I Released a Record

It has been a very long road, with lots of set backs and accomplishing this was much harder than I anticipated, but my debut album is out and I feel a strange mixture of pride, relief, exhaustion, exhilaration and dread about it.

The album is called “Another galaxy, Another planet, Another time” by Intergalactic Space Bears. Here is where you can listen to the record:

https://songwhip.com/intergalacticspacebears/another-galaxy-another-planet-another-time

Credit for the wonderful cover image belongs to my wonderful wife, Clare Topic, who has an amazing talent producing digital images like this one.

The whole record was made in the computer. Every synth was a software synth. The guitars were plugged into virtual amp simulators. All of the mixing and mastering was done “in the box”. I did everything (other than the cover art). I wrote the music, performed it, programmed it, recorded it, produced it, mixed it, mastered it and released it.

While I was doing the work of making the music, I also started a record label, called Confelicity Records. https://confelicityrecords.com/

Now that this music is out into the world, how it is received is none of my business. I hope people like it, but I am realistic enough to know that some people will dislike it, or worse, be totally indifferent to it, if they listen at all. That’s OK. I have much more new music to make.

The space bears, as the album title suggest, are from another galaxy, planet and time and they’re here to learn about this planet and time. I hope to further develop this story arc in future releases.

Anyway, if you’re so inclined, I do hope you listen to the record and enjoy it. It was inspired by Pink Floyd, Mike Oldfield and Jean Michel Jarre, so the music tends toward being calm, but also a little discomfiting. There are also lots of hidden Easter eggs and more obvious references to events, in the music itself.

I hope you like it.

The Reticence of Makers

The reason people who are naturally inclined to make things become reticent about doing so is that, at any time, people who see the world only in terms of money points they can score, can destroy everything you’ve built, and run away claiming they’ve won.

That’s happened to me more than once. People who only see the world and everything in it, in terms of how much money they can make exploiting it, don’t care about anything else. They can’t cast intrinsic value into dollars, so they rate it as effectively worth nothing.

That’s why they’re quite content to asset strip, smash up effective creative teams, leave developments half-finished and poison their own markets, by mistreating their customers. They’ll load up a company with unrepayable debts and immediately convert the funds into management fees, executive bonuses, and shareholder dividends. They’ll unconscionably abuse the makers. They’re bandits.

These predators burn through trust, goodwill and the makers’ desire to make valuable, useful things. They have no concern for what they’re wasting.

A predatory owner will forcefully tear your creative baby from your hands and orphan it, or give it to adoptive foster parents. It can leave you feeling like a brood bitch on one of those ghastly, intensive puppy farms. The lasting trauma and grief at having your creation snatched away from you is very real and long lasting.

How is a rational, reasonable maker supposed to react to financial-headed owners that behave this way? They shut down or leave, of course. Nobody likes to be abused or have their creations compromised or trashed, especially considering how much blood, sweat and tears went into their making. Nobody wants to tolerate vandalism of their life’s work. Nor should they. It wasn’t on the job description.

How many times have I been told I should work for less, because I get to do the work I love? Why am I donating to someone else’s wealth, just to have a meaningful working life? I’m not a charity.

Predatory owners will cut makers out of equity, so that they don’t share in the rewards for creating something wildly more valuable than their salary, which in reality is just a retainer to prevent the maker creating for themselves or someone else.

They think a salary covers any and all licence fees for the use of intellectual property you create, in perpetuity. If that’s the deal, that grossly undervalues the intellectual property.

Musicians have discovered this, to their cost, when they pay for the creation of a master recording, with interest, but their record company owns that master recording practically forever. It was a ‘work for hire’. The musician can’t even own the recording when the record company has lost all interest in its commercial exploitation. They have to sue for its return and let the courts decide.

The future possibilities of a creation, or it’s future developmental pathway, is incomprehensible to a predatory money man. It’s invisible. Unless you are a maker, you can’t even imagine the future value creation potential of something that has been made. This is why the UK government was content to hand over the intellectual property for computers and jet engines for peanuts, after the Second World War. It’s why they never correctly valued publicly owned infrastructure, as well.

Money heads don’t understand that creations are living entities that grow and evolve, which require constant nurturing and maintenance, to reach their full potential. They think that creation should be bounded and end, when the financial genius arbitrarily deems enough money has been spent on its creation.

