GUERRILLA REWILDING (Patreon)

Not so fast, Jeff Goldblum. Here at 65LABS we spend an achingly long time trying to decide if we should do something or not, while dedicating a dangerously small amount of resources to wondering whether we actually can. And so, in a brief interlude from our Wreckage Systems Technical Overview series, here is a short contribution fresh from the 65LABS Existential Doubt wing, laying out one of our many answers to the question 'why are you doing this???' rather than the 'how are you doing this???' question that the technical overviews tend to focus on.

GUERRILLA REWILDING

Once in a talk about generative music, Brian Eno compared the distinctions between architecture and gardening to the realm of music composition. He suggested that if you consider making fixed, 'concrete' music as something akin to architecture — fixed structures, placed very deliberately in relation to each other through space and time — then making generative music is something more like being a gardener.

One is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden. One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life. And that life isn't necessarily exactly what you'd envisaged for them. It's characteristic of the kind of work that I do that I'm really not aware of how the final result is going to look or sound. So in fact, I'm deliberately constructing systems that will put me in the same position as any other member of the audience. I want to be surprised by it as well. And indeed, I often am. (Eno, 2011)

This is an evocative and valuable metaphor to illustrate the nature of working with algorithms in and of themselves, but what Eno does not take into account here is that what works for him is not necessarily generalisable to all other musicians. It was Eno himself who first coined the term ‘generative music’ and for the last thirty years or so he has carved out a rarefied space for himself in which he can work that does not reflect the terrain other pop musicians inhabit. To expand on his metaphor, Eno gets to experiment in his garden planting generative music seeds, as do academics in gardens found at university music departments, but popular music practitioners at large find themselves in an increasingly dystopian, concrete cityscape shaped by the musical-industrial complex. There's barely a blade of grass in sight out here.

If we don’t have gardens in which to work we cannot become gardeners. So if we are interested in antagonising the conventional structures of popular music, we have to instead become guerrilla rewilders. Algorithmic composition becomes a transgressive act, a search for weaknesses in the architecture of pop songs, gaps in which we can plant seeds in the concrete to lay down roots that will eventually crack open the homogenised expectations of what popular music structures can look like.

This is not to argue against Eno himself, or the thrust of his call for us to all be gardeners; his is a utopian goal worth striving for and the broader intention he expresses here seems to be an ambition to rescue what Mark Fisher would call a “prospective time” (Fisher, 2011) for musicians to imagine new ways of making music that is otherwise robbed from them by a precarious existence under capitalist realism. (And indeed, this goal should not be limited to musicians. Prospective time should belong to everyone! We all deserve gardens, and time to think and play in them.)

This rewilding metaphor also does not intend to argue against the rarefied spaces made available in academia where musicians can experiment free from the explicit commercial pressures associated with the music industry. These spaces after all are subject to capitalist forces in different ways and bring with them their own possibilities and limitations for pushing the boundaries of what everyone's favourite grumpy uncle Adorno would call the “natural language” of popular music. It is in academia where generic algorithmic concepts and techniques can be developed and made more easily accessible to artists and noisy code dilettantes like us, potentially democratising an algorithmic approach to popular music composition. The academic roots of live coding communities are a testament to this.

But we cannot all be Brian Eno. And we here at 65LABS are either too altruistic or, (more likely), too vain to have our research bounce around in the echo chamber of academia mostly unheard, the strength of our signal too weak to reach outside its increasingly expensive walls and back into the world as it really is.

And so 65LABS and our Wreckage Systems are taking a stealth approach. Under the cover of darkness and huge commercial un-success, we skirt the peripheries of the vast structure of the musical-industrial complex, unnoticed by most, wearing sunglasses at night, clinging to the shadows. We find the cracks in the concrete, the fractures in the smooth, glistening shell of pop culture, and it is in these tiny spaces we plant our little seeds of antagonism. Guerrilla rewilders, stubbornly sowing our naive, fragile futures into the polluted soil of the decaying present.

Who knows what might eventually grow.