The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly breakdown of the music-web3 byway. (There may be unexpected stops along the way.)

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.

Total Silence

Living in cities, silence gets taken for granted. For the last 12 years I’ve lived in Chicago, Boston, New York and now London. But I grew up on the outskirts of a 600-person town in Minnesota. During summer nights, I went for runs beneath the milky way. My soundtrack was a chorus of crickets and cicadas, and the wind that meandered through the cornfields.

But those sounds are getting quieter.

The Guardian just featured a fascinating – and harrowing – tale of the soundscape recordist Peter Krause. He’s spent his life listening to the natural world. And for much of it, he’s been recording the flora and fauna of his local Sugarloaf Park in California.

The Guardian writes:

The recordings from each year are placed side-by-side, and the differences are palpable. It’s distinctly discomforting to hear the natural world’s quieting – especially while its digital counterpart grows ever louder.

Banksy’s Animals

When I describe London to people from home as “a breath of fresh air,” they think I’m nuts. It’s all relative, of course. And my childhood self would have thought the same of me. But after seven years in New York, London truly is. The green spaces. The absence of anything resembling Manhattan. The interminable sprawl of quaint neighborhoods.

That said, it’s still teeming with human noise. And earlier this month, Banksy reminded us that we’re not the only beings making noise this planet.

He covered London with nine new pieces of art in nine days. All of them were non-human animals – from an ibex in Kew to a rhino mounting a Nissan Micra in Charlton.

Most were quickly destroyed or nicked – either the government saving us from vandalistic horrors or an opportunistic acolyte who knows the value of an original Banksy.

And he is indeed the King Midas of street art, but that’s never been his goal. In 2018, for instance, at a Sotheby’s auction in London, his piece “Girl with Balloon” was shredded as soon as it sold for $1.04 million. Banksy himself had rigged the frame as a means to critique the commercial art world’s obsession with high valuations and ownership.

Banksy’s anti-establishment spirit has made him something of a web3 idol. In 2021, the company Particle purchased “Love is in the Air” and used some lawyerly finesse to “legally destroy” the work. I also wrote recently about the man now called Burnt Banksy, who burned Banksy’s painting “Morons” to transfer the piece’s value to an NFT.

“Morons” depicts an auction house selling a piece that reads: “I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit.”

Banksy posts images of his work to Instagram. Many of the comments from his 13.2 million followers are about locating the latest tag, or estimating its value. But some purists show up, too.

To the rhino piece, one follower said: “Can we please stop with 1. Where is it? 2. Has it been stolen yet? 3. The value of something? -- Why can’t we just enjoy it?”

Another captured what I imagine is closer to Banksy’s own intentions behind the pieces: “Nature is about to fck the industry like the industries fckd nature 🤍”

With each animal, each momentary oasis in the urban jungle, each theft in the night, we’re reminded of our culpability; of our reckless, futile dominion over nature, where under our reign, 100+ species go extinct every single day.

That’s nature, growing quieter.

Oases

And while folks here are losing their shit about a different kind of Oasis, others are getting turned away from live shows for wearing shirts that say “Free Gaza.” It was London’s O2 Arena that refused to admit the would-be patron. They wouldn’t let the wearer turn it inside out, or even give him a discount at the venue to get another shirt.

Standing nearby, a friend recorded the encounter, which she later posted. The video went viral:

@watford.psc

Denied entry to the O2 for wearing a t-shirt for 🇵🇸 #palestine #boycott #boycotttheo2 #freepalestine #endthegenocide #fy #fyp #viral #gaza... See more

The “Free Gaza” tee references Banksy’s “Girl with Balloon.” The street artist has a longstanding relationship with Palestine. Some of his most famous pieces can be found there, from “Love is in the Air” to the seven murals he created on the West Bank Wall, an Israeli-built, 38-foot high barricade that stretches for 450 miles.

The partition is also called the Segregation Wall, and Palestinians call it “The Wall of Apartheid.” Banksy has said it “essentially turns Palestine into the world's largest open prison."

When I traveled to Palestine in 2011, I saw some of his pieces, and spoke with people in Bethlehem who literally could not leave. There is no operational commercial airport in Palestine. And traveling between the two states, past the wall – which is considered illegal by the International Court of Justice (a 2003 UN resolution to tear down the wall was vetoed by the US) – is indeed akin to entering and exiting a prison. Armed soldiers carefully search would-be travelers and check that they have required permits. (The Israeli military even controls the border between Palestine and Jordan – the only other country that borders the West Bank.)