They believe creations can be finished. Of course, truly great creations remain an evolving work-in-progress forever, creating ever more value as they do. First drafts are rarely the best version of anything.

Why should you create, if the odds of having your creations snatched from you, sold for a fraction of their value, or utterly destroyed, are high? Why should you produce things of high value, if you’re cut out of sharing in the upside rewards? Why should we risk our houses on the project? Why should we be compliant, respectful, and polite to venal predators? The consideration is never reciprocated.

The world needs to be de-gamified. Not everything worthwhile can be valued correctly, in a game that values efficiency over equity, which also doesn’t care how the rewards are distributed. You can’t view everything in your world as having a dollar price tag, or see your only purpose in life as grabbing as many money points as you can, while laying waste to the living world and victory dancing on its ashes, when you’ve won.

You can’t keep thinking like that.

Makers don’t.

How Much More Time Have You Got?

Recently, I had a sudden, serious, life-changing event happen to me.

Out of nowhere.

I didn’t even know it had happened to me, at first. Nobody did. The first inkling of trouble was my plummeting vital signs. The confirmation was a CT scan, which revealed something so big and scary, it was a marvel I was still alive at all.

The medical professional who saw me in outpatients, a full couple of weeks after the crisis, was the first to look me straight in the eye and earnestly explain that I had been very close to checking out permanently. It hadn’t really sunk in, until then.

The rest of the time leading up to that discussion, the medical personnel were too busy doing everything they could to prevent that undesirable outcome. I’m very grateful for their efforts and expertise.

Coming so close to the end, like that, leaves you with a lot of time to contemplate what the consequences almost were. None of my unfinished works, music, writings or projects would have been completed. All my grand plans would have abruptly terminated. Everything that I have already created would have instantly become my legacy. At a stroke, everything I think and know would have been erased.

If I hadn’t made it, I’d have never had the chance to become a grandfather, nor met my nieces, who are due to visit later this year. I’d have never seen how my own children’s adult lives panned out. My wife would have been widowed. It’s all too dreadful to think about.

Your own mortality is a hard fact to grapple with. I’m still struggling with it. It was a shock.

There is, ahead of me, a long road to recovery, even though I got away with it, at least this time. What happened to me is very treatable and the prognosis is positive, if I take care, but that sure was too close a call.

The future is going to be both hard and challenging for me, but I’m still here. There are things I would still dearly love to create, but the question now is about how many of them I can get done. At this very moment, my potential near-term productivity is pretty low. Recovery is like that and you don’t get a choice. It takes time and rest. You just have to roll with it.

The truth is that none of us really knows how much more time we’ve got. There is no way to know.

Act accordingly.

The To Do Lost

My friend, Amy, is a very clever lady, but through serendipity, she came up with something I thought was especially brilliant, today.

She wrote that she felt she’d wasted her weekend, as she hadn’t done anything on her “Creative Things To Do Lost”.

It was a typo, of course. She meant ‘List’, but I have to admit that the whole concept of having a ‘creative things to do lost’ list sounds very appealing to me.

Imagine giving yourself the permission to try creative things, without having a clue what you’re doing. This is the perfect antidote to perfectionism. These are the things you will intentionally do, while totally lost. What a way to explore and experiment! I love it!

It got me thinking about what creative things I would like to do lost.

What would you put on your list?

Love Letters to Yourself

Sometimes, life not only gives you lemons, it bombards you with them.

Dealing with rejection is a necessary skill for any creative person, but that skill can be sorely tested, often to destruction.

When you’re feeling down, punched and kicked, write love letters to yourself, especially to your creative self.

You need to praise effusively all the good things you are. Those things are real and they’re valuable in the world, even if they don’t currently feel valued.

Writing love letters to your creative self repairs your soul. It’s self-care.

Rejection is never easy to absorb, so counterbalance it with self-acceptance.

Be your own fan.

Some Days You Don’t Want to Create

Some days you don’t want to create. For reasons.

You get tired of cranking out your creative work, like some kind of creativity machine. There’s no shame in it.

Do the admin.

Bang the drum.

Rest.

Go into learning mode.

Go down rabbit holes.

It all amounts to refreshment for your creativity. Worth doing, from time to time.

