8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

A
BLOG
FROM
NOWHERE

  • Biological Imperative

    Having a kid transition into adulthood in late 2025 and through 2026, this last year as I write this, has put a lot of perspective on my own life—as both a parent and as a creative soul endlessly seeking personal meaning through art and words.

    Kids are, often by a kind of cynical definition, a kind of legacy that demands a legacy.

    We parent for a million different reasons, but not the least among those reasons is the biological imperative to pass along a bit of ourselves.  That’s not selfishness or ego any more than it is the raw organic chemistry of life.

    And the physical passing of genes is the (relatively) easy part: simply having a kid, as difficult as that is for many, is step one in a lifelong process of a notion wrapped up in a word that often fails to do the effort justice: parenting.

    I reflect on these things and notice more and more each day that the Kid, for all her uniqueness, has embraced a kind of creative legacy from me: she dabbles in art, she writes about film, she plays with music, and she looks at the world through the same quirky lens that I tend to find distorts my perceptions of everything I see and do.

    This is modelling, sure. This is biased opportunities, of course. This is parenting, always.  But eighteen years of effort has also led to a kind of creative legacy of self that I have, probably as a side effect of just being open and transparent, have instilled on the next generation.

  • Avant Garde

    For a strange week in April my algorithm feed was full of videos, commentary and analysis about a curious French-Canadian music duo called Angine de poitrine [1] who, it seems, have washed ashore upon the cultural zeitgeist.

    Perhaps it is merely that my endless wanderings through the musicians internet have biased my perception and have only just momentarily shone a light on this thing and I am, as usual, a few steps behind in noticing. And certainly, I am in no good position to comment with meaning on the music itself, a microtonal eruption that has been described by others as noise, dissonance, or unlistenable. 

    I quite like it—and I bought an album and added it to my everyday playlist. I’m listening to it as I write this, in fact…

    Which is all for me to say that what I may be more qualified to comment on is the creative leap that such experimental projects embody. Angine de poitrine is the doing of something that I have merely being writing and thinking about: bending the rules, creating something unique, and experimenting outside of the traditional definition of marketable, sellable, commercial art.

    Succeeding, to boot.

    And while I’ll caveat that some of that aforementioned commentary I’ve seen on the duo has (unfairly, I think) framed the effort as merely a weird marketing gimmick, I would argue that such accusations miss the point entirely: that there is a tension in the heart of every true artist, trying to stand out and do something novel while simultaneously fitting in just enough to survive in a world that values standardization and commercial viability.

    Occasionally someone figures out that balance and it is a glorious cacophony.

  • Sonic Vibes

    Since I started writing this blog I have been working on a parallel personal project: I’ve been honing, refining and curating a playlist for working.

    As I write this, it contains nearly seven hours of music.

    I’ve gone through countless musical phases in my life when it comes to finding something chill to plug into my ears while I’m trying to write or be creative. For a few years I was really into LoFi but I think I’ve grown out of that at the moment, so instead I started putting songs into a “working” playlist. When I turn that on I have confidence that I’ll have a quiet, downbeat, ambient, vocal-lite collection of songs and sounds to listen to that meet a number of criteria: they are calming, they are limited in their distraction, and they fill the background.

    Your own playlist will certainly vary by taste, but I can’t help but highly recommend the exercise of making one.

    Make one for quiet working.

    Make one for inspired sketching.

    Make one to play as you get into the mood to make other music.

    Make one each for lightness and darkness and happiness and melancholy, too.

    Sound can be an integral part of your creative space, and it is a worthwhile exercise to take the time and effort to decorate that space with a sonic vibe that fits the need of the moments you will spend there creating.

  • Health Full, two

    (Continued from Health Full)

    I haven’t quite worked up the mental energy to call myself retired at this point. I’m not, really. Folks who have escaped the waged-employee chains and can work optionally or casually but who are still not of some societally agreed upon age of actual retirement we tend to use the word semi-retired. It’s code for I finished the capitalism main game storyline and now I’m going back for fun to play the parts I may have missed. 

    My experience though has often been one of adaptation, and while my brain may repeatedly tell me that I’m way too young to be calling myself retired, my body has had other ideas.

    I’m not twenty anymore.

    I strain my back sleeping wrong. My eyes get sore from looking at a screen for longer than an hour. I really need a comfortable chair when I sit at the piano. I probably shouldn’t lift too many heavy objects anymore if I can avoid it. Sitting in the grass to sketch means my knees are going to hurt when I try to stand up again. 

    Creativity is slower, more purposeful, and needs to account for mobility, agility and maybe even time to squeeze in an afternoon nap.

    It’s not weakness to acknowledge aging at any stage of the process. Knowing yourself and your limitations—and importantly, accepting it— as you work towards anything is a superpower, not a submission, even if it often seems precisely the opposite.

  • Tools Troubles

    Fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan told the world that the medium is the message[1], and I have long taken that to mean that it is as valuable to study the tools and techniques as the final product if we are ever to understand the whole.

    The artist can easily get lost in the tools, though. Photographers can bang on about their camera specs. Writers can wax poetic about their favourite keyboards. And musicians these days it seems are just as apt to post content about the subtle tonality differences between brands of violin strings as share their music.

    Yet, creativity is and always be an intimacy with the tools and techniques. The art and the mechanisms that enable it are inseparable and interwoven as two things can be. 

    Maybe that’s why we get hung up on the medium and the message and often confuse the effort to concentrate on them both with the attention they deserve. 

    Or maybe I just like writing about my toys and I am going to devote some space on this blog to share my thoughts about keyboards, cameras and violin strings. It wouldn’t be the first time, after all.

    Under the category of Tools & Troubles, I’lll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.