Those that follow me on Facebook and Twitter may have noticed I’ve become rather animated about politics these days. When I started my adventures as Cosmograf, I formed a firm opinion that it was best if musicians simply stayed out of political issues. I watched as some of my contemporaries clearly put their mark in the sand and pinned their party political allegiances to the mast, and I thought they were making a terrible mistake, dividing and alienating a potential audience when, it was all too difficult to get any attention at all for your music.
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Many of us carry an inner philosophy of ‘goal based thinking’. I know I do and like many learned behaviours it probably stems from childhood. Much of our indoctrination in early life and at school is to strive and achieve. Goal based thinking is being overly obsessed with the result of your endeavours and the expectation of achieving it. Needless to say if all you can see is the end goal, you’ll never learn to appreciate the journey and your world will become pointless if the end goal is never reached.
As a child I used to make the odd Airfix model or two. From the moment I took the plastic parts out of the box, I was in a race to produce a model that looked exactly like the picture on the box. All I could see was the image of my gleaming creation, complete in its Humbrol’d livery and carefully applied waterslide transfers…But it never quite ended up like I envisioned. I’d get glue on the windows of the cockpit or I’d snap the undercarriage of the aircraft before I’d fixed it in place. Then I might lose a few of the smallest pieces, spend a fruitless few minutes trying to find them and give up soon after in a heap of frustration.. The few models that I did finally get to fruition basically gathered dust on a shelf until wheels or wings got broken and they were discarded…
The journey to my goal was not at all enjoyable and if the goal was ever reached, it wasn’t valued.
An alternative approach to goal based thinking is ‘value based thinking’ where you consider the journey as part of the experience of reaching your goal.
In my Airfix model example I should have spent more time preparing my tools, mating the parts correctly, enjoying the progression of the build over a much longer time period. Once it was completed I’d have looked upon the finished model with pride, and felt good about the journey it took to create it. I’d have also valued the finished product more and taken more steps to protect it for the long term like putting it in a presentation case.
Although a complete failure at Airfix models, I’ve had more success applying this mindset to my music. Just as with the Airfix model, I rushed my first attempts and made terrible mistakes that couldn’t be fixed without starting again. I eventually learned to take more care, and thoroughly study the tools and the engineering and craft of producing music. This provided a much deeper sense of achievement and enjoyment from making a new record.
But I have to be really honest, once an album is released, it’s creatively, a dead end for me. There is no joy creatively for me from that point on unless I’m going to make a video or some other artistic offshoot. Once the album is finished I then have to switch from an artistic perspective to a marketing and business one in order to give it the best chance of being a success…and this can be a painful process. For many artists it’s so painful that they neglect to give it any attention at all and their newly created masterpiece fails to find an audience.
Whilst it’s always gratifying to see people’s responses to the music, mentally I’ve moved on to the next creation, the next journey.
In an ideal world I’d like to completely bail out of the process at this stage and hand everything over to someone in the PR arena. I’d argue that musicians are the worst people to promote and sell the record. You need to be dreadfully thick skinned to take the rejection of a cynical and disinterested press and utterly persistent to the point of annoyance in doggedly getting the attention it needs.
But hiring good PR professionals takes a great deal of money and there is no guarantee any of that investment will pay dividends. I’ve learned a lot about myself over the last few releases and even more from running my tiny label Gravity Dream Music. I have an endless capacity for details in pursuit of what I personally consider to be the goal, even if that goal is actually far removed from anything that the audience will ever recognise. This is a dangerous path for any commercial venture because it means all your time and money will be eaten up in tiny details that your audience might not ever see. But equally it’s your unique superpower. When you spend a huge amount of time perfecting these tiny details, the overall impression of the finished product to someone else is that you’ve made something impossible or magical.
Someone posted on Facebook yesterday that if you weren’t completely moved by the programme that they had just watched, then ‘unfriend me now’…..I wasn’t moved by it all, so I did unfriend him…..not because I disagreed with him, but in fact because I was intolerant of being told what I should or shouldn’t like.
The invention of the Compact Disc format that we know and love today is dated to around 1980 when Philips and Sony settled on the ‘Red Book’ standard, specifying a 120mm optical disc containing 2 channels of digitally encoded audio, with 16bit values sampled at 44100Hz. The format could store 74min-80mins of music on a single disc which was almost double capacity of a typical long playing record.
I’ve decided to start writing more about audio because I’m endlessly fascinated by the whole thing and it helps me to cement my own knowledge in what I do in producing Cosmograf records and for other artists.
Every day is school day and I kind of think it is a responsibility to have some answers for those people that do see me as having some knowledge and expertise in this area. I’m also interested in the misunderstandings that a lot of people seem to have about audio particularly in the area of playback and the myth and legend that seems to come up when people start banding around file formats, bit depths and sample rates and maybe not understanding what those numbers mean. I don’t want to start a war with audiophiles, as we are very much on the same side in terms of caring about audio quality, but I do think there’s a clear disconnect between what we do in the studio and what people think we do in reference to what they hear on their hi-fi systems.
This week is Mental Health Awareness Week and I think a perfect time to turn your gaze inward at the world within, rather than the one outside.
I’ve been on a journey of self-discovery for a few years now following my own issues with mental health and I’ve learned a lot of things and talked to some amazing people about their views on what makes us all tick.
As many of you know I’m really into metaphors and allegories, it’s always a big feature of my music but I saw this in my other job today and it got me thinking.
I was dismantling this manual wind Omega watch from the 1960s and spotted that a previous watchmaker had scratched their name and the date under the ratchet wheel (you can just see it in the picture).
Now I’ve seen this kind of thing many times before and it’s common practice to inscribe the inside rear of watch case after a service, but not on the movement itself and especially where it’s been inscribed in such a hidden position. It’s completely obscured from view in every possible way and the only person that will see this is the next watchmaker that services the watch, in this case me. So why on earth would they do this? Well there’s only one reason I can think of and it’s some sort of marking your territory thing, a bit like when my dog has to relieve himself on every single lamp post on his walks. He’s leaving a message completely invisible to humans, to all the other dogs that this is his patch and I’ve been here… But even armed with this insight I’m still baffled…
I’m about to release my next album, a few weeks away now and someone asked me a great question recently which I think deserves a wider audience because I think the answer is relevant to any anyone that has ever presented any artistic endeavour to a wider audience. WARNING. This is a long rambling post so skip to the tl; dr below if you don’t have the time.
Are you nervous before releasing new music? (Thanks to Jean-Maurice Bicard for this great question)
This sounds morbid, but I think a great way to check how your life is going is to imagine yourself at the end of it looking backward to the point you are now…Are you heading in the right direction? And are you going to achieve all the things you wanted to?…Let’s face it there’s nothing you can do about changing anything from now to birth, but you can do a lot to change your life from your current position to death.
I’m interested in the concept of your mind being like a constantly broadcasting TV set. Your thoughts are like a drama playing out in your favourite film or soap opera. You start to feel anxiety as the danger surfaces or the monster appears suddenly from the shadows. You feel warm when your favourite character walks along a beautiful beach with a golden sunset and you feel the icy blast and loneliness when they are trudging through snow, desperately trying to reach some remote and dangerous destination.