Project progress; compilation culture

Progress is still being made on my cable station, albeit much more slowly than when the idea was fresh and I was full of energy. I'm about a third done filling out the schedule we, but I may decide to rebalance some of what I have later. It's brain-intensive work, trying to not only remember enough videos but also thinking aboit the right order to put them in, and manually filling out the template. I have to really concentrate to make sure all the links go to the right places and everything displays properly. I'm going to have to spend a lot of time testing before I release it. But I think it'll be good when it's done.

Speaking of putting things in the right order, reviewing Visionaire 53 put another thought in my head: "you know, I bet I could make a pretty good short song compilation." So I did. It's called Super Sequitur, and it's the first (and hopefully not final) release from my new pretend label, Ancipital Records. I didn't think I could get tracks down to mean(x)=1m09s, but to be fair neither did Visionaire; many if not most of the tracks on disc 1 are excerpts or edits of larger pieces. I decided I wanted to make a compilation of 50 short tracks that would fit on a single (80 minute) CD, so I'd need an average track length of 1m26s; I also wanted to avoid editing or excerpting as much as possible, justifying my laziness by turning it into a challenge: Can I make a good compilation just from tracks in my music collection in their original form? Well, you be the judge:

• Download the album (.zip, 163 MB)

or

• Stream or download on the internet archive

I'm biased, but I think I did a pretty good job. It's a lot of the weird noisy experimental shit I love, but it's not all that because that would be boring. No track is longer than 2m30s, and I filled 99.5% of the available space. It pulls from a wide variety of genres, and I picked tracks that pack a huge impact into a very short runtime. This wasn't part of my original plan, but I noticed that I had several sets of thematically similar songs, so I tried to arrange them into a very loose narrative, and think I was moderately successful. I won't spoil it if you want to try to suss it out yourself (hints: Don't take the exact lyrics too literally. Titles and how the music makes you feel are more important. There's a flashback around the middle of the album.)

The only track that didn't come from my collection is the last one: I knew from the start I wanted to end the album with a performance of Auld Lang Syne from one of Phish's annual NYE shows. The only one I had was their 1995 show, which I believe was the only one that was commercially released.¹ It's a very nice rendition, but the track ends abruptly and wasn't suitable for the last track of an album. So I grabbed every Auld Lang Syne I could find that would fit in the remaining runtime. I almost went with their 2019 performance, because I thought it was beautiful how the crowd started singing along, but it's a little muddled and didn't strike quite the hopeful triumphant tone I was looking for. You can't hear the music as well over the crowd, and the audience had trouble staying in time with the band. (To be fair, some may have been under the influence of time-dilating substances.)

I settled on their 2013 performance: Trey's improvisation is on point, and there's a big organ swell near the end of the piece that really brings it home for me. There's also enough cheering and fireworks at the end that I could fade it out like a proper end of an album. That's the only edit I made; every other tracks is unaltered. I did an rsgain pass to help normalize the volume levels, found some public domain art for the cover, and cleaned up all the metadata; and the end result really feels like a proper compilation.

I won't bother with a track-by-track review, but needless to say every track is a 3 or a 4, and there's a plethora of bonus points to be awarded, so the total score would be somewhere in the high 80s or maybe even the low 90s, which would make it one of the best albums of all time. By my metric, anyway. Your milage may vary. But I hope not by too much.

Adam Neely recently released an excellent video in which he excoriates "a.i. music" and the culture forming around it. The most surprising takeaway is that people who get deep into Suno develop an alarming addiction to it, and many of the people who use it stop wanting to listen to anything but "their own music". Neely points out how weird this is—as a musician, he's proud of the work he made but of course doesn't obsessively listen to it; no actual musician does. Generative a.i. does some weird shit to people's brains. They're tricked into experiencing a faux thrill of creation without the sobering counterweight of actually doing anything meaningful or putting in work. People who "make a.i. music" largely can't cite a single other "a.i. artist" they listen to or take inspiration from. Their interest is utterly solipsistic. It's a fascinating watch.

I think making compilations is a way people without musical skill can sort of participate in the creation process without letting it go to their heads. I have no delusions that I made the music on Super Sequitur, and although I've enjoyed listening to it, it hasn't replaced all other music for me. I'm proud of how well the tracks flow and how nicely the "story" comes together, but I don't listen and think "wow, I made music!" I think it's a healthier way to turn consumption of music into a participatory act. It's more satisfying than just making a playlist on someone else's platform, and far more rewarding than prompting a slop machine. I put a lot of work into Super Sequitur! I painstakingly combed my library for the best tracks that fit my constraints. I made a spreadsheet to track the playlist in progress and how much of my time budget I had spent. I added, dropped, arranged and re-arranged tracks exhaustively. For the cover, I combed through public domain art for hours looking for pieces that jumped out at me.² I put at least a half work day's worth of time into designing the packaging. Is it perfect? No, but it looks and sounds like what I wanted to make, and I'm much prouder than if I had just told a computer to do it for me.

It's worth talking about how the different options do and don't harm the artists: "a.i. music generators" steal from artists en masse and sell a product derived from their work that directly competes with them. My compilation is technically violating artist's copyrights, but in a way that I think doesn't cause harm and may actually be beneficial. The compilation won't lead to any lost sales, and could be a net positive if someone listens to it, discovers bands they haven't heard of and goes on to buy some of their albums. That's why record labels were willing to give compilations out for free or very cheaply: it's essentially an ad for every artist that gets featured. It's the rare marketing strategy where everyone wins. How many people are going to listen to a song on a compilation and say "This is great! I really wanted this song, and now I don't have to buy the album!" I don't know, but it's probably a much smaller number than the ones who say "This song is great! I'm going to buy the album!"

I won't go so far as to say I'm doing the artists a favor, because the most likely outcome is that no one listens at all, but by the same token I also don't think I'm doing any harm. That what I'm doing is technically not allowed but the ways Spotify and Suno exploit artists is allowed is evidence of a rotten system. I think at worst, releasing our own compilations won't hurt anyone, and if the backlash to streaming reaches critical mass, it could be a net benefit to the culture of music ownership. Streaming music platforms aren't going to get better, they're going to keep feeding us more slop and giving the artists smaller and smaller crumbs. I don't think this is a system worthy of our respect.

Anyway, I probably need to take a break. My brain has not been good. It's been hyper-focusing on my projects to the extent that I'm having trouble sleeping because I can't stop thinking about what I want to do, and I'm already not sleeping the best because I need a new CPAP machine. I need to let my mind rest and start trying to read again. I haven't read a book since November, and having a reading habit is the best way to make my brain calm and controllable 🦝