Image: My Devil Daggers High Score, Matt Schell 2016

When does it make sense to persist and when does it make sense to give up? The concept of sunk costs tells us that we should not “throw good money after bad”. This means that it doesn’t make sense to push further in the wrong direction, just because we’ve gone a long way in the wrong direction already. On the other hand we have anecdotes like the person who swam halfway across the river, got tired and swam back. Knowing when to persist and when to cut losses seems important and is also incredibly hard, especially in the moment of struggle. As we encounter difficulties, our fear of failure (or success) whispers to us that it’s too hard, we won’t make it, no one will care, so just give up. It is wise to ignore these voices when we can identify them. But sometimes the voice is real-world feedback. We published our thing and no one bought it, or people disliked it, or it was met with indifference. The heroic biographies of our favorite creatives tell the tale of the ones who never gave up in the face of adversity, who laughed in the faces of their detractors and pushed through to success. But of course a significant part of this is confirmation bias. No one champions the story of the one who wisely quit and cut her losses while she was behind, before digging a deeper hole. Or the one who heroically pushed forward in the wrong direction, got lost and never came back. Everyone loves the story of victory against all odds, but sometimes it is wise to quit when the odds are against you. But those stories are quiet and often private.

It’s a gray, rainy morning here in Berlin and I had a difficult day of work yesterday focusing on my projects because my back and shoulders are hurting. I spent a lot of time rolling around on a tennis ball trying to get the knot out of a muscle in my trapezius muscle (thanks doctor on YouTube for the tip) while listening to YouTube videos of Seth Godin and Ray Dalio. Today, I have questions but no answers. At the very least, here I am showing up for you, doing my best to take care of myself, to continue thinking and trying hard to maintain momentum. Small victories.

Last night on my flight home to Berlin from Copenhagen I started reading “Principles” by Ray Dalio. Holy shit, it’s incredible. Dalio’s thinking is original, incisive and relentless. I don’t want to get too breathless but for a certain type of person at a certain moment this book is like a bomb going off in your head. Some context: over the past year I have been trying to learn about finance and investing. Money is obviously a topic that’s important to many of us but growing up in a liberal, bourgeois and waspy intellectual family it was a topic that was actively not discussed. Whatever the social mores that encourages people to not think about discuss or take seriously the topic of money and finance, I see it as a serious disadvantage. I try to be very transparent with my kids about money and discuss it in clear terms with them so they see at as a tool and means to an end, rather than as something tied up in all these ideas of class, propriety, self-worth and whatever complex emotions and social customs lead people to not want to talk about it. Honestly even writing about the topic here I feel a bit uncomfortable, a strange, and probably un-useful dynamic. I read Tony Robbin’s “Money: Master The Game” and from there moved on to reading Warren Buffet’s “The Essays of Warren Buffet”. Robbin’s made reference to Dalio who came across as interesting and so I bought “Principles” as well, but sat on it and didn’t read it. After reading the Buffet book I was ready for a break from reading about financial instruments, which while I’m interested to understand, I find dry.

I expected Dalio’s book to continue in the same vein and so put off reading it for a while. Last night I needed something for my flight and it was the book I had unread on my Kindle app on my phone, so I gave it a try. I really wish I had started earlier. Firstly, although Dalio is clearly a brilliant financier, this is really not a finance book. For those unfamiliar with Dalio, he grew up in Long Island, NY. His father was a jazz musician and mother a home-maker. He became interested in the markets at a young age, went to Harvard Business School and then after working various Wall Street jobs started Bridgewater associates as a research firm in a two bedroom apartment, before growing it into one of the world’s largest and most successful hedge funds with tens of billions under management. He has actively not sought the spotlight which may be why many, including myself haven’t heard of him, but after tremendous success in what he describes as the ‘third stage’ of his life he has shifted his focus to giving back. He’s signed the giving pledge along with Gates and Buffett and will gives a significant percentage of his wealth to charity, and has undertaken to distill and codify his learning in the process. This is where we arrive at “Principles”.

