A lot of music today feels hollow, with people romanticizing the idea of being an ‘artist’, forgetting that music has always been some sort of emotional expression, even if just to document some unidentifiable thought or feeling. As people have forgotten this core piece, and with music being treated more and more as social currency, it’s hard to find anything worth paying attention to.

 

It’s like going to the store to buy an orange, but in this hypothetical world, visual aesthetics have become prioritized over taste. You end up searching deep in a pile of oranges, pushing aside all these identical, shiny, perfectly spherical fruits, trying to find one of those good ones, from the farm, grown from the ground, that doesn’t taste like some weird gelatin composition of chemically manufactured citrus.

 

I want to be that secret community market down the street with not a plastic imitation in sight. 

 

In contrast to these “hollow” artists, I aim to platform artists that alternatively use culture to bridge the gap between their minds and yours. They’ve clearly worked to become culturally fluent, and now are able to express their real, unique perspectives in that familiar framing that most of us can digest.

 

To me, it feels as if these artists have something to say, or at least something they are trying to say. For them it’s not culture for culture’s sake, it’s a means of connecting the gap between oneself and the rest of the world. Culture as a means of articulation. 

 

Though, within this is a difficult task. Throughout the whole creative process, you must choose whether to favor understandability, or to disregard it and experiment in a way only you can understand. Most people choose understandability, though I’m not convinced they know anything else. 

 

What I mean is that it is very common to be a “craftsman” nowadays, simply picking a genre and being that type of “producer”. To me, this is different from making music as an artist, instead acting more like an exploitative business-person. To each their own, but for the more curious, this dilemma – creating with rules vs. no rules – can be difficult to navigate.

 

On the one hand, someone could argue that the “authentic” artist would create solely for themselves, with no rules surrounding pure experimenting. Though, this is an isolating process, as whatever you are expressing, consciously or not, is going to be very hard for anyone to understand. Some have dedicated decades to this pursuit, but few have become masterful enough to create a brand new vision, and one that the public can accept (Oneohtrix, Elysia Crampton, Aphex). 

 

On the other hand, for anyone to even understand what you’re doing in the short term, having some familiar element within your music is crucial. Experimenting with pre-existing styles is also just fun – most of the best up and coming artists exist within this limbo.

 

It’s like there’s a game, a playful conversation between the conscious and subconscious, with each contributing creative ideas — the conscious side prefers cultural influence, and the subconscious likes more internal exploration. To me, it feels like the goal is to mediate the ideal compromise between each side.

 

Example: Imagine producing a song, say with a live piano, and digital (in the daw) bass and drums. This idea I described can be applied to really any situation, live or on a computer.

 

For the piano, you might be inspired to write some chords that sound like some song you heard, or maybe in the style of a genre. On a smaller scale, maybe you choose certain embellishments between notes that suggest a certain style. That’s the more conscious side, actively making decisions coming from certain influences. 

 

The other type comes from more of an internal exploration, where all genre rules are cast aside. Say you are working on that same piano idea, but you think ‘what if I do something weird and put this note here?’ or ‘what would it sound like if I switched this thing to something completely different?’. Maybe the whole piece is in a certain style, but you choose to break some rules or turn it on its head. That’s what I mean in terms of internal exploration. 

 

Note that this still requires a conscious decision, but it is a conscious decision to explore. The reason I distinguish this type as ‘subconscious’ is because you are pulling unique ideas from inside, not from around you.

 

For digital music, you are still faced with these options of operating within the rules, or breaking them. The scope of these methods can exist on a very large scale (i.e. having a set genre for your album vs. creating first, defining second) or on a very small scale (i.e. choosing the placement of a single snare with or without regard to a certain style).

 

The featured artists, to me, seem to have finessed this balance, between influence and impulse. The music is not particularly unfamiliar, nor is it imitation; it remains grounded in culture, while expressing a unique perspective.