8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: Part 4 – When Nowhere Clicks

The aging self and what each stage of life might teach us about making things. The life of creating stuff.

Chapter List

  • 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.

  • Says Who

    Not many people are going to give you permission to make something… and bluntly, you shouldn’t need it.

    Don’t get me wrong, if it is dangerous or could hurt others—be that financially, morally, physically, or personally—then you should really reconsider your creative efforts.

    But if you are out there wanting to be the one who is creating, making, and sharing, and more so, are yearning for the art of making stuff because it might result in interesting, beautiful or wonderful results, then your permission-seeking mindset might turn out to be an unnecessary barrier holding you back.

    I write about these things, I spill affirmations of this sort, precisely because I have been a permission-seeker my whole life. I am old enough now that (mostly) when I catch myself seeking such permissions I have a stern internal monologue and give myself a good talking to about submitting to those behaviours. But I get it—because that notion digs into you like a relentless infection of spirit and you may never be rid of it. All you can really do it wake up every day and remind yourself that permission will never be given, nor should it even be required.

    And I’m not giving you permission here, though it might very much seem like it. 

    Rather I am writing this to nudge you towards dismissing the very need for it.

  • Critical Commodity

    Minding the gate are too many unworthy of the task.

    If you are a creative, and anything like me, you too often go online to see the unfiltered criticism of so many gatekeeping Shadowtrolls. Performative dismissal of the work of others has become something of a cottage industry online, an entire genre unto itself filled with dark aspirational influencers whose sole contribution is unfiltered judgement.

    Criticism is essential to any art form, but open critique meant to foster the talents of a creator who has hung their work out for public adjudication is vastly different than tearing those same offerings to shreds while glorifying the corpse of someone else’s creative efforts. Shadowtrolls feast on the pain of the latter, giving no value to the community they critique and farming adulation from those who giggle at the imperfection of others.

    Art is always imperfect. Even the rare examples that we hold up as so are also the source of flaws and must be subject to evaluation to particular tastes. 

    Criticism is inescapable, and I am not here to simply say it shouldn’t exist.

    Rather, as a creative who is among those offering our own imperfect samples to the world, that when met with the ravings of a Shadowtroll seeking to bar the path and slam the gate closed, we should do something besides hear and recoil at the critical rage. We should make our own evaluations of the source of those barriers and judgement, and discard such opinion with a ferocity met equal to the unworthy.

  • Comic Sounds

    I am no musician. 

    I’m not trying to be humble, but merely to tell you that despite being moderately okay at three instruments, being able to read music, and having a respectable recording studio hacked together in my basement office, I am really just dabbling in what most people would consider proper musical creativity.

    And I’m okay with that.

    I am trying to learn, strapped for access to resources and time and patience, at least the kind granted to a guy in his late forties who most people feel should either already be good at this kind of thing or should stop “acting like a kid” and do something more serious than compose jittery jams in his pyjamas. 

    I used to recap an essay[1] I once read about the font Comic Sans. You know it. It’s the most hated font in the design world, the free comic-book-ish font that came with Microsoft Windows long ago and shows up on “fun” corporate posters designed by people who don’t design for a living. I defended that font: people who use Comic Sans, I said remembering that essay, are thinking about design. They are arguably, well, just not great at it… yet.

    They are no designers. 

    But they are trying…the same way I am trying with music, art, and a dozen other creative pursuits. And rather than make fun of anything designed with Comic Sans, perhaps we should be thinking of it instead as a teaching opportunity. We should be thinking of it as made by someone who’s mind is open to the possibilities of creative expression.