"Fan Service"
aka the creative joy of misremembered basics
One of my fave moments in Killing Eve is when Villanelle returns to Russia and spends the day at the country carnival. She’s already shown to have access to fashionable wealth and travel, but she exhibits boredom despite what many would presume is an opulent, murderous lifestyle. But during this episode, she accumulates a whole pantheon o’ prizes — some might dismiss them as consumer tchotchkes, but she smiles like never before, holding a fan of practical utility.
So when you can have it all and things are too convenient, what do you do?
I go thru phases where I’m a hyperconsumer, like voraciously listening to new music releases I’m curious about — then the stark opposite, where I’m not really listening to much else at all. Part of it is because I’d rather make my own music, it feels like purposeful earning. Otherwise it’s like eyeing store veggies while you’ve nurtured a well-equipped garden. Better eat your own crops or they’ll go to waste.
And another aspect is celebrating the fragility of memory: there are things I “remember” about classic tracks that weren’t actually there. Sometimes I try to ape something so badly, rip it off from memory, and end up with something rather different. I chalk this up not just to mere “misremembering”, but combining fragments in ways that didn’t originally exist. It’s like the theoretical question of having dinner with two historical figures who weren’t alive at the same time. Quite a powerful tool in the kit.
It can be a lot of fun to play the other side of the field, ‘cuz then as I’ve said, you get greener grass on both sides. Sometimes with music tools, I’m all OCD and type in numbers, and other times I get loosey-goosey and wiggle the knobs. For all the advice about closing your eyes and feeling the music, I’m always tickled by the oft-repeated Burial anecdote about how he judges a good beat:
So I know when I’m happy with my drums because they look like a nice fishbone. When they look just skeletal as fuck in front of me, and so I know they’ll sound good.
(Funnily enough, I initially misremembered this as “wishbone”.) Think about that for a moment. He may’ve moved on since, but there was something so evocative in that description that it’s influenced others to do the same.
I reckon part of my boredom with listening to other music has to do with not hearing either (1) what I’m looking for and (2) what surprises me as a dynamic contrast, and ending up satisfying (1) + (2) on my own terms. I end up finding serendipity at the patch-level, when a talented sound designer wows me and I end up shaping those building blocks into my own music. Such as buzzing thru Dawesome KONTRAST and Spectrasonics Omnisphere 3 as of late, the fusion of smooooth workflow UI + aces patches substantially expands my sonic imagination.
Used to be as a youth, I had to do the Sophie’s choice of deciding how many resources to assign to effects, and sends vs. inserts over-compromises. Tech’s scaled exponentially, Apple Silicon’s growth over the last 5 years demonstrates this. Now I can stack as many as I fathom, though it’s often only amidst the extremities do I realize the value of the basics.
Boomeranging, I also relate to what Anna Meredith said:
It’s not that I don’t love music - I LOVE it and it’s one of the most powerful things I can think of, but when I’m writing I don’t want to be thinking about other bits of music. I want to try figure out the puzzle of how to write what I’m trying to write with only my own reference points.
If I had to trace it back, I had more hunger as a kid. It’s like when you’re starting out on an open world game and you exit your shack, and it’s overlooking all the unexplored terrain. There were loads of styles and things I thought “edgy” that’ve settled down, scenes that’ve matured, and there’s only so far you can go with chaotic glitchin’ before you put a hat-on-a-hat with an “IDM” label and call it a day. I sometimes talk to friends about creative burnout, and how healthy it can be to be utterly unlike yourself — imagine yourself in a parallel existence, like the odd Sora cameo. Besides visualizing myself as the Kool-Aid Man, I do ones of myself doing things I wouldn’t really ever consider, and it’s usually entertaining, but sometimes also insightful.
‘Course, I’d read studies on some kinds of fantasy like visualizing an improved avatar of yourself actually leading real-you to connect the dots and make life changes. When you can connect the aspiration to the so-called lived experience, like the time I played Fallout: New Vegas as a simulator for visiting Las Vegas (aside from the ruins and pseudo-Romans), and Watch Dogs 2 legit helped me navigate around San Francisco. I’d say it’s a shame Night City doesn’t map to a real locale (yet).
“How do you make choices you won’t regret?” recurs as a question, and one mere answer I have: make the choices you try to convince others of but they won’t take action. So you might as well do it for yourself.