Dalio is a systems thinker par excellence. His primary mode of operation is to gather and record data, process it with algorithms (systems or formulas) and then reflect on what that processed output reveals in order to make informed decisions. Very early on he realized that he could analyze all of the inputs to a system, distill them into a set of rules and then model that system with various inputs. He initially did this with commodities markets, learning how the production of meat was informed by grain prices, how fast the various meat animals put on weight and how the various prices and inputs interacted with one another. He built this into a model using early personal computers and was able to make informed decisions about the prices of corn, meat and soy in the commodities markets to great success. He embraced digital technology and modeling early and has kept pace and extended his use as computing power increased exponentially. This is where this concept of cyborg decision making arises. Dalio guides the investment process at Bridgewater using a massive array of digital models of millions of data points, processed using artificial intelligence techniques which he then compares to the decision making arrived at by the human agents of the firm, including himself. The result is a kind of mental scaffolding in which the humans compare their intuitive and analytical understandings and beliefs about how markets will behave against the more objective and emotionless logic of the machine agents. This cyborg process of decision making allows for both agents in the process to play from their strengths. Humans have powerful intuition and ability to see gestalts, but can be blinded by bias or emotion, whereas machines have the incredible ability to compute and objectively score data. The results in terms of the financial performance of Bridgewater have been astounding.

Dalio advocates in his book for us all to encode and externalize our decision making in a set of principles which we write down and evaluate our intuition against. He obviously also is a great believer in data, and using data to inform decision making. Dalio is in my opinion a genius of process and systems. His powerful insight is that he on his own is incapable of making the most optimal decisions. He has therefore sought to support his decision making process with a powerful scaffolding of machine intelligence and also collaborative human intelligence in the form of his team. Dalio’s focus on radical open mindedness and radical transparency as it’s practiced in the company culture of Bridgewater is a whole additional topic worth discussion on it’s own, and you’ll probably be hearing more about it in these pages as the shockwaves of this book ripple through my brain. To get an idea for how radical his approach to managing people is he has been described in the press as a ‘hedge fund cult leader’. For me, the story and thinking of Dalio feels like a direct challenge that needs to be responded to. How do I incorporate this into what I do? In a sense I feel envious because the playing field he chose on which to deploy his brilliance, the financial markets, is one with such a clear scoring mechanism. Every idea you try has a clear goal, to earn financial profits and to protect against losses. So he has a wonderfully direct way to evaluate the validity of his ideas.

For those of us who choose other areas in which to play, like the arts, how can we incorporate this kind of thinking? I think this kind of cyborg relationship to technology is already upon us in many areas of our lives, with so much of what we do mediated by software. For Dalio he has used it to incredible effect. What is the equivalent of this for artists? Steve Jobs famously called the computer a bicycle for the mind. Incidentally Dalio was a great fan of Jobs and spent significant time trying to understand and model his thinking after his death, seeing parallels between their worldviews. I think the full Jobs quote is a good way to end this piece.

“I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts.

And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.” ~ Steve Jobs (via brainpickings)

Still from “An Otter Eating A Pumpkin”, Matt Schell 2017

Today I’m feeling a lot of resistance to write. The term resistance is one I find useful in terms of the creative process, as conceived by Stephen Pressfield’s “The War of Art” and “Do The Work”. Pressfield writes eloquently about the mental struggles of being creative, in his case from a writer’s perspective. He writes:

“Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. resistance is the enemy within.” – Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

I feel that in fact most of the struggles and battles I experience in the creative process, and to a large extent the rest of life, are struggles with the enemy within. With fear, ego, self-doubt, inertia, loss of momentum. I know that I have the capacity to work, I believe that I have interesting things to say, but sometimes they are overcome by static and lost.

