The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly breakdown of the music-web3 byway.

Like most things in web3, the music space moves at breakneck speeds, issuing regular bouts of hope, cringe and FOMO. That combination of qualities blur the essence of the movement – the enduring solutions to legacy industry problems and the people building them. Let’s focus on the essence; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

Hello readers – I'm beginning this Beat with gratitude and a request. For those who hang out in this little corner of the Internet, thank you. It means a lot that you spend time with these thoughts and words. And to those who do, I’d love to hear from you: what about the Beat resonates? What doesn’t? My email is [email protected].

For those that do find resonance here, I’d be grateful if you passed it along to a friend who might feel that, too. And as ever, I’d love to hear what you’re listening to. 

Now back to regularly scheduled programming…

Aurora

Last weekend I trekked to the small Norwegian town of Ramburg, nestled in the Lofoten islands about 100 miles into the Arctic Circle. For three incredible nights I watched the Northern Lights erupt across the sky. At times they felt like ghost ships in the night, at others like another realm descending upon earth, and others still like the coming dawn. It was the stuff of magic, liminal and inscrutable.

Like the stars, the Aurora long lacked quantifiable explanation, and over the eons the peoples who bore witness wrought legends to explain how the lights fit their understanding of the universe. 

The Romans associated them with the coming day, believing them to be Aurora, the goddess of dawn (hence ‘Aurora Borealis.’) Some Inuit tribes thought them to be the spirits of dead humans playing a ball game with a walrus skull. In Norse mythology, they're the reflections of the shields and armor of the Valkyrie – many also believed them to be the Bifröst bridge, a rainbow-like arch that connects earth with Valhalla. 

In the absence of empirical evidence, people build narratives that fit their own constructs. What emerges is a product of limited – albeit creative – understanding. Sometimes, people even build bridges to new worlds. 

Scenes

Last week for Decential, I featured Jamie Reddington’s beautiful (aka Sound of Fractures) Scenes project, where the UK-based electronic artist and producer invites listeners to contribute their favorite memories and pictures in response to his music. “Music isn't just about sound. It's about the memories and emotions they evoke,” he said. “Scenes is an effort to give a tangible form to this abstract connection and capture it in something we can recognize.”

One of the themes of the piece – and a key takeaway from our conversation – was the misalignment between artist and platform narratives. 

“The algorithm is designed to keep people on the platform, therefore it pushes you to make content that keeps people on the platform,” Reddington said. “[The algorithm] doesn’t push you to make connections with people who will go and tell someone else to buy your thing, or be a part of your community, or bring you into that world.” 

With Scenes, Reddington refused to truncate his connective vision so that it could fit neatly on “the platform.” But even when he brought the idea to prominent web3 organizations that regularly preach artist autonomy and worldbuilding, he was met with demur.

“Everyone loves the concept,” he said, “but was like, ‘yeah, that doesn't hit what our metric is, which is mints or traffic or exposure.’”

Across web2 and web3, platforms dictate the rules of engagement and curtail experimentation to the confines of their products – and to the benefit of their bottom lines. Reddington – and artists generally – aren’t empowered with tools that can deliver their whole selves to an audience. Platforms curb agency to incentivize that which furthers their own narrative – their own constructs of life.

“We're just going to end up in the same trap as before,” he said, “because there are no rails for people to actually experiment.”

Drinking the JUICE

It is what it is, you might say. Instagram colors our reality. But there are those of us that believe in Outlyr-e’s avant-garde ethos, which is guided by principles like “resisting the assumption of continuity in the given way of doing,” and “seeing and operating beyond siloes.”

It’s that spirit that’s helped drive web3 and power orgs like Metalabel, who transcended the label model, reimagining it as collaborative, scene-driven groups releasing works under a common identity for a common purpose. 

Metalabel aligned themselves with the broader web3 movement until a recent changeover – which I covered a few Beats back. They announced they were “climbing out of the crypto rabbit hole,” citing many of the flaws for which crypto is stigmatized – like hyper speculation, high transaction fees and wallet drains.

These ills prompted co-founder Yancey Strickler to go on a “crypto diet,” which catalyzed an organizational redirection away from crypto. Today, Metalabel is still leveraging central tenets of the web3 movement – e.g. decentralization, interoperable data, portable identities – but they’re no longer building on blockchain rails.