I Thought the World Valued Engineering Skill and Creativity

I thought having deep skills in electronic design, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and software/computer engineering would safeguard my livelihood. Coupled with UX/UI design skills and product management skills, I thought my career would be bulletproof. Nope. It isn’t so.

Luckily, I thought innocently, having more strings to my bow would confer a modicum of stability and safety. If STEM skills weren’t enough, then perhaps trying to be a Renaissance man would provide a cloak of invincibility. I naively thought songwriting, music production skills, audio engineering and multi instrumentalist skills would protect me from being deemed surplus to humanity’s requirements. Nope. Wrong again.

Well, if all of that wasn’t enough, perhaps being good with words and images would allow me to carve out a protected niche in life. I thought I could earn at least a modest living from painting, drawing, designing and writing. No way. You’ve got to be kidding me.

Instead, everything in the economies I’ve lived and worked in has been asset-stripped, globalised, and financialised. In short, it has been stripped bare, to the very bone, to the point where nothing can function effectively any longer. Supply chains have been shattered and denuded. Co-dependent industrial ecosystems, supporting key industries, have withered and died. Essential services have been ‘profitised’. Gatekeepers have taken all the revenue. The producers, at the source of it all, don’t make enough to subsist.

We’ve been greeded to death, on purpose, by design, so that a self-appointed aristocracy can hoard wealth, beyond the reach of taxation, and live in outrageous opulence.

These days, investors expect corporate debts to be turned into dividends. Nobody builds capability or capacity for the long term. Nobody invests deeply in research and development. Nobody even invests in artist development. Returns must be harvested in ever increasing quantities, in the short term.

Nothing protects you from this any more.

You’re on your own.

I’m nothing if not a first class researcher and developer and a competent artist, in several different disciplines, to boot. There is no opportunity for those.

As a young man, I had hoped there was a place, somewhere on Earth, that would continue to value my best contributions. Sadly, I don’t think there is. Rather, asserting those skills and my experience has been a vicious battle, against intransigent people, for diminishing returns.

Being a rentier, or gambling on financial speculation, would have been far more lucrative, but required skills, values and cunning that I just don’t have. I still value integrity, ethics, and fair dealing. I like justice and equality. I don’t believe in supremacy or exploitation. I’m not cut out for a life in financial services or fintech.

Am I bitter about this? Damn right I am! Who wouldn’t be and why shouldn’t I be?

I’m sure everybody whose careers were blighted and undervalued by the manic political desire, above all else, to support the financial “industry“ (which produces nothing, but creams off a lot), is rightly entitled to feel embittered too. We lived in precarity, flirting with poverty, simply because our contributions to society were deemed as something less than the contributions of rent-seekers, landlords, gamblers, industry destroyers, swindlers and speculators.

The thing is this: We know the value of the contributions we made. We were simply never justly remunerated for them. We were immiserated by ideology, and that ideology has led the world to the brink of ruin.

Now that the world economy sits on the precipice of collapse, has there been a Damascene conversion, with political parties and leaders finally seeing the light and realising they must invest in people and knowledge to have a hope of survival, let alone a good life? Has there heck! They all talk about growth, without the vaguest clue about how to achieve it.

Government tax cuts don’t improve the living conditions of the world. Government investment in training, research and development does, so that we have the skills to solve the pressing problems and provide for ourselves in ways that don’t kill us all. There’s so much we still need to know just to avert our own extinction.

We could have been doing that for forty years, instead of inflating the casinos of the great financial capitals of the world. People were saying we should have invested in developing people the whole time. We knew neoliberalism would get us nowhere. For all those decades, there were enough skills to turn some utterly terrible situations, the result of cavalier industrialisation and blind capitalist zealotry, around completely, by now.

But we didn’t.

And many people’s careers and livelihoods were casualties.

And here we are.

Can Art Fight Stupidity?

In an age where stupidity has been weaponised for gain, can art fight stupidity?

Stupidity could get everyone and everything killed. Climate denial alone could accomplish that.

Much climate denial is fuelled by the professionally stupid, acting as shills for fossil fuel companies that want to get rid of their stranded assets as fast as they can, enlisting the stupid among us to delay action on climate change.

The professionally stupid act in bad faith. They may not be stupid people, but they are cynical and self-interested enough to say stupid things, in public forums, to mobilise the actually stupid to act to serve the interests of their paymasters.

