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.

Activating Truths

I started playing guitar when I was 15. My parents bought me an Esteban acoustic-electric for Christmas. More than a million such guitars grace the homes of aspiring players. Back then, they were packaged affordably alongside a set of instructional DVDs. I remember learning “House of the Rising Sun” from Esteban himself via the TV in our basement. 

In time, guitar surpassed piano as my primary instrument. But despite my predilection for the avant-garde and Sonic Youths of the world, who asked ‘why this way’ and championed alternative approaches to the six-string, I’ve never dabbled outside of standard tuning – let alone question whether it makes sense to play the guitar (or piano) as they are.

“[The guitar] awkwardly has more strings than fingers,” Alfred Darlington told me recently. “Not to slag on pianos,” they added, “but they're the most awkward instrument. There's black keys and white keys. They each represent very specific tones. The black keys are strangely enough further away than the white keys. The hand doesn't necessarily evenly fit. And there's plenty of reasons why this stuff has persisted, but it doesn't make sense.”

Darlington makes music under the moniker Daedelus. A fore-figure of Los Angeles' Beat Scene, Darlington has released music on labels like Ninja Tune, WARP and Brainfeeder. They’re also a founding DJ at Dublab and a founding faculty member for the EDI (Electronic Digital Instrument) program at Berklee College of Music, where they teach today.

“When we encounter an electronic instrument, that can be exactly what you want it to be,” Darlington told me. “It can also flummox people because they've been able to be on some sort of traditional piano-esque thing or guitar that’s been adopted by education. When they really get a chance to [interact with electronic instruments], they sometimes try to take their box and move it to similar-sized boxes.” 

Darlington has long been reimagining the boxes we live in and inspiring others to do the same. Perhaps most notably, they contributed to the iconic record Madvillainy, the lone collaborative album released by Madlib and MF Doom. In the track “Accordian,” Madlib samples the Daedelus piece “Experience,” employing an off-kilter motif that gives depth to the song and more distinction to the record.

“I was able to achieve a bit of that with my weird instrumentation and odd fitting sounds way earlier than some of the other things that I actually should have been dealing with – like my own gender,” Darlington said (they now identify as non-binary). “I know that growing up when I did, there wasn't necessarily language activated in the same way, but seeing students able to be in their truth at a much younger age is very inspiring.

“It's a boldness that I feel a lot of young people are way more comfortable with than being awkward in their instrument,” they continued. “They're really afraid of that – somehow you've found all this personal truth that's in your body or in your expression, but you can't play your guitar ‘upside down.’”

It’s rather easy to settle into our cozy boxes until the contours get rigid and we forget there are other boxes – especially when it feels like we fit well enough inside.

“That whole thing about daring to be outside and then embrace that awkwardness as an actual superpower,” Darlington said. ”There's something to that.”

Indeed – bodies, expressions, musical instruments… these are boxes waiting to be unpacked and tuned and reshaped into forms yet unseen. And until we unpack them – or at least feel like we have permission to peer inside to understand why we feel mistakenly contained – we may not even know we’re missing out on our best shapes and forms.

Shapeshifters

It was a big week for the shapeshifters. The US House passed the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21), which provides legal clarity and protections for digital assets. It had bipartisan support, with unexpected backing from prominent democrats like Nancy Pelosi. 

The announcement came a week after the Senate overturned a 2022 SEC bulletin that implemented accounting standards for organizations that custody crypto. The SEC also just approved amended filings from various Ethereum ETF applicants like BlackRock, Fidelity and Grayscale – four months after the agency did the same for the Bitcoin ETF. The move grants further legitimacy to digital currencies as an asset class. Moreover, retail investors can now be exposed to crypto without the need to interact with digital wallets.

“All of the recent events and developments,” Ji Kim, the chief legal and policy officer at Crypto Council for Innovation, told Decential’s Amanda Smith, “reflect that members of Congress are further realizing that digital assets are absolutely here to stay.”

Meanwhile, the US Justice Department is suing Live Nation Entertainment – the conglomerate that owns Ticketmaster – for violating antitrust laws. 29 states and the District of Columbia have joined the suit, citing Live Nation’s imperialist pursuits “to dominate the industry by locking venues into exclusive ticketing contracts, pressuring artists to use its services and threatening its rivals with financial retribution,” writes the New York Times. That’s good news for music.

Elsewhere, more disruptors are finding firmer ground. The AI music platform Suno – which was mentioned in a recent Beat focused on Suno competitor Udio – raised $125 million. It’s the eleventh biggest music-tech funding round ever.

And over in decentralized social, Farcaster raised $150 million of its own, touting 350,000 paid sign-ups and a 50x increase in network activity since going permissionless last October.

What all of these events have in common is that they’re institutional acknowledgement of what was once marginal thought. AI is here to stay. Decentralized social platforms have legs. Ticketmaster sucks and even the US government thinks so. And crypto, too, seems to be resilient. 

Money, of course, is the ultimate motivator – by quashing crypto, the US would be missing an opportunity to become a market leader. (It’s worth mentioning that Hong Kong approved its own Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs just a month ago, and the US “doesn’t want to play second fiddle to anyone.”)

Still, these institutional hat tips have trickledown effects. Increased trust – or its opposite, in the case of Live Nation – and hefty checks catalyze innovation. It won’t all be good – hefty checks aren’t inherently aligned with ethical progress or more equitable living. But what’s exciting is that new unexplored fringes will emerge, and guitar-shaped truths will be challenged.

“There's an [internal] barometer that knows that your truth may not sit easy on others,” Darlington told me, “but it's yours to give as a gift, if you so choose.”

What else will we discover if we play outdated models upside down? In these recent acts of ‘permission’ from the powers that be, who will activate the language they need to hone in on some yet unspoken truth? And when it’s found, after the dust has settled, who will again rally the margins in the face of institutional rigidity?

Who will continue the mission to unpack more decentralized, non-binary, variegated ways of being until those ‘powers that be’ finally accept that what makes us distinct is what makes us better.

Coda

On May 11, Stephen Kelly passed away. Kelly was the resident musicologist at Carleton College while I studied music there. He was part of what I called the ‘old guard,’ a contingent of professors focused on traditional western music – opera, symphonic works and the like. 

When Kelly retired after my junior year, I was on the committee to find his replacement. I encouraged Carleton to hire Andy Flory, a Motown expert and, broadly speaking, a modernist. When he landed the gig, Flory’s presence helped contemporize the department (mostly, sadly, after I graduated). It was part of the push Carleton needed to leave its own box. 

But I’m not ungrateful for the traditional foundation that box gave me. There are reasons besides inertia why people still play guitars and pianos. And it’s helpful to know where we came from to understand why we’re going somewhere else.

Kelly may have been traditional but he also kept an open ear. I’ll never forget when he approached me after a performance of “Moment Form,” my piece for amplified piano trio that ends in a glut of distortion and was named after a concept from the avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. (‘Moment Form’ is a musical mosaic of “self-contained (quasi-)independent sections, set off from other sections by discontinuities.)

“Even across all the distinct moments, you could feel some deeper unifying energy that was clearly you,” he told me with a big smile. “Keep going in that direction.”

RIP

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.