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.

Hard Art + Scenius

In 2022, a group of artists, activists, democracy specialists, faith leaders, economists and scientists began gathering in Brian Eno’s studio. They met – and still meet – bi-monthly, gathering to leave their individual silos and, at their intersections, seek polyphony. 

“While myriad people and organizations are in effect having the ‘same’ conversation, we are often utilizing different technical language,” Hard Art wrote. Without shared language, they said, the leaders across these disparate disciplines couldn’t understand that they were already “utterly aligned.”

Focused on raising awareness for climate and democratic collapse, the collective just started to release material on Metalabel, a space for co-releasing and collecting creative work. They’ve dropped four works so far: a manifesto, an introduction to the group, the Hard Art-curated “Fête of Britain” and an open letter in support of the nine women who took non-violent direct action against HSBC, one of the world’s largest fossil fuel investors. Anyone can collect them for free, or pay what they wish.

Hard Art says they’re releasing on Metalabel because it affords them the flexibility to release at uneven cadences and across various mediums. Truly, though, it’s a match made in heaven. 

Some years ago, Eno coined the term “scenius” as a companion to “genius.” Where genius is the creative intelligence of an individual, scenius is the creative intelligence of a community. Metalabel, which rallied to build a more “collaborative and scene-driven” label-like release engine, is the proverbial response to Eno’s call.

“[Scenius] reduces the distance between the artist and the ordinary person, so called,” Eno told Metalabel. “And you realize that there are a lot of ordinary people involved in that artist, and that the artist isn’t that special. It’s not a completely distinct being. But culture has been notably bad at understanding that.”

Indeed it has, but why is that so?

Little capitalist assholes

Also in 2022, Eno made headlines in the crypto world, maligning NFTs as “a way for artists to get a little piece of the action from global capitalism, our own cute little version of financialization,” he said. “How sweet,” he continued, “now artists can become little capitalist assholes as well.”

Until recently, as Beat readers will already know, Metalabel was built on crypto rails. The organization migrated off-chain in February, while continuing to leverage central tenets of the web3 movement – e.g. decentralization, interoperable data and portable identities. You can still “collect” Hard Art’s releases, for instance, but there’s no longer an on-chain, wallet-based verification process. It’s worth wondering if Eno would have participated if Metalabel were still a crypto project.

To Eno’s critique, there’s certainly merit, but it’s also absent some complexity. Around the time his comments were published, I wrote my first major piece for Decential: “Music NFTs Become Latest Battleground Between Capitalists and Creators.” I decided to bookend it with Eno sentiments, seeking to capture the nuance of our “cute little version of financialization” within a markedly exploitative creator ecosystem where artists are desperate to find alternative paths.

Eno has long championed principles like collaborative building and decentralization, so it was with some surprise that I first read his take without finding many ‘well, musicians are a bit fucked so we can’t blame them for trying new things to earn a living’ concessions. 

To his enduring credit, he did leave space for curiosity and not knowing, and pondered whether NFTs could represent a “contemporary form of Robin Hood-ism” in which “artists can use these tools to divert some of the global trillions off into some more productive and humane directions.” (He caveated, though, that moral questions of unnecessary energy usage and “murky money” persist.)

Eno said he’d been approached many times to make an NFT, which makes sense given his web3-aligned value system. The composer also has a well-documented history of experimenting with tech. For 50+ years, he’s been making “generative music” – a process of feeding sounds through his own software and adjusting the output to his liking, based on its interplay with life in various situations.

This past week, in beautiful serendipity, I happened to attend the UK Premiere of Eno – a generative documentary that explores Eno’s life – at London’s Barbican Centre. The doc chronicles – and references – Eno’s own creative process, and it unfolds across an intimate 90-minute sequence that changes every time it’s watched. The rendition we saw will never be seen again.

Brain One

To create Eno, filmmaker Gary Hustwit and digital artist Brendan Dawes fashioned software (called Brain One, an anagram, of course, of Brian Eno) that combines Eno’s interviews, unreleased archival footage and music into a singular viewing experience. Each rendering is dynamic and unique – there are some 59 quintillion possible versions.

According to the creators, there’s “so much material” Brain One can “choose” to inject into each viewing. Our version included myriad Bowie sequences (like the making of “Heroes”), Eno test-driving his first video camera in New York, a scene from another event at the Barbican (a meta moment of coincidence), pissing in Duchamp’s infamous urinal, and recent scenes from his home, where Eno was captured making music and spending time in his garden.