One of Banksy’s pieces on “the wall” features two kids holding a shovel and bucket, and a cutout that seems to reveal a tropical vista on the other side. An old Palestinian man, Banksy wrote on his website, told him his painting made the wall look beautiful. The artist thanked him, only to be told: “We don't want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall. Go home.”

This week, Israel expanded military operations from Gaza to the West Bank. At least nine Palestinians have already been killed.

That’s Palestine, growing quieter.

Nature

Early on in my Brooklyn tenure, in a cafe in Park Slope, I interviewed a musician named Nature Ganganbaigal. When we met, he was wearing stark leather boots and a bandana. There was a guitar slung over his shoulder.

Nature was born and raised in Beijing, but he felt more closely connected to his Mongolian heritage. He was a congenial guy who saw beauty everywhere, but he was also pissed, tired of people trying to control the way he was in the world. Heavy metal was one of his outlets – and one of the things he was always told he wasn’t supposed to like.

“I’m just listening to some fucking music and dressing differently,” he told me. “If I were a teacher, I would never tell my student ‘don’t do that.’ I would tell them ‘be careful about doing that, but don’t kill it.’ Teachers need to realize: ‘be careful, you are not a god.’

“Government, morality, whatever the standard is they’ve set up for people – it’s all about making you feel guilty,” he continued. “If you look beyond, there’s no good intention. It’s not about saving anyone, or teaching you how to be a good person, or how to be happy. They’re not trying to care about me – they’re just manipulating my life so I go the way they tell me to go, so that I serve their purpose; it has nothing to do with my well-being.“

Ganganbaigal first discovered metal music in the video game Red Alert 2. He’d go on to contribute to the soundtracks for other video games, like Civilization VI, Age of Empires IV and Doom Eternal. But he was best known for starting the band Tengger Cavalry, whose sound melded heavy metal and Mongolian folk music.

I saw them play a raucous show at the seminal Brooklyn metal bar, Saint Vitus, which sadly just shuttered for good, bringing Nature’s memory back into my mind.

After that show, he and I stayed in touch for a while. He came to one of my birthday parties. And I followed along as Tengger Cavalry sold out Carnegie Hall, and Nature started to receive plaudits for his film scores.

But even in those “congenial” days, he seemed overwhelmed by the distance between his ideals and our reality – the fact that others couldn’t see the common sense in exploring the spaces between, where we discover unexpected forms, like Mongolian folk metal.

In 2019, I sent him a note and never heard back. I learned that Nature had died. The cause of death was undisclosed, but he’d attempted suicide once before. And being aware of his frustrations with the world, I imagine he took his own life.

That’s Nature, getting quieter.

Coda

It's easy to become lost in the noise of right and wrong, and us and them. The digital maelstrom compounds that noise. It’s distracting, and it’s meant to be. Every time we try and listen we’re being sold something. We forget how to discern what’s actually important until we just quietly fall into line – or lose our minds trying to hear something true.

There are moments where I feel like Peter Krause, where “the only thing that relieve[s] the anxiety was being out [in nature] and just listening to the soundscapes.”

If we lose those, what will there be to hear?

Recently I read the book Spectres: Composing Listening, a collection of essays from artists out of the musique concréte school. Musique concréte is a style of music composition that uses recorded sounds as raw materials, where inputs are similar to what Krause records.

Each contributor “focuses in on a personal aspect, a fragment of that thrilling territory that is sonic and musical experimentation.” My favorite essay was “Exercises in Non-Human Listening,” by the Norwegian composer, Epsen Sommer Eide.

Eide references some of Jakob Johann von Uexküll’s work, where the biologist sought to describe the world experienced by a tick. Uexküll found a new way to “describe landscapes…in which creatures are not inert objects but knowing subjects.”

Eide also considered the way mosquitoes hear. Male mosquitoes listen for 400 hertz, the range at which females buzz. Once found, the males adjust their frequencies to the other’s tone – “a tuning duet,” Eide writes. Its hearing organ then creates distortions between those tones, and the male mosquito tunes into that – a third, “ghost tone” that lies somewhere in between.

This space guides Eide’s subsequent questions. Where does listening end and where does it begin? he wonders. What about the microphone? Does it end in the membrane, or extend to the magnetic field of the transducer, or envelop everything within its recording range?

He envisages a microphone that rolls about the earth, listening. Everything in its path becomes part of it. “Herds of animals, people on their way to work, cities, oceans. Finally, after weeks, months…a lifetime of recording,” he writes, “we reach a microphone the size of the earth, recording itself in the silence of space.”

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.