The ability to coin it is just the tipping point; what is with these things that make our lives “easier?”
Is there something to be said about the valor and experience of having to do something, go somewhere or be someone?
When I talked to New York’s lo-fi dram pop duo Phantom Handshakes, they talked about being inspired by the “in-betweens,” the liminal spaces of work and play, walking on the street or on the train.
What do we gain by having it all at our fingertips?
Wilson from Raleigh’s Thirsty Curses mentions Christine Rosen’s “The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World,” elaborating on the advantages of “the trivial” — when you stop for gas, chatting with someone near you; meeting thy neighbor.
Proponents of the digital sphere talk about finding niche communities and meeting people you never would’ve before, and I wonder how good of a thing that is.
By nature of living in the same area, you’re likely to share more in common with your neighbor than someone through the phone.
I also want to posit about our associations of pleasure; it worries me that increasingly, our brains are accustomed and acquainted to eliciting pleasure from the silicon, plastic, glass, heavy metals and the like that go into these handheld dopamine machines.
When there are so many people in this world to love, to get attached to, to feel ties to and advocate for, I worry about machine-learning in our brains, making it so that the way we feel good is through touching plastic plugged in to some ether.
Beyond this, I wonder what that feel-good is.
Is dopamine the most sustainable neurotransmitter? I dont think so. Mostly built on action potential, it’s probably the reason we all feel so fried, so constantly tube-fed and sedated, which averages “content.”
Furthermore, what are the distinctions between art, entertainment, content and media? Where do we fit within that ecosystem? Where do we want to?
I encourage the harder route, the longer path, the possibly more scenic one, enjoying the effort of critical thinking in the hope it might dig us out of our incompetency hole.
Q: In regards to algorithms and wanting to not spit back up something that people will definitely enjoy and testing the audience, how do you play with experimentation in your music?
Connor Tomlinson: I see the role of art being to expand your horizons in some way. The art, especially music, that I tend to fall in love with, is the stuff that makes me a little uncomfortable.
And I think people who listen to our music will kind of pick up on that. It tends to be radically different from release to release.
It’s hard to put a genre label on it, maybe each individual song, sure, but song to song, it’s a little more unexpected. And then, in my song writing, I really want to present unconventional song structures, unconventional combinations of sounds, things that get people thinking.
Matt Stretz: I feel like most artists are incentivized to make music they feel the listener is going to want, and so I feel like it’s kind of avant garde to make music that’s more designed to be a piece of art. What we’re witnessing is a lot of people fed up with the status quo.
Photo via Impulse Machines “Margwa” video
Connor Tomlinson: The whole 35 millimeter landscape format we’re used to in film that gets the label of art in visual media is equally arbitrary and incultured as the current vertical reel format. And I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say, ‘what can we do interesting vertically in video?’
Q: Can you distinguish between ‘media,’ ‘art,’ ‘content,’ and ‘entertainment’?
Connor Tomlinson: I think it’s dangerous to start to ascribe the meaning of art to intention or the artist’s side of the process if you’re experiencing it as an audience member.
Now, of course, knowing things about how it was created, like this was written over 10 years; it’s a masterpiece, is going to be nice.
Or if, like, a lot of really important jazz recordings, this was improvised on the spot, this was a moment of genius, and that will affect your perception.
But ultimately, the difference between between art and content, I think, is about how the the audience relates to it. Is it something that sticks with you, that you carry this actual work with you, or is it a means to fill time and for the producer, a means to gain subscribers, gain profit or feed into whatever system they’re trying to game? Which, of course, gaming the system, that’s what you need to do to survive.
I think every artist needs to know how to create content, but it’s equally possible to imbue content with the types of characteristics that’ll, like, really catch your audience off guard.
photo via Impulse Machines “Margwa” video
Q: If art is proportional to labor spent, how do we regard spontaneous creation this way?
Matt Stretz: I feel like art is viewed through a weird, romanticized lens where people want to gatekeep what is or is not art based on their own expectations and notions of what art is.
Zac Strum: I think the constant struggle as an artist is, once you know what’s happening, you’re desensitized to it, whereas other people who don’t know what’s happening still love it. That’s why artists are not allowed to judge their own work at any point.
photo via impulse machines “Parasomnia” teaser
Q: What intersections do you see between science and art?
Connor Tomlinson: The great leaps forward in science often come from the same types of places as art. A lot of what enlightenment theory was based on came to people in dreams.
photo via Impulse Machine’s “Ultraviolent” visualizer
I think the difference is not so much in methods as much as aims. So art, you’re trying to create experiences for people.
Science, you’re trying to establish correlations, establish models. You’re also trying to create things.
It’s equally productive, but the goal is more for something that will eventually be able to be used in engineering, in order to build things that also create experiences, so maybe we can say that art is a combination of science and engineering.
It’s just geared more towards the effects, more towards creating emotional responses, rather than creating different ways of living in the world through material things.
Ethan Bowen: I think the main way the two subjects are tied together is through experimentation, because in both you are taking what you have and finding different ways to put them together in order to understand the world around you better.
