Building a life around music

I felt the need this week to look back and reflect on how I got here. As with most people’s stories in music it was an odd series of events led me to getting to have the life I have today as an artist, rather than producing for others. It’s still early, but at this moment at least, I feel like I’m building something meaningful where everything is slowly connecting in the right way. I’ve had for the first time in years some “this is where I’m meant to be” moments, especially during the Alone Together event.

Some of you might just want music, and none of the other things that have become part of my world… some of you may have joined this ride after the music and care more about the story and experimenting. But I do know that this thing is growing, and that made want to write down for myself a reminder of the chances, the people, the inspirations for what got me here. Now it feels like it is all starting to come together, I can see now what really matters, and I realised I need to get back to how I started: just sharing openly where I’m at.

When I started this journey I was burnt out from making music for the commercial music industry. I went from making a few hundred songs a year and living off one or two of those, to finally getting to make an album as a signed artist that never came out. I was lucky to have been living off music for a long time, but I wasn’t feeling fulfilled or happy with my process. I had worked so hard I developed a nerve problem in my hands and arms and was forced to stop making music altogether except for in short bursts… and I got back to just making what I felt connected to, and that became Sound of Fractures. It was part of a mental shift for me, towards being honest with who I was, how old I was and what I cared about. For the first time in my life I wrote something, a post that went with my first EP called Real Friends: A New Beginning. It was just for me. I talked openly about how I felt, what my life was, and what I wanted it to be. Until then I had never really shared anything about me, or even tried to communicate it myself.. in a way the whole process was almost like self therapy, and me finding myself again. The music itself was mixed by my close friend Emre Ramazanoglu, the visualisers by my jackson Ducasse. I was being managed by my friend Casper Louis, and the songs all contained samples of my day to day life. The EP cover was a photo from my mum’s wall of me when I was a kid. The press shots by my best mates cousin Joe Puxley. It was my reset. I went on soon after to meet my now wife, and start my journey of being a parent. Looking back it all felt connected. She took me travelling and I took a break for the first time in 9 years. I had only travelled before for writing sessions and writing camps. I guess I started to live.

The second phase of this journey has been about not just freedom to create, but freedom to discover who I was as an artist. There was a window where I got to explore releasing music in new ways. I found an amazing circle of people through exploring music as NFTs. It blew open my world. I could combine art forms, I could distribute directly to people, release music in new formats, give people shares of songs, allow them to contribute to making the artwork.. the crucial part was all the people I found and that found me were excited about an “other”. They were open, sick of streaming and the normal exploitative models, they came with open minds and hearts. Selling my music as art helped fund my following EPs, and time for me to think. They helped contribute to the crowdfund of SCENES my debut album, but they also contributed their own memories. That time gave me creative freedom from the music industry and social media. It allowed me to see that I wanted to give people the feeling my process had given me, and that’s what SCENES was. I had put my life in my music, and I wanted to invite others to do the same, by making their memories and lives part of the project. And 350 people contributed their memories and I raised £6000 to pay for the project, one that no commercial partner or brand believed in because the value at the end was emotional value for fans, not money.

That period, where NFTs funded my work, looking back now was R&D funding for what Sound of Fractures has become. That period of people backing artists may have felt like it fell apart when the NFT music platforms failed, but it was crucial time for some of us; multidisciplinary creators / founders / creative technologists — where we didn’t need to fit in the box, or create in the mould expected by major tech or the music industry. It has now led to me building a whole world around participation, co-ownership and meaning making. It’s helped me free myself from what I thought an electronic music artist had to be.

Alone Together has become the perfect vehicle for all the ideas I have experimented with over the last 4 years, and I can’t wait to see where we take it next… but crucially it came from having creative and technological freedom, opening up my heart and speaking freely… and actively looking for ways to bring you in to be a part of the experience.

Real Friends - The Beginning of Something New

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July 15, 2024

This post is a way to gain insight into my creative world, my story and what makes Sound of Fractures different. I will lay out my road map for web3, the level of thought that has gone into my decisions, and how it all fits conceptually with my creative output. By the end, I hope you are invested not just in my story, but what the future holds.