Momentum is a useful way for me to think about this. When I have momentum, when I’m being consistent, working and moving forward a kind of positive inertia can kick in. Yesterday it felt good to work and so tomorrow I look forward to working again. Today I’m tired and I can feel my momentum dip, but with the experience of years I know how important it is to expend effort to maintain it. To stick to my creative routine and pour energy into carrying the heavy canoe from one river to the next. If I don’t, I won’t get to the next smooth downstream flow. After doing this for a while it’s possible to build up hope and faith that easier times are in fact ahead, if we can just make it through this current patch of thorns.

Free things have become a bigger part of our lives, and to an extent we’ve grown to expect them in certain areas. New websites, online services and tools nowadays are often free. This introduces strange dynamics much of the time, in which for example on social media, the user becomes the product and the customer becomes the advertiser, the data miner, the eye of surveillance and tracking. This introduces dynamics which can create negative outcomes for users in which they are subjected to behavior modification techniques designed to maximize attention and engagement, in order to drive ad views or data generation, to the detriment of the user’s experience of using the platform. Social media is particularly guilty of this but there are others, like finance platform Mint, which provides financial analytics in exchange for sharing your data with third parties.

Jaron Lanier has written and spoken eloquently about these dynamics, how the algorithms which run these platforms often come into adversarial relationships with the users given their business model. He’s written several books and given numerous talks and interviews in which he advises people to delete their social media accounts. I’m inclined to agree with him although my response has been instead to limit and shrink my use of social media and confine it instead to only Twitter and YouTube. I’ve removed myself from Facebook and Instagram as I find Facebook and their ‘growth at any cost’ mentality to be particularly egregious in these regards.

Part of what is interesting and novel about these struggles for attention is the fact that we enter a domain where we are struggling only indirectly against other humans, and more directly with algorithms and machine learning models. The tools which are used to track and modify the behavior of millions of users concurrently, like for example on YouTube, grow more complex all the time, to the point where they become to a degree opaque to their creators. To automate this type of behavior at

scale

it’s impossible to use human labor and so machine learning, neural networks, and self-adjusting algorithms are required. This means that even the people running these platforms do not directly control or explicitly understand what’s happening. Particularly on the larger platforms in which many algorithms and processes are happeningsimultaneously, this is true. In the case of YouTube those of us who do work on the platform talk and think about ‘the algorithm’ all the time but in

fact

there are many algorithms all interacting concurrently with the single goal of maximizing attention-spend on the platform and thereby maximizing ad revenue generated.

I am not an apocalyptic techno alarmist who would cry ‘Skynet!’ in the face of this development. For example, YouTube’s algorithm has led me into some wonderful corners musically and helped me to discover a wealth of for example 80s Japanese Ambient music that my life is very much enriched by (see my post on Music, Design and Mastery for an example). There’s also a terrific community of people posting wonderful, creative house music that YouTube’s algorithm has discovered I like, and started serving me more of. I’ve discovered the work of So Inagawa this way, who I’ll probably write about soon.

But whether we find this alarming or amazing we must acknowledge that something new is happening. We are in an evolving feedback loop with complex software entities which are concurrently modifying themselves and their own view of the world and simultaneously modifying our behavior, taste and worldview. There’s a a rapid evolutionary aspect to this and it is something new and worth paying attention to.

Image: Some Airport Sunrise, Matt Schell 2018

Waking up in Copenhagen to the American election results, I feel very mixed feelings. I wanted to see a crushing, decisive repudiation of Trump and his racist, fascist policies. Instead we saw a valuable victory for the left in taking the US house of representatives, but not a decisive one. Certain candidates I had high hopes for did not win, candidates who embraced a bolder progressive platform like Andrew Gillum and Beto O’Rourke. Stacy Abrams seems destined for a runoff or recount so fingers still crossed there. So I’m hopeful, but also disappointed.

