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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.
Nothingness
As a young child, while walking aimlessly around my grandparents’ kitchen, staring at the brown tiled floor, I was suddenly struck by a confounding question: what if there was nothing? And not your Buddhist ‘emptiness’ variety of nothing, but a never was, never could be, Neverending Story kind of nothing. I was suddenly frozen, unable to shake the visceral dolor of the idea. Still, to this day, that kitchen floor is seared into my mind.
I was reminded of that moment during my slow journey through Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality, when the physicist cited Gottfried Leibniz’s famous query: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
Greene recalls a childhood memory of his own, having the same “deeply troubling” thought that had him “pacing” about his room.
He recalls nothingness in his explanation of the “Ultimate Multiverse,” one of the many multiverse types he presents in the book, in which every possible universe exists. Greene borrows from Borges’ La Biblioteca de Babel, where the books of Babel are written in the language of mathematics.
“No longer do most equations lie dormant,” Greene writes, “with only the lucky few mysteriously coaxed to life through physical instantiation.” If every kind of universe exists, he posits, then that must include one that has – and always has had – nothing.
In the encounter, I relived the sensation of my childhood dread. But I also realized the exercise could be a useful tool, akin to the magical realists and futurists who re-interpret pasts and skew realities so that we might – from a safe distance – reflect on the world we live in today.
Promotional Principles
“We love to create but dislike hate to publish.”
That’s the mid-edit opener to Metalabel’s public, in-progress, collaborative Google doc titled “Promotional Principles for Creative People.” The strikethrough is fitting – for now it’s a suggested edit, but I think they should leave it – because it indicates an important resolve.
“Making something new is all experimentation and possibility and exploration,” they write. “Publishing means promoting which means venturing into the market to show our wares.”
The creative process is rich and infinite until that moment when other eyes and hearts emerge on the periphery, when “what if they hate it?” obfuscates all erstwhile fertility. The reality that people just might hate it becomes a brick wall, but the absolute soul-crushing torment of “what if I never do anything with this and it just sits at home or on some shadow URL, unknown, untouched, dying before it ever lived, doomed to nothingness” is so much worse.
As someone who spends too much time in that purgatory, I was quite inspired by Metalabel’s stepwise path toward resilient self-promotion, so I’ve shared it below – alongside some of my favorite sentiments (you can review the doc and collaborate here):
Do it for yourself. “Liberate yourself from caring about immediate responses to your work.”
Small is beautiful. “By setting the ceiling for how much interest we’re looking for, we define our success.”
Celebrate the night before. “Our friends at MSCHF once shared a fascinating anecdote: they always have release parties for their drops the night before. They want to celebrate making the work rather than how the work is received.”
Context is queen. “When people glimpse what drives our work they feel more connected and empathetic to it. They think of it as their discovery, something they feel warm and proud for being a part of.”
Release Windowing. “Establish the context of your work and build anticipation and understanding of it in your public’s eyes.”
Be prepared for release day. “We’ve learned to schedule our posts and time away from our keyboard when we put out new work” to avoid the dopamine-seeking “slot machine eyes.”
Release in different mediums. “When it comes to bigger pieces or work you wish to cycle into the cultural eye through wider circles, explore the ways in which expressing it in another format can introduce it to a new audience and enrich the connections you already have.”
Host an event or talk. These serve as an “anchor point” and “a new excuse to talk about the work during and after the event itself.”
Multiple people sharing, not just one. “It makes a huge difference when multiple contributors are committed to a plan for promoting a release…Use group threads to share information, but to get anything done go direct.”
Scenes. “Connect with the wider scene of people who make work like you.”
Make the next thing. “In the closing pages of Virgil Abloh’s life retrospective Figures of Speech he writes: ‘Upon creating this dense book of work, I have realized one thing at the end: it’s all worth nothing compared to the freedom to express the next idea.’”
Wendy Carlos
In what feels supplemental to Promotional Principles, The Creative Independent – another Yancey Strickler joint – recently released On Making a Living as an Artist, a physical zine with “interviews, wisdom, and guides that illuminate the trials and tribulations of living a creative life, as told by working artists.” It “features contributions from everyone from Philip Glass to L’Rain.”
L’Rain, a musician, is Taja Cheek. She’s a friend of a friend, and I interviewed her in 2016 when she was the Curatorial Assistant of MoMA PS1. We chatted ahead of the museum’s excellent Warm Up series, a summer concert program that features (mostly electronic) artists reflective of PS1’s own pioneering spirit.