And I think it comes down to just a way of understanding the world around you. But the main difference comes in the degree of objectivity or subjectivity with each individual topic.
So science is a very objective way of looking at the world and understanding how it works and the inner machinations and art is a way of interpreting that in a very subjective manner.
photo via Impulse Machine’s ‘waterboarding loop’
Q: What’s the relationship between film and music?
Connor Tomlinson: Well, they are two uniquely powerful forms of art.
I’d also lump theater in there, in the sense that they’re time-based. It’s not just something that exists for itself static; they can only exist unfolding over time. And so you experience them very differently from how you experience painting or sculpture, and because there’s this movement that’s essential to music and to film.
And of course, sound is very important to both of them. Silent film was at one point a thing, but even then, they felt a need to bring in live orchestras.
I see them as, like, two sides of the same coin. Film captures the visual, more literal interpretation of art, and audio and music is more subliminal.
In film, you can show something to somebody, but in audio, you kind of have to figure out ways to tell that same story. So I feel like they go hand in hand, and I feel you almost need both to compliment each other. I feel like music can enhance emotions in film and vice versa, with the music.
photo via Impulse Machine’s “Margwa”
Matt Stretz: If you’re listening to music, you’re thinking of music and if you’re listening to music, you’re thinking of a thing in your head. You have a picture of what’s happening to an extent.
Ethan Bowen: It’s important to understand the medium you’re working with and the expectations thereof, so you can subvert them whenever necessary in order to create art that truly makes people think.
Because if you know what people want and you give them what they want, yes, they’re going to be happy, but it’s not going to give them the same level of engagement that they might have otherwise.
photo from Impulse Machine’s “Margwa”
Q: What can we learn from jazz?
Connor Tomlinson: Something I think a lot about is effectual reasoning versus like, causal reasoning.
And I think jazz speaks to this idea that rather than having in mind what something’s going to sound like and going about creating what you have in mind, you need to just kind of take what you have in front of you and take what you have behind you — your band, what they’re playing, what notes you have played — and commit to your course.
There are no wrong notes in jazz, because if you play wrong notes it becomes the start of the next phrase, which is going to be right. I think it’s the wisdom of jazz.
photo via Impulse Machine’s “Masquerade” loop
Ethan Bowen: It even goes beyond understanding theory.
At that point, you have to understand conversation, which I think is how it ties into the languages we speak as people, because at the end of the day, math, english, music, they’re all languages that we speak and all ways of interpreting the world around us.
If you start to learn the language, then you start to appreciate the things they’re saying.
Q: Advice?
Zac Strum: If we’re doing drawing stuff, don’t go get your massive canvas and tell yourself, ‘I’m just gonna go for it,’ go in your notebook, draw out some stuff, but have fun with it.
Don’t be like, ‘I need to make a realistic human hand.’ Start to draw human hand. If it becomes unrealistic, practice how to mold that into something fun.
Like, I can take a picture of a hand if you want a picture of a hand, but you can’t get a picture of what I’m thinking of. You can’t get a picture of what I’m even not thinking of because I messed up in the drawing and had to rework it.
Go in with an idea, not an expectation. Have the idea of what you want to make, except don’t hold yourself to your expectation of what you want to make, because if you mess up drawing a centipede and it turns into a weird abomination, boom, you just discovered a new bug. Having an essence of the thing is what you’re shooting for.
Similar to music, if you’re trying to write a metal song that you want to, then be like this chaotic entity.
It has to have the basis, the skeleton. But then you gotta decorate it with all these other places and know when to break that skeleton, totally unhinge some bones, dislocate a shoulder, too.
Love Patio was formed “in 1987 by Ken Fabricatore and Mikael Jacobson while they attended the Musician’s Institute in Hollywood, CA.The two conducted late-night jam sessions, which turned into recordings via a Tascam cassette 4-track machine.”
Now they’ve released their debut album, ‘”Debut Album,” an emulsion of jazzy flow and indie jamming.
“I probably started playing drums at 13. And so even though I play guitar on LOVE PATIO tracks, I’m primarily a drummer. That’s what I moved out to California for. Joined all the bands in high school—jazz band, Pep Band, Concert Band—then moved to Florida, started playing in punk rock bands in Gainesville back in the early, mid-80s,” Ken recalls.
For Mikael, the journey started even earlier: “I played music from the time I was a kid, and started with piano and drums and some guitar, and finally bass, which became my main instrument.”
They tell me about music school in Hollywood in the 80’s and DIY scenes, saying:
“It was kind of the peak of hair metal. But there was also another thing… there was certainly an underground. We were both going to see Jane’s Addiction all the time, Chili Peppers all the time. Probably a handful of other bands.
“Beyond just playing music, theres the community of it for me, and not just Hollywood—Gainesville, New York—it was all grassroots. It was making your own flyers, handing them out to your friends, handing them out to girls you liked, just getting people to a show, basically getting an event going. Now, the rest was up to you. If your band sucked, people weren’t going to keep coming to it. It was just, I don’t know, it was more organic.”
