new music section added to web site

from 2025-10-18
by hexeaktivitat

after several general life crises hitting me all simultaneously (nothing scary, just a lot of "oh shit I actually have to adult now, who allowed this to happen") I might start using this web site again! oh no

anyway to make it easier for me to share or link music sketches and thoughts and so on I built out a new part of the web site. you can click on the /music link in the header, or you can just click here.

okay but why share all this

something that I noticed while going through the process of self-learning a bunch of things (music, programming, creative writing, literary criticism, fighting games, sewing, whatever) is that there's often a very poor public record of what it looks like when you're learning a new skill. people throw around the ira glass quote way too much and while it's very true, I have historically found it difficult to find, understand, and grasp what it actually looks, feels, seems like when you are a beginner and intermediate learner in a particular field. people usually group up and create a small circle of people around the same level and workshop and learn with each other until they're ready to share their work (really, their progress) with the world at large.

this means a lot of what that early, beginner and intermediate work, the "still learning" work, gets left in dustbins and cutting room floors. it never gets organized. it never sees the light of day (unless you get famous enough that an archive collects what's left and calls it juvenalia). this means there's not a lot of external models of what learning and progressing in a skill before you get to the point you share it with the world exists, something that I think is a valuable and important resource in an era marked by heavy amounts of autodidactism. you see this a lot with people Going Through It with their skill-based hobby, struggling to move past the invisible line between "amateur" and "professional" (invisible and largely imaginary, since the line is effectively self-confidence).

now, I've been working at music and music production skills for quite a few years off and on as a hobby, but I've only just recently started to feel comfortable and grasp that I could, in fact, put my work out there. I still feel like I'm "learning" (especially the art of finishing something, rather than living in the world of infinite sketches, which really isn't an issue honestly). I also like sharing things, sometimes for attention but mostly just because I like sharing things in the hopes of other people enjoying them and, crucially, helping building up my own confidence in what I am doing. I also firmly believe that having a record of someone's progress through the parts of a practice that are difficult for them is important, arguably more important that having a body of "official", approved, vetted, and polished work. portfolios and releases and other victories are the high watermarks, not the steady churn.

the development of an artist (or any sort of technically demanding skill, really) is largely the product of their failures, and processes learned from those failures, which if you only follow and consume the exhibited end products you never see (you'll recognize this if you've read art & fear). so I think it's important, more than releasing finished products, to release and make public the unfinished products, the abandoned wips, things you tried before you abandoned that pathway for your own interests. this is something I think the internet is fairly uniquely suited for.

I remember, fairly clearly, the moment I was listening to music has the right to children and understanding that actually, no, the haphazard sounds and song concepts I was working on were not so dissimilar to what boards of canada were working with, even if it didn't feel that way because they had an album and I didn't (also I don't work in their genre, really). and I think, perhaps, that while that was a bit of a revelatory experience, it's also good to be able to have that feeling much sooner, and with work that's doesn't have that particular cultural reputation conveyed upon it. we should all be able to listen to philosophy of the world and realize that, yes, actually, you can make music, or whatever you're into, and it doesn't fucking matter what it's like. the world, in general, will be a better place with more art.