When paradigm-shifting orgs like Metalabel – representatives of the purpose-driven contingent of crypto – distance themselves from the space, how does this affect our interpretation of the web3 movement at large?

In last week’s Beat, I re-introduced two familiar faces, Dan Fowler and Vaughn McKenzie-Landell, the co-creators of JUICE (as well as prodigious thinkers who have long been present in the on-chain music space), a project helping founders disrupt incumbents through sovereign assets that don’t require said incumbents’ permission.

Writing in the project’s newly christened substack, the co-leads responded to Metalabel’s pivot. They make valid – and respectful – points throughout the commentary, sure to ground their feedback in moral alignment with the Metalabel cause.

“Many of the learnings Metalabel experienced over the past year were hiding in plain sight from the beginning,” they write. “That they didn't see them is a function of the distorted reality they and many of us create for ourselves.”

That distorted reality stems from strong ideals at odds with a culture still rife with shitcoin-to-the-moon bros – once again, from narrative misalignment. “If traders dominate the collective, then crypto will produce goods for them,” Fowler and McKenzie-Landell continue. “If crypto doesn't represent our interests, we must redesign the system or introduce more like-minded people. Taking leave leaves us all worse off.”

It’s important dialogue from some of the most articulate thinkers in the nebulous new Internet continuum – on both sides. These distorted realities arise because we create narratives for ourselves to – like Reddington did with Scenes – “give a tangible form to this abstract connection and capture it in something we can recognize.”

We are all building with the same technology but our understanding of it can be very different, depending on where you’re looking from. Are you inside the bubble or outside? Crypto-pilled and dieting or never entered the matrix at all?

When we grow accustomed to the cozy confines of the Metalabels and JUICEs, Songcamps and Kernels, it’s off-putting to see the stark greed of crypto’s broader existence.

I mention these four groups as some of those maintaining a moral substrate atop which we can hold hope. The peer-learning community Kernel remains one of my particular favorites, and its most recent block, KB8, is wrapping up this week.

As a peer mentor for this cohort, I was privy to much of the journey, including Showcase day, the “culmination of a Kernel block where adventures from fellows are presented and celebrated.”

A dozen or so fellows presented purpose-driven projects that addressed everything from Amazon conservation to “cultural renaissance engineering.” I left utterly inspired. And throughout all of them, the audience was celebratory, dropping encouraging notes in the chat for all journeys – quite contrary to the pitch competitions I’ve seen in the past. (KB9 applications are now open, for all your narratives.)

I’ve witnessed similar behavior inside many of the other communities mentioned above, too. Kernel et al are spaces that continues to vitalize my hope for this technology because they exist wholly counter to the speculative shitcoin narrative. In my own limited understanding of the universe, it’s an interpretation that resonates.

Coda

The Sámi are one of Europe’s few recognized indigenous peoples. They hail from what is today Norway, Sweden, Finland and part of Russia, and like most indigenous peoples, they suffered horrible oppressions as the world modernized.

The natural world, through the Sámi lens, is closely connected to music – the Sámi word for ‘aurora borealis’ is “guovssahas,” meaning “the light you can hear.”

One of the community’s traditional forms of song is called ‘joik,’ a chanted form of singing that may sound familiar to those that have heard the music of indigenous North American peoples. The style is deeply connected with nature. Songs are meant to evoke a person, animal or place, often inflected with natural phenomena like those enigmatic Northern Lights.

When your experience has no justification for unpredictable, dancing lights in the sky, you explain it best you can – through song, as the reflections of warring gods, dead spirits at play, or an early dawn. They’re all valid and meaning-full, even after we’ve evolved our understanding of what’s “really” going on. We can honor what was without drawing a line in the sand, or boxing ourselves out from an ever changing present.

“Nature, life, and the universe inspire me. I am not so concerned with genres and boundaries,” says Sámi joik singer Elle Márjá Eira. “There is a Sámi saying that goes: It is better to be in motion than to stand still.”

Now go outside and listen to music – it’s a beautiful day.

My name is MacEagon Voyce. For more music and less noise, consider subscribing to The Beat. And if you already do, consider sharing with a friend. Thanks for being here.