And on the note of organic community, they mention the largest of all:
“I got into the Grateful Dead when I was probably 24, and I would say they were about the ultimate of a band creating a community. Gosh, over six years, I went to 135 Grateful Dead concerts. That absolutely became my world because of this one band, and I wasn’t alone.”
Beyond live music, we discussed digitization, what ‘making it’ looks like across time and music genres.
“What we would have given to be digital back in the 80s! We were so limited with four-track cassettes. You could bounce them down just a little bit to get some extra tracks going, but at best, you could get maybe seven different things going on without the sound degrading.
“But, at the same time, that lack of technology really was a good thing. That was all we had. There was minimal distraction. I don’t know how people get stuff done today. That was it—it just felt like that was all I was doing, all day long, going to class and coming home and recording, just all day long. I had something like 135 four-track tapes full of music.
“As much as digital is at our fingertips, I do think there’s been a resurgence of vinyl because it doesn’t have that compressed sound. Some people don’t care, but other people do. I have a record player, and I like it. It’s something I enjoy. That’s why I wanted to put out an album.”
Touching on this importance of music to personhood, Ken shares its intraperonal benefits, saying, “I try to put in 30 minutes on my guitar every day. It just helps with my overall mental attitude, puts me in a good mood. It clears my head. I would equate it to either gardening or going for a jog.
“I constantly have melodies going through my head. I constantly have drum patterns going through my head, and it doesn’t leave you.”
The passage of time and the digital revolution have changed things, but some things stay the same: a tune to keep you going and people to jam with.
Indie rock trio, Goddamn Wolves (GW), releases new album “We’re Doomed” riffing on humanity’s fate, playing on what it’ll take to reach an abysmal state, ultimately concluding as long as we’re trying there’s hope, creation and expression for yourself.
“It’s extremely valuable. It’s really all we got going for us.”
How do you find music?
Is it a neighbor? Coworker?
Did someone let you know about a local band? Is it a common melody through a town, is it the resources and motifs from a certain region?
Local music can dream.
“I like you humans,” says Drew Foglia when referencing sourcing songs from algorithms or individuals.
A chicken and the egg situation, which comes first, interest in diverse connective music and then space, or is space provided for it and introduced intravenously?
We might ask ourselves this at the radio, when we make space for collective amalgamations of genres and influences we’re drafting and concoction of difference, synchrony and exposure.
Foglia, drummer for Goddamn Wolves says, “I love it, it has opened me to more genres. Even with all the algorithms and everything, you humans do it better.”
Can a corporate system say the same?
“Streaming corporate monoliths,” as described by Chris Weilding, lead singer for GW describes.
Would you want music from an AI or a person, what would the differences be?
When we think of AI as liberating us, cleaning the obsolete that’s holding us back from creative pursuits, can we chicken and egg it, ask for the space to get it or create space to make it real. Can we say we feel liberated by being “assisted by AI?”
What does the algorithm want and what does it want from you?
What does it say about us that we’re so ‘brain-rotted’ we can’t be bothered with tasks that might aid in our critical thinking instead of offloading and uploading into a machine.
Professor Burgess posits on this track, plugged into our devices like an embryonic sac, you’re less likely to care about your environment around you slowly burning or flooding, is it an ideal to be passive, to be sedated, to feel nothing, rubbed raw by the world.
Are we losing some of our humanity when we turn to an algorithm, are we losing nuance and the subjective nature of one’s experience of the world and ways to embrace and channel it?
Drew says “it crushes me that more people can’t make a living doing this, it just means I can only surmise that it means there’s a lot of artistic expression getting squelched. There are a lot of people that aren’t able to express themselves artistically because there’s too much pressure, there’s too much of a requirement to spend too much of our time just surviving, right?”
We’re at a standstill, a fork in the road. Do we accept the american algorithm being fed to us, or do we ask each other what we think, ask each other what we’re listening to. Why do you like it?
Chris Wielding suggests “the way things are now it’s clear that the the the only response that’s going to work is, is actions outside of the institutions that exist, rethinking everything, because it’s just not going to work the way it’s going now, I think in a grassroots way”.
Elaborating on creation beyond the system and its feedback mechanisms, saying, “Even if no one sees it, if you’re writing a song in your bedroom, and you’ve you finished a song, you wrote a song, you wrote a poem, or you made a painting, it just makes the world a better place.”
Expanding, “And I think we get trapped into it, if someone from the outside doesn’t appreciate it, or if you don’t make money from it, it’s not valuable. It’s extremely valuable. It’s really all we got going for us.”
It’s not enough to survive; we’re meaning making machines that create stories to share with each other, feelings to be had, movements to propel.
Maybe we’re not so doomed, supported by Laura McCullough tying it back to their current project, “if you check out the lyrics to ‘We’re Doomed,’ you know, it’s actually not all doom and gloom. Chris’s lyrics say when everybody gives up, that’s when we’re doomed, right? There’s always more we can do.”
So write a song, paint something and call it art. Ask a friend what they’ve been listening to and what shows they’re seeing.
Remember the people around you will assist you in more fulfilling ways than an energy-guzzling, water-bubbling AI could ever. Feel it all, the doom, gloom and hope