The stupider their pronouncements, the more attention they attract, so their stupid message propagates further and for longer. That’s how click-baiting works. In the context of social media, click bait is a stupidity amplifier and multiplier.

Stupidity could be terminal. There may be no way back from its consequences.

Can art (writing, visual arts, movies, music) combat the assault on the intellect represented by the professionally stupid and their uncritical followers?

This will require artists to act in good faith and not see exploitation of the stupid, by feeding them stupid ideas that resonate with them, as a means of personal enrichment.

It will also require artists with integrity, who realise that personal wealth is of practically no use, when your life support system collapses under the weight of mass stupidity. Killing your own life support system for profit is actually not in your own self-interest, unless you really dig death.

In that sense, the professionally stupid, who make a living promoting stupid ideas to stupid people, may have miscalculated. They’re cutting their own throats. There will be no escape from extreme temperatures, increasingly energetic storms, crop failure and drought. The money they make preaching to the stupid won’t be enough to protect themselves against the consequences of the stupidity they unleash.

We all know who they are. They’re a daily nuisance on Twitter, Facebook, on television, and on radio. Usually, their funding is opaque and stupid people in charge of broadcasting organisations enlist them to ‘balance’ the argument, presumably against fact-based rationality and reality.

In as much as fantasy can be said to be a balance against reality, then their goal is accomplished, but that’s not how they present it. We’re supposed to believe both sides, even the stupid one, are speaking in good faith, from facts, addressing reality. It isn’t so.

Can art convert the stupid into the well-informed? Can it turn uncritical non-thinkers into critical thinkers?

I suspect it might be able to. Those in government so keen to defund the arts might agree.

At this juncture in human history, art that remains aloof, disinterested and disengaged with the fight against stupidity is, in truth, just another species of stupidity.

Artists that make that kind of art are, by not trying to stem the tide of stupidity, but instead adding to it, also stupid.

How did so many people become so stupid in the first place? Why are there literally millions of people only too happy to propagate stupid ideas and beliefs? When did stupidity become so fashionable?

I don’t know if art can fight stupidity effectively but I hope it can and I hope there are artists who will try. There’s very little else standing between us and extinction.

Arting Shapes You

I’m going to suggest that by far the most significant and dominant thing that comes out of maintaining a creative practice is that it defines and refines you.

It teaches you better habits, improves your resilience, hones your fine motor skills, sharpens your intellect, shows you how to access and improve your imagination and taste in shareable ways, guides you toward higher quality ideas, and little by little, turns you into a more interesting person, with better, more agile thinking skills. It leaves you stronger.

The stuff you make and the audience you might build for it are secondary effects.

The big creation, or recreation, is you.

Art making improves you as a human being. Doing so regularly is a process of continuous self-improvement. If you were a Japanese car factory and not an artist, this continuous self-improvement might be called Kaizen and would be the very embodiment of total quality management. It teaches you discipline, but not the kind that is imposed on you. This is a discipline you develop for yourself as a useful tool in your art making skill set. You own it. You’re fully invested in it. It’s not a ceremony, it’s a necessity.

When you see art making through this lens, all the requisite self-discipline and self-motivation, the learning to deal with rejection and criticism, the lessons of finishing over perfecting, and many more, begin to make sense. Art isn’t about getting rich or having your work widely noticed. It isn’t even necessarily about commerce and money changing hands. Instead, it’s about personal enrichment through a dedication to self-improvement and increasing quality, for its own sake. In short, it’s nothing less than a totally different way of being, in the world.

That shifts the emphasis radically. Now, the art you produce isn’t about whether anybody liked it or even heard about it. Now, it’s about what new things you learned while making the art, what new techniques and methods you tried, what wider influences you drew on, and how you personally changed, incrementally, through the experience of grappling with the making of your art.

You embarked on an epic inner journey of further self-discovery and you can never unsee those further deeper insights into yourself. You know a little bit more about yourself than you did before. You may have even grown to like, admire, or even love, those unexamined aspects of your soul that were brought to the fore, while making your art.

It’s not like this is cost free. Dedication usually involves sacrifice and compromise of some kind. The very process of conceiving of and realising your work of art can leave you physically, mentally and emotionally depleted. So does physical exercise.

We maintain our physical fitness because it improves the quality of our lives and extends our health-spans. Very few of us physically exercise to sell something or become the most admired and adored person in the land. We do it because it’s good for us and bestows benefits on us. Yes, we’re hot, sweaty, in pain and tired after vigorous exercise, but we do it because it’s life affirming and extending.