Hope and disappointment are inextricably intertwined. To dare to hope is to risk disappointment, and so we need to welcome it when it comes, knowing we took a risk to hope, as we should have. There’s a quote that comes to mind from Gandhi, which I’ll quote at length here because the context is interesting. In “For Pacifists” he’s writing about a riot in Bombay:

“My reply is that a satyagrahi may never run away from danger, irrespective of whether he is alone or in the company of many. He will have fully performed his duty if he dies fighting. The same holds good in armed warfare. It applies with greater force in Satyagraha. Moreover, the sacrifice of one will evoke the sacrifice of many and may possibly produce big results. There is always this possibility. But one must scrupulously avoid the temptation of a desire for results.”

I believe that I first read this quote in a piece by Arundhati Roy but I couldn’t place it and only found the source via Google books (read here) This concept of avoiding the tempation of a desire for results is a powerful one. As I interpret it, and as Gandhi has been quoted elsewhere “The path is the goal.” Action is the goal, struggle is the goal, continuing is the goal. Placing the focus on continuing on the path instead of achieving an end point or result means that while we may experience set back, disappointment and friction, we have an achievable goal, to continue on the path.

I think this path orientation or process orientation is valuable in virtually all contexts. It’s valuable for the struggle to create and to be an artist and also for the struggle to resist the rising tide of global fascism. All we need to do is to push forward, slowly, gently and inexorably, forever. Results will be achieved along the way.

Image: Still from Dead Cities 001 by Matt Schell 2018

A lot of my personal work explores concepts of generativity, procedural content generation and various forms of indirect or chaotic art creation. For many creators of procedural content, we are looking for moments of surprise and revelation, that 1+1=3 moment where through juxtaposition, coincidence or chance our generator throws up something beautiful or interesting. In a way I think of this process as analogous to exploring a natural landscape, and some of the sense of beauty we experience in that. The natural landscape is complex, shaped by chaotic forces yet also follows a set of underlying rules. Rivers do not flow through the air and trees are usually perpendicular to the ground. When they’re uprooted on their side, crawling around in or on their roots and the resulting small cave can be fascinating. We love waterfalls because the juxtaposition of cliff, river and gravity produces the beautiful emergent phenomena of water falling through the air. Working with, experiencing and exploring generative art has a similar feeling for me. The experience can be interesting on the superficial level, in which interesting immediate forms are thrown up, but also gives us an opportunity to practice systems thinking. How did this get here? What factors lead to this arising?

The moments of discovery we feel in the natural landscape are more exciting to us when they feel unplanned. There is a major difference in feeling when we hold onto a guardrail and follow the well lit path down into a cave, and when we discover a cave in the forest with no signs and no safety barriers. Derek Yu, in his wonderful book Spelunky, about the creative process behind the game of the same title, talks about the concept of ‘indifference’. In this case he refers to a rejection of the theme park approach to level design, in which every rock and shrub is carefully arranged and colored to lead you down the path to the next crafted set piece. Many level designers discuss the value in studying the work of the Disney corporation in laying out it’s theme parks, and there is no doubt that they are masterpieces of sight lines, spatial planning and careful, subliminal guidance. Like reading a great novel, swept up in the flow, we are effortless guided from one delightful experience to the next. But we cannot honestly call this an experience of exploration. At best this is an exploration on an invisible cognitive leash.

I had an early memorable experience playing Minecraft with my two sons, who were probably 4 and 5 at the time. We were building a house by the beach, and digging a moat around it, to fill with water and keep out zombies. In the process of digging out the moat around the house, suddenly my screen went black. What had happened? I had accidentally broken through into a cave. When I managed to bring some light into the cave I discovered a canyon like underground cavern system filled with skeletons and lava. The experience was memorable because of it’s surprising nature and the very real feeling that this space had been there beneath my feet, but no one had led me there, yet I had discovered it. I remember it now well enough to recount it, and that’s not something I can say about many video games. In this generated, indifferent environment I had an experience worth describing in a few sentences. It felt real to me in the way that no carefully crafted climactic set piece in a game has.

As computers become more powerful and our facility with procedural tools increases I hope that this is a thread we continue to explore. Indeed given the multi-billion dollar success of Minecraft I hope that it’s lessons of complex, indifferent, procedural worlds are absorbed and developed further.

