Week 21, 2025 - Music

Song of the week:

Top of mind

Over my life, the one anchor artistic outlet I've had has been music. Mostly as a consumer. And occasionally, as a producer (I mean that in a very loose sense; and I'll get to that.).

By contrast, my wife anchors on movies or TV. Which makes sense given she's a writer/producer/director. And in that industry.

I'm in the tech world. I love the tech world. And I think the music world parallels it a lot. There's a lot of over-consumption. There's a lot of hegemony-creation with music labels, much like FAANG and adjacent megacorps buying up all the cool, smaller companies. And the same is true of music creation companies; synth makers, guitar companies, etc.

But there's an enormous indie scene in music. In many ways, although articulated poorly, the founder of Spotify, Daniel Ek, noted that it's never been cheaper or easier to get into music. Which means someone as idiotic as me can have a wealth of professional grade equipment in my home, and still be deeply untalented.

My three loves in this space are Bang & Olufsen for audio equipment (though my office and living room are decorated with Sonos systems), PRS guitars and Teenage Engineering synths. I recently got myself an OP-XY, which I've not yet spent the time to properly learn yet but am excited. Especially to pair it up with my OP-1F among other things. And of course, for my guitar I have a plethora of wonderful effects pedals. And for everything, a trove of effects and plugins on my laptop.

And yet, while I have noodled and mucked around with similarly talentless but eager friends, I've never really released anything. I've not given myself the time to sit down for a few hours and make a track, end-to-end, and release it on Soundcloud or similar.

Side track, as a younger man working in the tech department of an Apple retailer, I applied for a job in Berlin with the then fledgling Soundcloud. I even re-created my CV in their website's likeness. And didn't even get a response back. Even better, and more foreshadowing of my career, was the fact that I was undeterred and simply contacted a Berlin-based VC who had invested in Soundcloud to ask about similar jobs in the scene. Skip a few years later, and I still never wound up living in Berlin, but I was visiting regularly for my job and was then a mentor for TechStars Berlin. Funny how things work out like that!

I follow a bunch of random indie producers on Mastodon and Instagram. I love their unashamed self promotion, and promotion of each others' work. I love how they lather their posts with Bandcamp links. And how their very irregular YouTube videos are basically just home studio tours with intensely elaborate equipment setups, yielding results that are often questionably simple.

I love how crazy it is. I'm not that deep down the rabbit hole of guitars because I've wound down to two guitars. Both PRS, but both very different. And a small collection of synths, again mostly anchored on my beloved Teenage Engineering branded ones.

I'm writing this out of love for the ability to do cool, indie things for yourself. Share them for 10 people. Heck, share them for no people. But just getting the ability to increasingly tinker with mad good equipment for the sake of it. And not because something interesting will happen.

Photo of the week

(via my unsplash)

Tabs

Meta

Published on: 25th May, 2025

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