I suggest to you that pursuing art making on a regular basis bestows benefits on you too, but on your mind and soul, not just on the physical parts of your body that are involved in art making. We expand our perspectives. We entertain fresh ideas. We read and observe more about the world, to fuel our creative inspiration. Our self-confidence soars, with each new personal accomplishment.

So, don’t make art to become cooler. It will almost certainly do that for you anyway, but it isn’t the point. Do it because it improves the quality of your existence.

It lets you express and articulate emotions and troubles which would otherwise be repressed and pushed down, accumulating stress in your body like some kind of dysregulated pressure cooker. It clarifies your viewpoints and lets you process your trauma. It lets you say things you’d otherwise be too restrained to say out loud. You can take revenge on those that wronged you by creating beauty in spite of their ill treatment of you.

In short, making art turns you into a better version of yourself, each and every time you make something. It turns you from a net consumer into a net contributor. It dissolves your imposter syndrome, as you gain confidence in knowing what you’re doing. You become a much better human being.

Art making shapes you in so many subtle, but important ways.

Nobody Knows How Long Creation Takes

Nobody who does not create a form of art has any understanding of how long it takes to create art in that form.

Ask a non-songwriter how long it takes to write a song and you’ll get some alarming answers. They don’t even understand the mental processes involved. That’s all invisible, therefore it doesn’t exist and takes no time.

Even a back of the envelope estimate for how long it will take to write a book, or edit eight hours of video would tell a person how absurd their initial expectations are, but nobody even scratches those first approximation estimates out. They’d rather pick an estimate out of thin air and attempt to assert it as divine truth.

Is it a belief in magic that drives unrealistic expectations about what a creative professional can produce, per unit of time?

Or is it marketing and propaganda that tells people Bill Gates wrote MS-DOS single handedly while still a student (he didn’t) or Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook one drink-fuelled weekend, in his dorm (no, he didn’t)? This myth-making distorts perceptions of what ought to be possible and it’s based on bare-faced lies.

That’s how design becomes synonymous with “just colouring in”. Because you play your music for free, when you’re practicing, you ought to be happy to hand over an original composition for free. CAD design is “just drawing”. An original painting is “just slapping some paint on a canvas”. In fact, there’s a widespread idea that if you enjoy doing something, that’s reason enough to donate it for free.

If you ask people how long it takes to mix a song, they’ll typically give you an answer close to the length of the song. In truth, a mixing engineer may have to listen to a single song hundreds of times, making adjustments as they go, before the final mix can be printed. A three minute song becomes 300 minutes of effort. That’s 5 hours, not 3 minutes. That’s why mixing a ten song album can take more than a working week. Then you can start mastering!

Does anybody consider the preparation, research, set-up and tear-down time? Do they factor in their share of the ten thousand hours somebody put into becoming a master at their craft? Do they add in the time taken to order supplies? Often, they don’t even count the cost of the materials.

In film making, does anyone count the cost of the typical 200 to 1 shooting ratios? For every finished minute on the screen, 199 minutes of performance and cinematography lie discarded on the virtual cutting room floor. A 100 minute-long feature film will throw away 19,900 minutes of footage. That’s nearly 14 x 24 hour days worth of imagery that the editor will at least have previewed, while selecting the shot to include in the final film.

A really good writer can bang out around 5000 good words a day, on a sustained basis, assuming they’ve already done their research. Hence, a 100,000 word book takes 20 days solid to draft, before editing. Some writers are lucky to produce 500 words a day, though. Their first draft will take 200 days.

How many times do you suppose they’ll have to read and re-read their own 100,000 words, before the manuscript is print-ready? The average reading speed is about 250 words a minute. If you have to read your own 100,000 words, all the way through, just 3 or 4 times, that represents around 26 hours of work alone.

Of course, if you point out the facts, you’re “just being difficult”, “building up your part” and “sand bagging”.

You’re expected to produce this work in your spare time.

I don’t know how we begin to educate the recipients and patrons of creative work about the huge value that’s being delivered. It seems to be a perennial problem, in the creative industries. They get impatient and annoyed when artworks can’t be delivered according to the imaginary schedule they made up.

Nobody realises how much time everything takes.