface, seem wildly different from one another.
I also sometimes noticed that I’d succeeded in ways I hadn’t appreciated at the time.
For example, during the period I wrote Marmonies, I thought about arrangements in terms of primary colours. I didn’t want to use many of the tricks producers use to add vibe or emotion to their tracks, such as dense reverb, layers, or pads. I wanted each element to pop—bright, primary colours, distinct and clear. Listening back to tunes like Marmonies, I think I pulled it off.
I also deliberately limited my tools, knowing that constraints fuel creativity—that if you reach for the same sounds as everyone else, you won’t develop your own idiosyncratic voice.
While working on these tunes, I hadn’t developed an artistic practice, or an artistic confidence. I was just fumbling through, with only random internet forums for help.
On the one hand, I failed. Much of this music wears its influences a little too heavily—but that’s what apprenticeships are for. And honestly, some of my more ‘popular’ work sounds a little too derivative to my ears.1
Still, listening back, I’m struck by how I couldn’t recreate this music now, even if I tried. There’s something in it—some character, some feeling—that feels out of reach. Part of that is just naivety. But part of it is also the limited palate of tools I used. In particular, my use of samples.
Sampling can be an open-ended and slow process, even tedious. First, you have to find and catalog sounds. Then, you have to twist and shape them into something new. It’s more like fishing than composing—casting out, listening, waiting for something to bite. Some days, nothing does. But when it does, it feels mercurial. That’s very different from sitting down with a guitar and laying down a part you already hear in your head.2
The bassline in this song, for instance, is built from the same audio as the main bell-like tones: a snippet cropped from an understated piece of music by a famous 20th century composer. I spent agessss shaping it, sculpting tiny snippets of audio until they rolled and twisted just so. To this day, I could listen to it roll along almost indefinitely.
I’m also certain I could never recreate it, and that makes me like it more.
As Devon Hansen writes in a recent Substack post (H/T Shawn Reynaldo), contemporary music production tools focus on “time-efficiency, productivity, and workflow optimization.” These are exactly the same biases that Evgeny Morozov says characterize neoliberalism: “market bias (private actors outperform public ones), adaptation bias (adapting to reality beats changing it), and efficiency bias (efficiency trumps social concerns).”
Had I stuck to those metrics, I’d never have sat for a couple of days turning snippets of bell sounds into a bassline. It makes no sense when I could just play in something that would be good enough.
But those hours I spent playing with the sound were fun! They were memorable!
Last week, I went to an amazing exhibition in NYC by an artist, Ro Miller, who works with scent.3 One of the pieces was a ‘scent clock’. Instead of marking time with rigid precision, it did so gradually—soft cues that you had to tune into. The time would change, but it would take a while for your nose to pick out the hints of...wait...is that lavender?...coming through. The clock still marked time, but in a way that felt diffuse, embodied. A counterpoint to just-in-time capitalism.
Sitting around, playing with sounds, waiting for an idea to bite—that’s diffuse, embodied time, too. And if you end up making something you’re still proud to share almost a decade later, perhaps it wasn’t so inefficient, after all.
Yes, Kieran, the response to the meme piece is coming.
Of course, you could always lift a loop from a ’70s record and call it a day, but my approach to sampling was more about piecing together fragments—a bell from here, a twinkle from there.
It was the best exhibition I’ve been to in ages, partly because of the work and partly because we got to talk with the artist. The whole thing felt alive and lived in, more like folk practice than the attempt to carve off a slice of finance capital that a lot of art feels like.
Lol, I sensed that footnote might be for me as soon as I saw it. This is nice and relaxing a flows so nicely. Glad you enjoyed NYC. We await the meme response!