When I asked her who, of anyone in the world, she’d choose to invite to Warm Up, she said Wendy Carlos. “She would never do it because she doesn’t like dance music,” she told me. “I mean she’s been so influential in the development of Moog…it would be awesome to have her here.”
For those who don’t know, Carlos was an early Moog pioneer. Her debut 1968 record Switched-on-Bach – a collection of Bach pieces rendered on the Moog synthesizer – was huge. The album topped US classical charts for three years. It won three Grammys and became the second classical album ever to go platinum.
More than that, it gave the Moog international visibility, serving as the promotional force that helped make Moog a household name. Without her effort, would we have Kraftwerk, who used the Minimoog to make Autobahn? If no Kraftwerk, would we have Aphex Twin or Depeche Mode? Or the Belleville Three, who fused Kraftwerk melodies with funk rhythms to create what became known as techno?
And music was not the only realm in which Carlos was a pioneer. Born as Walter Carlos, Wendy began hormone replacement therapy in 1968. This was when identifying as trans had little public example or precedent, and for years she was confused, hiding it from view, gluing sideburns to her face for public appearances. In 1979, she disclosed her identity as a trans woman, which helped normalize the idea of transgender identity. And if she hadn’t, might that identity be in even more danger today than it already is?
The intention here is not to drown us in a sea of ‘what if’s, but to revel in our existence in this world that has what it has. If the “Ultimate Multiverse” is our reality, than how lucky we are to be in this universe – to have music and film and love and boldness that leaves us breathless and saying ‘thank god this thing exists!’
And more than anything else, how incredible that we have so many creators who have risked that perilous path, who have heralded Ben Folds’ clear, unfortunate truth – “If you don’t want anything to do with [self promotion], stay in your fucking basement” (because it’s a well-known fact that it’s hard to make a living if you “stay in your fucking basement”), and that part of what moves people is the sheer fucking courage of putting ‘something’ into a world where before there was nothing like it.
With historical context, things like synthesizers and trans rights can feel inevitable (I’m going to give the US an incredibly generous benefit of the doubt that we’re experiencing an unfortunate blip in our long arc of justice), but in the moments of release, when that brick wall looms, that ‘something’ – even when that ‘something’ is our truth – feels garish and unsafe.
That brick wall is a regular feature in my own therapy and self-work, and recently a coach shared these salient words that I’ve since plastered onto my wall:
“What if it’s as good as you think it is? What if you shared it with the world with the same beauty and care that you put into it making it?”
A helpful – though elusive – addition to that sentiment, which Metalabel voiced in a quippy parenthetical, is: “(Keep in mind, not giving a f#!k is advised.)”
Coda
Alongside studying music at Brown, Carlos also studied physics, and I like to imagine that she’s probed the abyss of nothingness – or at least something very different than what we have, like one of the infinite alternatives of an “Ultimate Multiverse.”
That infinity, of all the possible things that aren’t nothing, can also be a lot. But we’re already pretty familiar with that infinity. The Internet, in many ways, is our own little manifestation of the “Ultimate Multiverse,” a place where “no longer do most equations lie dormant,” the substrate for anything you can possibly imagine, where we can express our multitudes – all of the ‘somethings’ that prove we’re here.
Metalabel’s Yancey Strickler was the most recent guest on our podcast, For the Record, and I’ll leave you with his thoughts:
“We are forming the institutions and the norms and the social structures that might define the next thousand years of human experience. I think there's going to be a pre-Internet and a post-Internet human experience, like the way the Victorian age feels to us now is what anything from the 1980s and earlier will feel like to the world from now on.
But what we're finding is that to go online is to become re-individualized. And what you look like, what people in your life think of you, where you're from – all those things are available for you to rewrite and revise and invent and to do that as many times as you wish. What's happening is that all of our slices of self [are online].
There's a version of me that loves music. There's a version that could be talking about basketball. There's a version that could be talking about philosophy. There are all these different versions of me that are all alive online right now congregating. Maybe two of our alts are talking right now somewhere. It's possible, right?
And algorithmically they are. Maybe we're being fed to each other. So there's this other universe where that is happening. What we're going to do is we're going to build communal structures and institutions that are meant to provide safety, security, love, economic needs, and just basic needs in a more digital existence.
People have gotten excited about DAOs and things the past few years, but I've always felt like those things are the smoke and not the fire. And the fire is us being invited to redefine our identity in this whole other place, and the infinite exploration space it gives our inner selves to meet.”
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.