It’s tempting to think of Brain One as a machine that parses a reservoir of scenes to randomly curate a 90-minute film, but the AI – as is true of all AI – is trained on human-made parameters. It responds to tone and subject content.

For instance, the filmmakers used Oblique Strategies – a set of 100 cards, created by Eno and the artist Peter Schmidt in 1975, that feature provocative phrases meant to assist creativity – as narrative devices. For the doc, they filmed David Byrne and Laurie Anderson reading various cards, which – as they’re intended to do for the creative act – functioned as pivot points. When Brain One pulls a certain card, we veer down a different narrative pathway.

Our viewing concluded with Byrne reading a particularly simple strategy: “Go outside. Shut the door.”

Algorithms are not screwdrivers

In a post-film conversation, Eno fielded a question on modern generative systems – aka AI and algorithms. “Most of those algorithms are made by a few young Americans who want to make a lot of money,” he said. “Whoever designs the algorithms, designs the future.

“The ownership of the algorithms cannot be in the hands of Elon Musk and Zuckerberg,” he continued. “[Their] social media's sole purpose is to sow division, and division makes money.” 

In concert with that reality, it’s easy to understand Eno’s 2022 comments, as well as his reticence to get involved. Crypto is financed by lots of people who want to make a lot of money, and financial – not cultural – returns continue to be the guiding light for many crypto investors and builders.

We have to acknowledge, Eno said at the Barbican, that “algorithms are not neutral. They're not like screwdrivers.” So if the system isn’t working for us, we should try to change its parameters – as Eno does with his own generative systems.

“My approach,” he said in a 2005 interview, “is, although I don't interfere with the completion of a system, if the end result is not good, I'll ditch it and do something else."

As luck would have it, I got to see Eno twice last week. Last Thursday, he appeared at a Palestinian fundraiser at London’s Union Chapel, an evening that featured British musicians like Nadine Shah and Mogwai, as well as writers, activists and even a surprise appearance by Husam Zomlot, Palestine’s Ambassador to the UK (and previously, to the US).

Accompanied by the oud player Adnan Joubran, Eno read “Oh Rascal Children Of Gaza,” a poem written by Palestinian poet Khaled Juma during an Israeli bombardment in 2008. Eno’s presence was part of our collective attempt to ditch what, clearly, is a horrible end result in Palestine.

Hard Art is an extension of that perspective. It’s intervention that seeks to ditch the shit results of careless stewardship. Whether Metalabel is on-chain or not probably had nothing to do with Eno’s calculus. The important bit is that Metalabel is rooted in scenius principles, and it affords Hard Art the space to be better stewards. Like Eno, Metalabel rejects toxic notions of genius and distinction, and has faith that we are more “utterly aligned” than the division sown by “young Americans” might suggest.

And yet here I am, still elevating Eno from the multitude of utterly aligned artists and ordinary folk who have contributed to his “distinct” being.

Coda

In 2007, Eno wrote a piece for The Guardian called, “The Debt I Owe to Jon Hassell.” “It was a music I felt I'd been waiting for,” Eno wrote, remembering the first time he discovered his longtime friend and collaborator.

11 years later, I interviewed and profiled Hassell. Hassell and I then became friends. I was going to help him write his long-in-the-works book, The North and South of You, which represents a loose distinction that Hassell commonly makes: the elements of art that make us think (North) versus the elements that make us move (South). It’s that broader philosophy that envelops '“Fourth World,” the term Hassell used to describe his “unified primitive/futuristic sound,” which continues to influence modern electronic music.

Before Hassell passed away in 2021, I twice visited him at his home in LA. Sadly, I don’t think he was very happy. He was sick, and struggling to pay his bills. At times he was resentful, imagining a life that could have been. To me, and to others, he mentioned his exclusion from the 1981 Eno-Byrne record, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

At that time, Eno and Hassell had recently released Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics, and the latter was meant to make Bush of Ghosts, too. But Hassell claimed he couldn’t afford the flight to California where they were recording. Eno and Byrne made it anyways. And what most upset Hassell was hearing the end result, feeling like his own music had been appropriated without credit, and subsequently struggling to find his identity amidst an arts market that had already chosen its geniuses.

Wounds healed, though, and Hassell spoke of Eno only with love. He became the godfather of Eno’s daughters, and Hassell told me that, for decades, Eno helped support him through tough times.

But imagine if our culture didn’t lionize individuals at all. What if Hassell didn’t have to imagine having a name the size of Eno or Byrne, because we appreciated that they were all just ordinary people, utterly aligned, seeking polyphony.

Now go outside. Shut the door. 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.