Drum & Lace Field Notes 21

On crunching creativity & dumbing down joy

Ciao amici,

I hope everyone is doing all well- if you’re in the U.S., hope you had a good Thanksgiving with your family or chosen family. If not, then hope you had a great normal Thursday with a side of endless sales emails.

In the spirit of the ‘holiday’ tho, I would like to say that I am really thankful and grateful for everyone who follows along with anything I’m doing and shows any interest in my work. I’m grateful for all those who listen to my music or attends any of my live performances. I’m eternally grateful for all the people that elevate me and that support me in any aspect of my art and life. I would also like to say a big thank you to everyone who has ever tried to hold me back, who has been a bump in the road, or that hasn’t wished me well as you’ve provided me with life lesson that have been turned into a positive. So, just grateful for everyone, the lovers and the haters.

It definitely all of a sudden feels like the end of the year is close. It’s that time when work and life are both starting to somehow simultaneously wind down and amp up. Magically, my work schedule has cleared up from one day to another, which in retrospect I’m extremely grateful for, as there’s so many future things I need to take care of. But more on that series of events, a little later.

First and foremost, here’s your reminder that the next Solstice Solidarity Synthesis is taking place on December 17th at The Old Church in Stoke Newington (London). Please come join us! The proceeds from the show go to City Harvest, and the lineup is really incredible. You can get tickets here on Resident Advisor or at the door. If you’re a student or are experiencing financial hardship, here is a link to student tickets (honor system). And if you’re not in London and want to support the series, there is now a £10 Supporter ‘Add-On’. Hope to see a bunch of you there!

What I would really like to dive into today, covers quite a few topics I’ve been thinking about a lot this week that I didn’t realize until earlier today are super connected to one another. It all stemmed from the initial thought - that the speed at which our society expects creative work to be done is unsustainable.

Which leads me to my first topic of discussion, the biggest elephant in all creative working rooms - AI. In an absolutely unsurprising twist, there have been a couple announcements this week about major music labels partnering with various AI companies in what they continue to see as positive moves forward (insert massive eye-roll).

Here are two to read about both these. The first one, about the partnering of Warner Music Group with Suno, includes the ridiculous idea as the quote that “AI becomes pro-artist when it adheres to our principles,.” Not sure how artist-friendly one can be when you start to follow the money-trail of these things, such as is described in this instagram reel about Suno - via wordsbykristin. The second partnership, about UMG, Sony and Warner signing a publishing deal with KLAY is additionally frustrating. The key takeaway is that supposedly “KLAY will help further evolve music experiences for fans, leveraging the potential of AI, while fully respecting the rights of artists, songwriters, and rightsholders”. It’s unclear how and what these partnerships actually mean for artists and how they’re supposed to be pro-artist. I guess all we can do is keep an eye on these.

In related news, this interesting (and rather depressing) article popped up for me this week about a history teacher in the United States who purposely inserted an ‘AI Trojan Horse’ within the text of a homework assignment, as he was curious to see how many of his 122 students were going to use AI to complete their assignment. I won’t spoil how he went about planting this Trojan Horse but the results are really telling (sigh). You can read all about it here, but spoiler alert, nearly 40% of the papers he got back were written with AI’s assistance. Increasingly more and more Uni students are using AI to get their assignments done, and there’s obvious concern (read this Guardian article from earlier this year - AI and university). I’m obviously no longer a university student so it can be hard to imagine how it must be now, and I can understand using Chat GPT to help with admin/scheduling/etc (although I’m a stickler for reminding everyone of the environmental impact) but if you’re using it to write your papers, why spend the money to get a higher-education?

And to tie it all in and come back to my initial thought (I promise this’ll all make sense, stay with me) - I was let go off of a scoring project last week, sort of from one day to another- change of musical direction, but a couple months into the writing process. Not great, but I also understand this happens, right? But what really got me thinking, as I was obviously going through being hit in the ego gut about being let go, was a quite unexpected thing- something the producer of said project brought up when we spoke.

They essentially mentioned the fact that nowadays, in a time where TV ‘pilot seasons’* are non-existent, studios/networks will commission a whole series without allowing for the creatives (of all departments) to find any sort of stylistic footing before just diving into the process. On top of this, to prioritize costs, the series will likely be scheduled to be worked on as efficiently (ie fast) as possible. This will mean trying to cram in the schedule so folks (especially those in unions) can be relieved sooner, et cetera, et cetera. But ultimately, what ends up happening is, let’s take the composer as an example, they will get brought onto the project based off of their previous work/credits, but more importantly, based on what the musical vision for the project is. The biggest issue being that the majority of the time, the filmmakers won’t actually know what they want until they hear something and/or you’re in the process of writing it.

What ultimately ends up happening at times, is that composers can feel like they are set up for failure. Some are granted the chance to pivot, if there needs to be one musically, but often a composer will get replaced. A custom that seems to be happening more in the last couple years.

In my case, could the situation have been handled differently? Sure, but that’s not why I’m bringing this up. What I mean to highlight is that everything seems to need to be created so quickly that it often doesn’t allow anyone a chance of being truly creative or innovative. May we all be lucky enough to keep working on projects that have long deadlines and film makers open to innovation!

So how does this all connect? I think it all does in the way that if creative work is expected to be done in the most crunched timelines ever, prioritizing un-original output versus unique-ness, not only are we watering down the artistic content of our art, but we’re ultimately setting up creatives (who possess any truly unique voice/visual/what-have-you) to fail. And how convenient that the big corps/labels/studios are slowly investing in AI, because the moment they succeed in completely devaluing an artist’s work, they’ll handily offer up their invested solutions.

A great analogy I read recently that cements this lack of originality in culture was about how cars in the 1950-60s used to be available and purchased in a wide range of color as compared to now. This shift to a couple popular colors, such as grey, white and black today can be read as a form of collective capitalist oppression (much in line with the uber rich’s obsession with all white/beige stuff) where this simple shift in car colors is a way of ‘dimming the joy’ in people. It makes sense if you think about - if everything is homogenized and looks the same, it is easier to categorize ie. control. The ever brilliant @luisamunchtheory has a new video on her IG today that touches somewhat on this and how we move forward for the future & how we can’t have democracy without informed citizens, quoting Gramsci and his theory of ‘cultural hegemony’. If you haven’t, definitely watch some of her other videos - they’re fascinating.

Anyhow, much food for thought & as always please let me know your thoughts!

In less dense news, all audio, both stereo & atmos, are finally done for my upcoming release! I’ve nearly lost count of the number of studios & different headphones I’ve used to test these mixes (special thank you to PMC and Dolby). Being a perfectionist & musician means that the mixing stage of things can take just as long and is just as important as the writing part- I pour so much of myself into the writing part that it’s literally impossible for me to settle on it not sounding juuuuust right. As I may have already chatted about in the past, it was a mad challenge to mix these very beat-heavy (and sonically dense) tracks in stereo myself with the invaluable assistance of Ian Hultquist, who helped bring them over the finish line. Grateful for Chris McCormick at Blacklisted Mastering for the fab stereo masters & to the wildly talented ears of Richard Burki for the ace Atmos mixes. Not too much longer until you get official news and release date for this new music!

I think that’s more than enough for this Field Notes, thank you for reading through all this and bearing with me. Please know I’m always open to chatting more about anything that’s in these posts, so comment directly on here or find me online.

As always, I leave you with a gallery of photos below from the last couple weeks. So much autumnal glory here in London & a quick trip home to Firenze.

Have a lovely rest of the week everyone and take care of yourselves this time of year -

xoxo,

D & L