Music

I have been producing music since roughly 2010, but perhaps only started taking it much more seriously around 2016. 

I rarely produce music these days, but when I do, I use Ableton with some very light use of physical hardware. After going through a long phase of GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome), I sold all of my synthesizers and kept my Roland Juno 106, which was the first synthesizer I bought when I was in college - it had paint on it and was originally from a secondary school in Scotland. The Juno 106 is a really charming and beloved polyphonic synthesizer from the 80s.

Many music producers have, or have had, GAS - this syndrome transfers over to many different hobbies and domains. It is mostly a distraction from finishing work, which is arguably one of the more difficult parts of being creative. You just need one more analog drum machine, vintage synthesizer or software plugin, and you'll be able to create the track that you'll be happy with. This is a huge trap! The one thing that really matters for music production is a workflow that allows you to be creative with very little friction and helps you finish tracks. For me, that's just using Ableton, in the box, as it's sometimes referred to. Many producers (especially on reddit) will fetishize DAWless setups, where they don't have any computer involved in their music production and just have physical gear without the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation, i.e music production software). You can take a guess how many of those people share their music with the world!

Most of my music has been released on vinyl, usually in limited runs of 200-300 copies, which is the standard number of copies for relatively niche electronic music genres. Vinyl generally doesn't sound better than digital, at least in the conventional sense of audio fidelity (detail, soundstage etc). Vinyls have crackle, low end distortion, wow and flutter (the vinyl does not play consistently at the same speed). These can also be positive qualities for the listening experience, but they do not "add detail" as many purists claim. The main advantages of vinyl are that it looks cool, it sounds cozy and warm, it's very tactile, it's nostalgic and is something one can properly own. The act of listening to it is a process, and one that people really enjoy. The aesthetics of vinyl are more important than the physics of the audio that comes out of the speakers from vinyl.

Vinyl releases are also a good signal of whether music will be worth listening to. There is a lot of bad electronic music out there - there is a very low barrier to entry to releasing music these days (which is, on net, a good thing probably). Mastering, cutting and pressing a vinyl release costs thousands of euro, and you may not even be guaranteed to sell the full run. Record stores need to buy copies too, and generally you also need to pay a distributor to get them into record stores. Much like books that have a physical publisher, music that is released on a vinyl label is some signal of quality. With that said, many small vinyl labels don't even break even for each release, most do it for the love of the game!

Many labels are "vinyl-only", mostly for coolness purposes but also to create artificial scarcity. This does not stop people from buying the record, ripping the audio into the digital domain and then distributing on P2P file sharing platforms like Soulseek and YouTube. People will get their music at the end of the day! Most of my vinyl releases are available on YouTube via this method of ripping and uploading.

In the subgenre of minimal house specifically, there is a lot of emphasis on the act of DJing with vinyl, as it requires a decent amount of skill in order to beatmatch two vinyl records. Digital DJing has largely solved this using the "sync" feature on digital DJ setups to automatically synchronize two tracks using some clever algorithms. 

The aura of vinyl DJing helps sustain the record market in a few electronic genres. More interestingly though, since a huge amount of electronic music was exclusively published on vinyl before the digital music age, there are a lot of hidden gems that DJs try to find by digging in record stores around the world to find long forgotten records. DJs also use this to signal their craft quite a bit, finding rare gems, posting photos of themselves in obscure record stores in cities they tour in and so on.

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.”
- Brian Eno

All of my released music is below. Most of it could be considered minimal house - which is a subgenre of house music that has enjoyed a few booms and busts over the years since the early 2000s. It can be mostly characterized by more subtle grooves compared to standard house music, larger emphasis on syncopation, slowly evolving rhythms and micro-samples, with long whooshy chords and driving, plucky basslines. It's likely you can only buy copies second hand now, but you can also listen to some releases on Spotify or buy it on Bandcamp.

I'm definitely very sympathetic to how difficult it can be for many people to enjoy house music, if you don't already, it's unlikely you will. It can be very repetitive and uninteresting. In general, house and techno are a highly contextual types of music - they are really intended to be heard and danced to in clubs. It's also a bit odd to listen to standalone club tracks, because they often open and close with a stripped down beats with no melodic content, to help the DJ transition between to tracks without the key of each track clashing - it can be a bit discontinuous. The clubbing experience of dance music is what has led many people to enjoy the music outside of the club. I'm not sure I would have ever gotten into it if I had never gone to clubs!

The selection of music really matters too - I mostly consume house music via podcasts - which are just DJ mixes that have been published online. There are a lot of incredible DJs out there who are very skilled at curating, sequencing and blending a selection of music that creates a nice flow. 

Here is a selection of my favourite podcasts, I only listen to them when I work.

Noah Skelton · mixes I enjoy

I have also recorded a few podcasts over the years:

Noah Skelton · Podcasts