8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: [19] Broken & Bewildered

The concept of decay, error and wabi-sabi leading to the beauty of an imperfect life.

  • Broken Sounds

    I bought another guitar pedal.

    (Note to new readers. I do not actually own a guitar, but I do play either my synth or my violin through my pedals to “wet” the sounds.)

    My new pedal is a multi-effects distortion pedal. This means, putting aside the looper pedal (which has a very specific recording & performance purpose) I now have what I would call a matching set: one pedal that adds and a second pedal that subtracts.

    The new distortion pedal is subtractive. As I understand it, it passes the audio signal through its circuits and scrapes away some of the clarity of the signal by clipping or compressing or otherwise degrading the pristine sound emerging from the instrument before it comes out of the speaker.

    There is beauty in destruction of that sort.

    There is grit. There is abrasion. There is texture.

    In fact, having now acquired a device whose sole purpose is to erode the quality of what comes from another device, it has got me thinking about the role of destruction in a lot of my art, and the aesthetics of grinding away the perfection in favour of something that feels like it has been lived in. Used. Worn away with time and the passing of years. And not just that, but done so with the clash of random indifference only possible through authenticity. 

    How can one hope to recreate the beauty of erosion and the story of a million soft touches with a simple tool in a single day? How do you add grit to fiction? How do you age a photograph at the moment of the click of the shutter? How do you sketch abrasion?

    I can only begin to wonder.

  • Loop Jamming

    Have you noticed that the advice on the internet rarely leans into imperfection.

    Very few people are writing tutorials about how to just have fun.

    If you have been reading this blog you will long since know that my creative adventures into 2026 have swirled around creating music. I have played an instrument for forty years, but stretched my musical explorations more and more for just the last decade, taking up the violin about ten years ago, joining a community orchestra, and lately getting into synth-based audio explorations on my own. I’m a novice, but one with a big range: a large puddle, but not one that goes very deep—if you take my meaning.

    In attempting to deepen that knowledge I have been seeking instruction, often online, and what I find is that most everything leans into the idea that the end goal must be perfect: polished, honed and uniformly refined to gold standard. 

    For example, I have been looping: recording layered loops of sound (and noise) and voice and rhythm into all manner of interesting audio recordings. Some of them I’ve been publishing as a kind of podcast on this very site. They are rough. They are gritty. They have sharp edges. They are imperfect.

    Yet according to every piece of advice online my work has no value unless I strive for perfect.

    Use a DAW.

    Quantize your tracks.

    Set up your recording booth just so.

    Imperfection is the enemy… apparently.

    But I don’t want that: I have merely been jamming. Exploring. Feeling my way through the tools and making things that echo with a kind of imperfect delight in their moment of creation. 

    So here’s a piece of advice online: strive for imperfect, too. After all, it’s human.

  • Autocorrect Coworker

    I went for a walk and decided to use my technology to help me brainstorm ideas.

    I opened up the notes app. I stuck my wireless headphones in my ears. I hit the transcribe button on the little virtual keyboard. And I started walking through the nature-adjacent path. 

    A lot of great ideas wound up in the little digital notepad.

    And then also… a lot of weird broken ideas pulled from the blur of whatever happens when autocorrect meets ambient nature noises meets me failing to articulate my voice while talking to myself in the woods. 

    My phone tended to get my transcription brainstorming session about ninety percent right… and then seemed to hallucinate a few other things it must have thought I might have said.

    One might think that this cause me to be upset, and sure, at first it kind of did.

    But then a strange thing happened. A few—not all, but a few—of the typos and misheard corrections started making sense, and too, muddling serendipitously into interesting ideas. 

    It was nothing revolutionary. No. It was nothing deeply groundbreaking. Yet, somehow—whether is was some algorithm trying to make sense of my rambling ideating or just fortunate murmurings transcribed into something slightly better than gibberish—technology actually did slightly more than I expected when I asked it to help me brainstorm. 

    It became more than just a digital transcriptionist, it weighed in… perhaps accidentally, but also not lacking in value or merit either.