8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

A
BLOG
FROM
NOWHERE

  • Opinionated Facts

    My opinion is not fact.

    Elsewhere, I do a lot of writing about critical thinking and evidence-based inquiry. That is to say, I am curious about curiosity and the mechanisms by which we learn, know, and believe things to be true.

    If they are actually true is an entirely different matter, of course.

    I was watching a video the other day, a review for an audio product of some sort, and after a lot of “shoulds” and other such recommendations by the host he looked right into the camera, his voice changed tone, and he solemnly added the caveat to his entire product rant saying “…but my opinion is not fact, it’s just my opinion. Do your own research.”

    What a great thought.

    This concept of opinion versus fact too often, in my opinion, goes unsaid.

    A lot of us making and creating and sharing find it easier to do so without the burden of evidence or absolutes. We write something and then hang it out there for evaluation, all the while never adding that asterisk of self-checking: adding, perhaps that this is just an opinion, my opinion, and I stand by it, but you should make your own judgements after all. 

    This is my opinion, everything I write here, all the advice and so-called insight. My ideas. My thoughts. My scribbles. My notions, and all of it based in my singular experience. It’s not fact, unsaid as I often leave it to be.

    Take it for what it is worth. Nothing more, nothing less.

  • Right Wrong

    I want you to disagree with what you read or hear on this project.

    I’m not trying to write cozy aphorisms to make you comfortable in your creative pursuits. I want you to squirm a little when I tell you that your skills might not actually be as important as you think they are, that gates are not meant for keeping and that responding to market forces, meme-culture and focus groups are at best vapid and hollow, and at worse patronage to a soulless master.

    I want you to object. I want you to rethink. And then I want you to adjust your perspective a little bit even if you roll your eyes at my presumptive arrogance on the topic of your skill.

    If you take away anything from reading these posts or listening to my podcasts you should be a little irked that some random guy could have the gall to call your boardroom-style pursuit of personal brand and textbook-grade art and commercially viable chord progressions anything but magical. 

    Comfortable is complacent. 

    Clean is boring. 

    Perfection is the pursuit of the placid and flaccid.

    Following the rules is the domain of algorithms and what AIs now seem to do best. Not you, tho, do you?

    Wrong is more right than you want to admit, and I’m willing to punch you in the creative gut if it helps you realize that simple notion for even a few moments.

  • Amateur Appeal 

    I recently wrote a piece on this blog about breaking from the conformity of rules when we create, suggesting in my two-hundred word blog-conforming limit that stepping outside of the guardrails presented by this idea of your art needing to be so-called “commercial viable” might be a means to escape from a constraint imposed on your feeling of accomplishment and ability.

    I was thinking about this in a different context: the amateur effect.

    That is to say, sometimes amateurs create things that break rules not because they want to break away from constraints of the form, and also not because they are unencumbered by a debt to the patronage of a person or system that limits professionals, but rather, simply because they simply haven’t internalized those same rules that might otherwise limit them. They break rules because they didn’t know they existed, and occasionally stumble upon something worth considering through that process.

    It is, of course, far from given that amateurs can de facto make interesting contributions to an art just because they are new to the craft, and even if we could, it could also be argued that accidental creation is neither consistency nor necessarily something to be proud of.

    But it is interesting, the notion that I might take up a new hobby in a style of music, or mode of painting, or craft of prose and by virtue of accident make something not just reasonably good, but rule-bending enough for someone better at the effort to consider their cherished rules and skills as something that can, on occasion, be bent a little bit.

  • Podcast Guy

    I need to inform you that by the time you read this I will be a podcast guy.

    Ugh. One of those, huh?

    My excuse is such: in early February I embraced a few big ideas that manifested as a spoken audio project, which very much looks and acts like a podcast at the moment.

    Big ideas, you ask?

    First, I have been playing with sound, music, recording, and an array of other tools and toys that are burning a hole in my soul looking for a purpose. 

    Second, I looked at the conformity of what I should be doing and making as a so-called commercially viable product and said to hell with that, I just want to make what I want to make.

    Third, I realized, and you may have seen me write about this a few times already, that stepping away from posting and participating doesn’t make the terrible stuff go away, it just leaves a gap that is destined to be filled with political, vapid, or algorithmic slop.

    In other words, I was motivated to step up and start making more, posting more, and participating, but in a way that suited me. The result so far has been me dabbling in a new podcast-like project, and likely one that will not sound like nor look like the hundred other podcasts in your feed. 

    …or, so I hope.

    Big ideas, small project, and a vast shift towards a new perspective… and if nothing else, you can listen to me now, too.

  • MIDI Controller

    I broke, and I finally bought a dedicated MIDI controller.

    It was not an expensive one. Nor is it a toy. It is, rather, a very basic and simple twenty-five key computer keyboard that has piano ivories instead of numbers and letters. It makes no sound of its own. It just sends electronic signals to another device, as if I was typing musical notes.

    If you had asked me a year ago what I knew about musical keyboards I would have told you there were pianos …and electronic pianos …and—I am reluctantly admitting here that I hadn’t been paying much attention after that point. 

    I like synth music, and growing up we didn’t have a real piano or a fancy keyboard, but rather a simple department store brand electronic synth with a couple dozen built in instruments. In our house now, my wife has (because it is hers from before we were married) a pretty nice digital piano in her office, and a little over a decade ago we acquired a small upright piano, too, which sits in our kitchen and serves little other purpose than to remind me of a decade of the kid doing piano lessons. But, the concept of a bed of black and white keys that makes sounds? That was pretty clear in my head.

    For myself, those pianos were never quite what I needed. What I was craving, musically speaking.

    Instead, I went down the synthesizer rabbit hole a little over a year ago now and learned that a proper synth is more than a piano keyboard that makes funny sounds, but rather a way to generate and manipulate sounds with electrical or digital tools, and for which a piano-style keyboard is merely a comfortable and familiar user interface. 

    Now I’ve gone full circle. I own a small keyboard controller to interface with the synth software on my computers, and I am learning more about how it all works with each visit to this world of music and sound …and most importantly, a new personal exploration of audio creativity.