So, a couple of weeks back Adrien hit me up to contribute to a compilation of hit em tracks. I contributed 3 tracks in 3 nights, during a stressful work week, and holy shit it was a good time. The original tweet being about a rave, I focused on dancefloor sounds that I’ve always loved: give me disco ahead of the entire history of rock, in a heartbeat, says the troll in me.
So those music-making nights were Monday to Wednesday, and then on Friday I watched the Eno documentary (perhaps an Eno documentary, given how it works?) and listened to Eno saying how he found it incredibly difficult to get out from under his own preconceptions of what he needed to do next, having had success with a particular sound. In a later scene he talked about how we all have a child who wants to play and create and a critic who wants to tear every choice apart, and that it is a good thing to just push the critic out of the room and let the child play.
While I’d never compare myself to Eno with regards levels of success, this stuff was incredibly relatable. Trying to just do whatever you found enjoyable and not throwing out the seed before it could germinate? The reflections of this talking head seemed incredibly apposite for what I’d been doing earlier in the week.
The stuff I was banging out might’ve been formally constrained, but was a lot of fun, and perhaps the key reason for that was not really caring about the results in any wider sense than just “shall I stop now?”. I was just trying to follow the brief and apply what I love and enjoy about dance music to it, and, you know, after 30+ years of music making, that came pretty easily.
I guess it’d be easy to be snarky about bandwagon-jumping, but I’m sort of reminded of B-Real’s opening lines on Illusions: “Some people tell me that I need help / Some people can fuck off and go to hell”. In making the music I didn’t give a shit about whether it’d get attention as part of this hit em fad. If no one listened to these tracks it really wouldn’t matter, same as any other music I release. It was a fun idea and a cute thing to be a part of.