Image: Surprise Eggs From The Dumpster, Mat Schell 2015

Some days sitting down to write these is easy and some days it’s not. Today is a non-easy day, for some reason my neck and shoulders are super tense and painful. I went swimming yesterday and did a dive off a diving block (slightly showing off for my sons) and somehow in the process of jumping in both calves totally seized up and went into cramps, and I hit the bottom of the pool with my fingers, having dove too deep. This is what I get for showing off. So everything hurts today. Not badly, but enough to make me grouchy.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how artists can make a living in our current late capitalist system and survive. I think about it for myself, but also in a broader sense. Art is valuable, but not useful. It’s rare that we urgently need to buy a piece of art. It’s almost always a kind of indulgence or tertiary concern. Many of us feel an urgent need to make art and so as a result there is art getting made but in my opinion not a great framework for supporting it in the market. To be clear, when I refer to art, I’m thinking about stuff that explicitly does not fit into traditional ideas of usefulness. For example a tastefully composed black and white photo of a pier can be hung in a hotel room as decoration. It’s serving a purpose there and making the hotel feel different than if it had Ikea commodity paintings on the wall. But it’s not particularly expressing anything for us, and thereby I’d say in that context isn’t really serving as art. Art, in my opinion is useless in day to day life. It serves as a mirror for us to reflect on, allows us to feel connected to it’s creator and maybe shows us a new perspective. These outcomes are valuable, in my opinion, but not useful in a straightforward sense.

Capitalism and modern economics with it’s myth of the ‘rational economic actor’ basically has no support for or understanding of art. Rational economic beings do not have souls that sing in the presence of art, and art is difficult to quantify, categorize and put in economic boxes. And it suffers for that. Entertainment has understandable economic value, clearly, serving as a kind of mental vacation or decoration for otherwise boring lives. Sometimes entertainment slips into art territory but often the two values are opposed. The fact that all human cultures have some kind of practice of art making and that we’ve done it for thousands of years suggests that this is something important for humans, but I believe the current system still fails to understand that or perhaps subverts it. Mostly art in the current system exists as a kind of surplus activity which exists outside of or beside capitalism, funded by government cultural grants, non-profits and bourgeois generosity.

One might think that because art prompts introspection and can provoke complex feelings it is seen as subversive to the contemporary economic model. The industrialization of human life called for a machine like human, standardized via the public education process with predictable competencies. These machine like humans need to tolerate a great deal of unpleasantness including life in the cramped quarters of cities and factories, extremes of boredom and alienation from their labor (and thereby huge tracts of their life). It’s possible that during the construction of the machine like human model it was realized that provocation and introspection were vectors for chaos and change, and therefore were discouraged. Instead the primary purpose of art-like activities was replaced with distracting entertainments and superficial decorations. These do serve a valuable purpose for the machine like human, allowing us to longer tolerate the conditions under which we are required to labor. I doubt that any shadowy cabal sat down and articulated this as an agenda, but as it is in the nature of complex systems to optimize for certain outcomes, I belive that this is one of the outcomes we are seeing. It’s worth noting that as we exit the industrial era into the information/internet era with it’s accompanying explosion of complexity and creativity, other ways of living may be possible.

Image: Dawn in Mexico City 2017, Matt Schell

I am always working and making stuff, but it’s not always visible. That’s because a lot of the work I do gets discarded at some point because it doesn’t work out or go anywhere, experiments, prototypes, small ideas. In a way it’s a shame because just as I learn things from those experiments, others might as well. So I am trying to get better at being more transparent and documenting my process. Of course this is a bit scary, the ego doesn’t really want to let people into it’s secret lair and show the outside world the mess. But I think overcoming that is worthwhile and bringing people into your work is worth it. This blog is an attempt in that direction, though it’s focus is more holistic and less on the individual projects etc that I’m working on. For the more granular technical details, I have my YouTube channel which I’ve restarted and tried to be more consistent on. Again, I am resisting the desire there to make perfectly packaged content (for example nice concise tutorials) and instead just bring people into my process and showing them what’s being worked on. It started with the release of my procedural generation asset Strata, and still circles around that a lot since that’s my main current released project, but it also shows some of the other small experiments I’m working on and making as well.

