The influx of gear porn in electronic music is hilarious to me. Cool, you have like $10,000 worth of synths on your Instagram, but fetishizing this equipment doesn’t mean your sound isn’t boring. If what we love about these technologies are their cyberpunk and sci-fi aesthetics, then we should create music that is intriguing and beautiful. Looking to the future, I think our most interesting ideas will stem from the combination of old and new technologies. With the growing omnipresence of music streaming and the crowded consumerization of production software, the audience for experimental music is larger than ever before. We should create music for a growing number of nightlife harlequins — the embodiments of split dichotomies and personalities, the reclusive performers and the outcast entertainers, the dreamers and misanthropes, the paradoxical yet meaningful.

A concept rising in popularity in electronic music is hauntology, the persistence of elements from the past found in contemporary songs and bodies of work. These sounds haunt the present like a ghost, creating new futures by conserving the past. Listening to music is like using a time machine. We feel nostalgia for sounds, samples, and instruments that evoke cultural memory. Music that elicits nostalgia keeps the idea of the past alive, rendering it real in the present. When we sense the creep of  feelings and memories from the past into the music we listen to, it can feel like a ghost is making itself known from a time that once existed. Several questions arise — did the past ever become the past? Are we feeling nostalgia for times that have come and gone, or did they just never end?

In response, electronic artists are turning to modular synths, a perfect combination of old and new technologies that can be manipulated to evoke feelings of both the past and future. A modular synth is made up of many separate synth modules which can all be connected to one another by CV (control voltage) patch cables. Modulation allows the user to create their own synthesizer by connecting inputs, outputs, and controls in various ways that wouldn’t be possible in a pre-built synth with components and internal patches set in place. It’s the difference between building your own Lego house and buying one that comes glued together. Modular synths don’t come with presets, and each one is unique with its own personality and purpose. 

Depending on how many modules you own, the possibilities of patch combinations and sounds are endless and at times random. This complexity means it is difficult to create the same sound twice, an aspect that keeps me inspired to dive deeper into these types of technologies. It can feel like exploring the great unknown, and in a hauntological sense, the known.

Quarantine gave me time to reflect on my personal relationship to psychosis, consciousness, and memory. I’ve recently turned to recording ambient, drone, and dance music, experimenting with repetition and the fluid transition between consciousness and subconsciousness. I find myself paying attention to this music at first, but my mind will begin to wander, and the sounds will slip into my subconscious. It feels like meditation. While music that is dense and detailed doesn’t grant the mind much space to drift, ambient and dance music allow the listener to ponder new thoughts and ideas. I love the idea that someone can listen to my music while creating their own art, influencing their subconscious mind but not requiring all of their attention.

The recent dry spell in live performance has conjured a desire to create new communities in the music scene. I don’t think I’m alone in saying that New York can be socially ostracizing, so I hope we can supersede the need for cliques to create community events and spaces that are more accepting. Exclusivity will function as a matter of public health rather than a coolness factor. 

I’m looking forward to continuing the party series I started last year called 29 Speedway. The goal is to transform it into a collective of like-minded musicians and visual artists who care about pushing the boundaries of live audiovisual shows and performance art. I want to put on shows that are as much about the visual projections as they are about the music, ranging from intimate sound gallery shows to large-scale rave parties. In the meantime, I plan to start hosting small performance shows at my studio compound in Ridgewood. 

We need to utilize spaces that artists maintain full ownership over, spaces the city cannot regulate. There’s beauty in the DIY space, and I think we are going to see a lot more of them popping up in the near future. People are so afraid that New York might be dead, but like hauntology, the past remains alive and we can incorporate it into our present. But like gear porn, we shouldn’t get hung up on the old just for aesthetics. We should combine it with the new to create a better future.