On praxis and inviting people in
"A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably"
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Do you know the meaning of / this is love (this is love)”
NoMeansNo
The story of what it means to be valid as a musician, of success and of acceptance, are songs that we sing to ourselves and each other, informed by our experiences. They are stories mediated by the system as a whole. That is not to say that they do not have concrete effects.
Scroll on your phone looking at the lives of musicians that you don’t know and will never know, feeling that strange ache.
A daydream. A musician who you look up to is in the audience at your show. They come backstage and they tell you that your performance moved them. Perhaps they want to take your hand.
Google ‘how to get people to come to your gig’
Many of the ways that we’re taught to think about making music, and art more broadly, conform to inward facing patterns. Singer songwriter / band / label / scene. It’s more complicated than that by some distance, but binaries can be useful when you’re conceptualising a space, to a point (pun). Do not mistake this for them being fundamentally more real than any other peg you could hang your hat on.
Consider now ways of making music that are more outward facing, and more porous, and less relationally constrained.
Cut to a talking head.
Because now we have to go first person so I can talk about my experiences. Perhaps I’m being interviewed for content.
Wide shot of a sofa, coffee, houseplant, microphone.
“Yeah good question, thanks. So over the last couple of years the way I think about making music has changed, and it’s all really done a lot more than I thought it would, the Drone Orchestra. Er, I see a lot of people struggling with sustaining making music, emotionally I mean, the practical and economic thing is obviously a whole other thing, but yeah there’s something about the way that we’re told to do things and the disappointment of the broken promises of Capitalism, you know?
So people are feeling like failures, feeling lonely, feeling burned out, as a result of doing the things they are told will work for them. Yeah, it’s really sad. I mean, I’m not an expert here but it looks pretty pervasive to me.
So yeah, the start, sure. Er, a bunch of stuff happened and I found myself in London after some years away, living on my own, and there were lots of people around doing the done thing of like family and primarily socialising and existing in relation to that, no criticism or disrespect, to me it was quite sort of impenetrable because I wasn’t doing that myself. I’d been in some situations which, er, challenged what I wanted from life I guess, and what I thought was maybe possible, and I thought about what I could do that would be more community orientated, more open, and how I could make my own life better really, to be honest.
Um. So I decided to start a drone orchestra, and just kind of see what happened. We’re not the first drone orchestra, and it was inspired by a whole load of stuff, I’d been putting on house shows and meeting people and getting into the more collaborative side of stuff. I don’t recall the exact point at which it became a concrete decision but at some point I messaged a friend who I’d been collaborating with and said I want to do this thing, and so we did. Set a date, sent some messages, I think at the first session there were like four of us.
And yeah, I think one of the most educational things about the drone orchestra for me, and there’s been plenty and I’m still learning, was the process of letting strangers into my flat without really any screening process before they showed up at the door and trusting that we could do something cool. Obviously I’m very safe to do that, relatively speaking, for various reasons, it’s really pretty low stakes but yeah and then people started expressing to me how much they got out of the stuff we were doing and that was really nice, and I just wanted to keep doing more of it. Also learning to collaborate better and to let go of the control of things was good, that’s always important right?
So yeah, trying to be concise, er, there’s something so different when you can build something that remains like fluid, nobody has to commit, everyone is welcome and we do what we can to circumvent questions of productivity and success and validity, and try to stay mindful of like, what you can renegotiate about how to function, what is proper, what works. Try to stay open. Keep being active about inviting people in, and invite widely, be careful not to just default to the kind of people you’re most comfortable being around. You know, get into real physical space with people rather than forming parasocial relationships, turn virtual contact into something concrete. Model doing things the way you think they should be done, do unto others and all that. You have to make spaces that feel safe, and you need to provide access for people who don’t have the resources you might. Decenter yourself if you can, get other people involved in shaping things. It all takes constant reiteration, because the world will keep trying to pull things into more standard shapes, that’s the nature of things, but it’s well worth it so far. Yeah not so concise there, sorry.
Start your own drone orchestra basically haha.
Yeah thanks very much, appreciate the opportunity.”
The camera pans back to reveal that the wall behind the sofa is a false wall and everything outside the set is a vast expanse of land on fire.
The South London Drone Orchestra, on a somehow floating platform partially obscured by smoke, play something stunningly beautiful alongside the roaring of the flames.