The value of creating this kind of secondary documentation work (which takes work and effort, to be sure) is that it crystallizes the process and creates a secondary product that will survive and be valuable (hopefully) even if the main project / product turns out to be unsuccessful. In fact it’s probably particularly interesting to see the process go wrong for others, from a learning perspective. “Learn from other people’s mistakes” as they say. In a sense documenting your process can serve as a kind of hedge against the risk of an unsuccessful project. If the project itself is unsuccessful, there is at least some useful learning that may come out of it for others. I think creating process documentation also encourages reflection during work, and therefore probably helps one to digest and perhaps reveal additional insights, both during the creation process and after the fact. Writing this blog and making YouTube videos about my recent stuff has been useful in that sense.

Importantly in both cases the documentation is public. This has an additional value of creating a degree of accountability in which I am publicly promising and committing to do work, and therefore feel I will disappoint some people if I give in to the temptation to give up. We all respond differently to this kind of social perspective but I know for me the idea of missing deadlines or having projects collapse publicly stings much more than silently and privately giving up on stuff. So for solo practitioners like myself, this kind of public blogging or video creation is a way to create some degree of public social accountability, which you may also find valuable.

Image: StrangePainting1.png by Matt Schell 2015, created in Joy Exhibition by Strangethink

For a few months I’ve been feeling a bit stuck creatively. Mainly because I’ve been feeling crushed by the weight of finishing Monarch Black, which I’m still not doing. That created a kind of creative block and I felt guilty about working on other stuff, and then I didn’t. Creative energy is something that grows the more it’s used, like physical energy. I don’t think it’s possible to rest and save creative energy long term, it has to be excercised or it withers and shrinks. So I created Strata as a kind of path back to making stuff, and I’ve been making YouTube videos and releasing updates on it as a way to get back into the saddle. So far Strata is not earning a lot of money, but it is ticking along steadily. It’s currently making about 100 dollars a month between Itch and the Asset Store. Not anything that’s going to change my life, but I’m going to stick with it and see what happens. It’s been slowly picking up reviews and attention so maybe that will accelerate at some point.

The fact that Strata is a paid product sort of allowed to feel ‘virtuous’ to myself to work on it while ignoring Monarch Black, and was a kind of a loophole to get myself working again. It’s worked. I recently went on a binge of watching videos by Seth Godin, someone who I admire very much. His background and perspective is primarily in writing about marketing, which I understand is not for everyone. But as is often the case, when you get good enough at something, and think deeply about it, the insights from long practice begin to become more universal. I do marketing work for my day job (what a surprise to find that I, who think of myself as an artist turned into a professional marketer) and so his stuff is relevant to me on a lot of levels. If you are interested in a radical and transformative perspective on education, I strongly recommend you read his free book “Stop Stealing Dreams”. I think I’m actually going to re-read it again soon as I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Seth Godin is the person who recommended writing a blog every day (as he does) and I decided to accept the challenge and do this. The fact that his posts are short and daily was something which also gave me a kind of ‘permission’ to write this the way I do. Short, personal, discursive and filled with digressions. It’s important for me not to think of this as ‘useful content’ for people, although probably some thoughts of use will arise anyway. This helps me to avoid the temptation to write the kind of ’10 great tips to finish your stupid videogame’ articles that a lot of blogs degenerate into.

