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Pompeo Massani, The Itinerant Musicians (1880-1889)

If you’re a musician, you’re devoted to a single instrument you’ve learned to a depth that it feels expressive. But a music producer’s devotion is diffuse–it has more than one object. It’s in this way that musicians who compose by producing are instrument agnostic. Agnostic not in the sense of being doubtful, but in the sense of being compatible with a variety of instrumental possibilities. What is an instrument anyways? A producer’s musical system spans the acoustic and the electronic, the analog and the digital, the real and the virtual. It’s a system replete with sounds, devices, and configurations on the verge of instrumentality, capable of expressiveness, and worthy of devotion. The scope of what constitutes a musical instrument in production then, is as wide as our thinking about the matter. So listen to options as they suggest themselves, like producer Proc Fiskal who says “I sort of play YouTube like an instrument.” In sum, instrument agnosticism’s lesson is embrace any sound that’s a playable sound.