“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s… Continue reading

“It’s noteworthy that the first action a computer program designed to detect patterns undertakes is not to analyze but to collect. Which is consistent with how many writers, musicians, and designers view themselves: not as master craftsmen but as collectors. They consume voraciously, pursue obsessively, and accumulate influences the way chefs hunt for ingredients.” “The… Continue reading

“If we think about what it means to ‘concentrate’ or ‘pay attention’ at an individual level, it implies alignment: different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert and oriented toward the same thing. To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things; it means constantly denying… Continue reading

“Vocal psychedelia is the omni-genre at the epicenter of our new musical mythology, from Jamaica to Africa to America.” […] “Auto-Tuned artists are the new synthesizers — they’re the new samplers — and the sounds they make recalibrate your consciousness.” […] “Music simulates the future. It war-games it. All those sci-fi sounds it produces, all… Continue reading

“Ship creative work. On a schedule. Without attachment and without reassurance. The internet brings uninvited energy, positive and negative, to the work we set out to do. It opens an infinite spigot of new ideas, new tools, and new people for the project. If you want to create your work, it might pay to turn… Continue reading

“The biggest achievement for music is empathy. You can transform into someone else’s emotional state. And you can go into situations where it’s incredibly difficult to find the right words. Music in general is somewhere between words…Music morphs you into the one who created it.” – Martin Stimming, Hanging Out With Audiophiles podcast, Episode 89 Continue reading

“In a world increasingly data driven and surveilled, skateboarding lives beneath scoring and resists all datazation by establishing everything as a performance. It deflects the surveillance state by its primal devotion to documenting and sharing itself, monitoring every possible development, repetition, and failure. It preempts the onslaught of observation by embracing it. To preempt is… Continue reading