One thing that has helped me to get this blog going and so far be pretty consistent with writing it is a morning routine. Over the past few weeks I’ve been practicing the following routine pretty consistently. I wake up, take the kids to school if it’s a school day, have breakfast and coffee, then immediately after go straight into the following sequence, which I do in the same order: Meditate for 10-20 minutes, Write 3 pages longhand in a journal (just garbage free form stream of consciousness type writing) and then write one of these posts. The fact of doing it in the same order and doing it every single day has made it easier, and somehow the fact that there are multiple parts weirdly seems to make it easier. I think the reason for this is that once the routine is started I’ve sort of conditioned myself to move unthinkingly to the next step when I complete the previous, so it becomes sort of automatic. I’ve tried at various moments to form different habits but somehow launching this kind of sequence of good habits every day has helped this latest attempt to be more successful. It’s still only a short time but I find myself looking forward to doing it tomorrow as I go to bed, which is a good sign. I also enjoy it and don’t see it as a chore. It takes roughly an hour every day. It’s pretty purely pleasurable at this point. You all can be my public accountability partners to see if I continue and for how long. If I slack off and you notice send me a message and ask what happened at support@mirrorfishmedia.com 🙂

I often wonder why it is that I like minimalist music so much. Many people find it incredibly boring, or too simple or too repetitive. There’s not enough there for them, but somehow for me the simplicity of the form is a major part of the appeal. I of course enjoy plenty of non-minimal music that has a lot going on and a lot of lively emotions in it, but I enjoy minimal music in a different way. I’ve been trying to understand those different modes of enjoyment and articulate them to myself. I’ve been listening to a lot of minimal ambient music lately. Particularly William Basinski who I wrote about earlier, but also a lot of work by Japanese 80s ambient composer Hiroshi Yoshimura. My friends Stefanie and Lamin mentioned to me that they were playing his music at bedtime with their son and since they have excellent musical taste I decided to check it out. Yoshimura’s music is wonderful, it’s simple, beautiful and refined. The aesthetics feel very ‘traditional japanese’ with a palette of sounds drawn from field recordings and 80s new age synthesizer vocabulary. There’s a deliberateness, sense of negative space and calm, peaceful mood that I find fitting into my life at many moments. Particularly in the morning, like now as I’m writing this, or as I’m winding down at the end of the day. I am reminded of skillful visual design or art when I think about Yoshimura’s music, clean, balanced and impactful. For me minimal music and minimal art or graphic design sit in similar modes of appreciation for me. I want to be able to appreciate each element distinctly in it’s own negative space, either in terms of timbre, arrangement or time and hear it’s relationship to the structure of the whole. This is something that the earlier music of experimental artists like Autechre did extremely well for me also, the sense of structure, deliberateness and detail. It’s something I’ve never been good at in my own music at all, which is an interesting thought, although my work has always been minimal and deliberately so.

I started reading a great book last night “Mastery” by George Leonard. He examines the process of learning through his practice of the martial art Aikido, as a teacher and student. The core message is bold and uncompromising, that the only path to excellence in a subject (or for that matter in life) is through the embrace of methodical and deliberate practice. He writes at length about the need to embrace the plateaus in learning which occur in between quick occasional accelerations in skill. This is probably just the book I needed to read right now. It’s bitter medicine in a sense for me, I feel like he’s shining a hard bright light on some of my dilettante tendencies. I have a strong pattern of learning something insofar as it’s easy, while progress is quick, and then coasting on a plateau for a long time, without taking the disciplined steps needed to deconstruct my skills and advance. I’ve also been bad at seeking out teachers who are better than me to help me go to the next stage. The result is a lot of mediocrity in my opinion, with moments in which I accidentally hit on something good, through sheer volume of attempts. I think this is true of a lot of people, so I don’t mean to be too harshly self-critical, but it’s probably something that’s holding me back. An example of this is that I made music for years using keyboards and sequencers but I never really learned keyboard well enough to play live on stage. It’s an embarassing detail for me, even after having moved on from actively creating music daily. I thought often about taking piano lessons, but the humbling experience of being a beginner after having released records and been seen as a non-beginner held me back. The willingness to humble oneself and break down the illusion of earned competency to move forward seems important, and is something I’m still bad at. Listening to Yoshimura’s music there is a refinement and surety that I think I appreciate very much for the knowledge that it’s something I lack.