Creative Mode On

 

The internet makes a sort of engagement with music possible that’s incredibly expansive in its reach yet utterly introverted in its nature. In order to appreciate this strange predicament, consider the following analogy...

A lot of us seem to share an intuitive sense of recorded music in its entirety as a landscape that we can inhabit and explore. Genres, idioms, and epochs make different regions within the whole. The output of specific artists can form distinctive spaces within these regions, and specific works can function as landmarks.

In this “space”, just like in the real world, there inevitably are some areas with which we’re more acquainted than others. We each have our childhood stomping grounds, places we regularly visit, perhaps even somewhere we’d call home. For each of us there are also regions too remote or daunting to explore, requiring long treks beyond all familiar ground, or the scaling of difficult terrain. At least, there used to be areas like that.

The internet hasn’t changed this space itself so much as changed the way we move around in it. In the old days, you had to explore along the dirt roads of physical object acquisition. This kind of travel meant ingratiating yourself with the locals any time you wanted to feel out a new region. If you wanted to learn about punk rock, hear all the best obscure singles and live recordings, you had to hang out in the right social spheres at the right venues, be initiated into the guild. Having unrestricted internet access grants something similar to what typing “/gamemode 1” did in Minecraft. You can leave slow, grounded methods of travel behind and go anywhere you want… without directly interacting with a single person, let alone investing in a particular community. Each of us can sail over forests and villages, dropping in at opportune times, yet remaining undetected.

 

choose your Guild

It’s easy to forget that this is a miraculous development. With the exploration process now so much less arduous than before, we can each explore with so much latitude, make incredible discoveries that we never would have imagined from our old parochial confines. And we can do so without having to play elitist, cliquey games of access. Whoever you are, whether you’d fit the guild’s admission criteria or not, you get to experience this.

(Reading music discussions from the pre-internet era, or from its early days, it’s both amusing and slightly frustrating how much conversation space is devoted to trading now-redundant advice on how to hear the damn stuff in the first place. Tiktok influencer Luke Davis described one early thread as “a nice period piece in that you’ve got the top record collectors in the world at the time tentatively feeling out a terrain that every 14 year old in the world now knows”.)

 

There are also losses in this new mode of engagement. First, there’s a reason video games sometimes withhold cool instant travel methods until the late stages. The excitement of unlimited options can give way to ungratefulness and in turn boredom; when you could be anywhere, it’s easy to lose interest in what’s actually in front of you. And second, involving yourself with local communities isn’t all bad. Getting a feel for the culture of a place enriches your appreciation for it. Cultural context has the potential to enhance both the directness and depth of art.

Maybe this historically new type of listener will bring about the death of music. But I’m hoping that instead we’ll carry it to unprecedented heights. Whatever the case, once you can float off the ground, sticking to the footpaths seems absurd. Who are you fooling? Your relationship with the land has irrevocably changed. So if I and many other listeners are stuck with this mode of engagement, we may as well explore it, or rather explore with it. 

Imagination is what can save us in this state. Factual knowledge, the old currency, is now easy to come by and therefore of diminished value. That sort of information is out there for you to find if you think it'll help your travels. No, the bigger concern is that you “see every detail clearly, but can’t grasp the meaning”. If, as suggested above, our enhanced freedom of movement comes at the cost of cheapening the world around us, it’s on us to figure out how to overcome the sense-dulling impatience that comes with too many options and too little investment. Instead of waiting for music to enter us, we have to enter it. So close your eyes and let the prosaic details of your bedroom melt away! Calibrate your psyche and let yourself get carried away to a new reality! You may be different when you get back. (Or is it the world that's changed?)

Everything that follows is a search for—and a hopelessly incomplete log of—the ways in. We’re looking for concepts that allow us to not just hear but immerse ourselves in the music, concepts that make the landscape overwhelmingly vivid. My focus is firmly on electronic music (nonvocal stuff from America and Western Europe, at that), but this discussion is surely relevant to other kinds of music, as well as other artforms entirely. 

 

 

(I’ll also make plenty of sweeping historical claims and speculative claims about artists’ intentions... as is fun to do. Just keep in mind that this isn't supposed to be proper journalism or scholarship. It’s all in service of our true goal: putting the imagination's gears in motion.)