brettworks

(Photo: Elijah Macleod)

Your musical influences are spirit architects whose works form an invisible blueprint for your own. Influence is both a gift given and its acceptance–a call and response. It’s your echoing, recalling, and imitation of what you love in your forebears and colleagues as you try to ventriloquize them, imagining what they would do in your shoes. Your sense of self becomes fluid: What sounds would they be drawn to? What forms would they use? How would they be expressive? Influences, from the past or the present, are your guiding models of what is imaginatively possible. Influence invites us into ever deeper into its spider web history as we feel the feeling of the influencer’s work and puzzle over its unfamiliar sources, each with their own influences from all over. Webs spun, spells cast: How did someone else arrive at their sound, a sound that now spurs you, inspired, to make your own?