Why Does Electronic Music Sound Like Shoegaze? Art School Girlfriend on Lean In, positive nihilism, and making music for fun

20:06Sean:I found that.

20:06Polly Mackey:Do you think that some of that is a response to digital worlds? Like obviously when you were making this record, AI wasn't in the place that it is now, I'd imagine. because I listened to one of your interviews you did recently and it sounds like you've been working on this record for a little while. And I think that obviously just being online just feels like being in such a digital world and how do you pull people out of that? And it's those kinds of things, isn't it? Like I've learned from making this podcast when the room sound disappears, if you do an edit, like you're just so obvious that you've edited something and like the sound of a room is so crucial, even to someone's unconscious brain when they're just listening to people talking.

20:44Polly Mackey:if I was to just add in a pause but not include the room sound it just sounds so strange and we perceive and feel those things and I didn't even notice the room sound until it's not there and it's like such a small perceptive thing that we have and I guess like the natural world has so many different frequencies and sounds and things that we feel without hearing in such a so was there anything in amongst kind of that process that felt a bit like detangling yourself from the

21:13Sean:web yeah i did loads of reading on this and it kind of all just led back to this kind of like late capitalism thing of frictionless and ease and like we're in a position now where someone without any musical training or anything could open a phone app and make a piece of music that is inherently like perfect like perfectly quantized noiseless like perfect in terms of that kind of description and i think because that of that which is no criticism at all i think the democracy of music making is one of the most important things in the world to have access to putting ideas into into into life and everyone should have access to music making but i think because of the ease of being able to make stuff sound like really perfect and because i think a lot of electronic music if we think about like the growth of edm in america and things like that it's so like shiny and well, like everything is so crisp and you can hear everything and it's mixed to perfection.

22:14Sean:It's mastered to sound as loud as possible. I think we're just doing the classic thing of our ears wanting to go the other way. And I've always kind of, I've always had that in my music. There was something I instinctively did from even my first EPs where I was missing the sound of a room and not even in terms of a reverb perspective, but actually my least favorite thing to do is to press play on a song and the music come out of what I call it. It's like the digital black out of like actual silence so before digital recording there was no such thing as silence you had a tape hiss so when you press play on an old track like you have the sound of tape or microphones or preamps but we don't necessarily have to have that anymore we can have digital silence so I've always done it since I remember one of the first ones I did it was on Moon which was quite a DAW based production and I was just like god I hate this this silence like when I press play and then the music comes in.

23:06Sean:So I just set up a microphone in a room and just turned the preamp right up and just recorded it. And so you don't even hear reverb or anything. It's just... So if you press play on most of my songs now, you'll hear like a very small gap of noise and then it begins. So yeah, I kind of did a lot of reading. There was a couple of books. So obviously like Mark Fisher, Hauntology, um that whole kind of world of of critical thinking on on where we are in music and then it was also like um burnout culture was a really interesting short book that i read and then the new analog by damon krakowski was really cool it kind of critiques like how technology has removed a lot of this kind of human quality it's a great book it's really really cool it just uses the metaphor of like um for example the way that when we talk on a phone phones are now designed to like remove background noise and again take us back to silence when there's not stuff and he was saying the romanticism of being on the phone to someone and hearing them breathe is gone you actually physically can't have that anymore so it's like this idea of like are you there it's just as a big kind of metaphor just before you join this the um riverside that

24:19Polly Mackey:we're recording this in has a noise reduction option and i think it's just to stop the sound the traffic and things from going past I should have left it on I can't turn it off I was thinking should I should I turn it off before we started and it's like no it's probably going to do something useful also my room sounds awful so you don't want the bounce of the wall yeah the microphone all those kinds of things but anyway that's an aside but so you learned quite a lot in that process that some of that's fed into this record by the sounds of it yeah it

24:49Sean:It was just a lot of like, I feel like I'd gotten to the point where I was making music so automatically. And obviously I was thinking about it and reflecting while I did it. But there's something about just doing such like a critical analysis, which probably why it ended up sounding so existential as well. It's because it was like, you can't, when you're doing a thesis on something, the whole idea is that you're doing practices research and you can't just do something automatically. There has to be a context. There has to be a critical framework. there has to be analysis, there has to be reflection.

25:22Sean:And it was really great for that in a way. I think because a lot of my life is being kind of like a lecturer slash academic and then the other side of my life is my music career. And the only reason I'm the lecturer is because of my music career. So I'm always talking about my practice when I'm lecturing. I'm opening up sessions, I'm showing students stuff, but I've never really had it feed the other way back. So this was a great opportunity for that to happen and me to be like, okay, well, if I do it this other way around, if I start thinking critically about my process, what kind of comes up?

25:56Sean:And this whole thesis came out of it, which was really interesting.

26:00Polly Mackey:A very different kind of feedback. In one of your interviews, you talked about positive nihilism. Could you explain a little bit about what you meant about that and how that relates to this record?

26:10Sean:I think anybody who's approaching their mid-30s and is still making music and having a day job has got to be doing it for the love of it at this point, because I think it has gotten quite difficult to find the time, to find the passion, the creativity. and I think for me it got to the point where I realized that it's like so much the place that makes my brain like streamlined like I feel like all the ironically all the noise disappears and it's just flow state and it's instinct and it's like feels like the like my best muscle is making music and it got to the point where it's like well actually if again thinking about like growing up all I wanted to do was make music and I'm doing it and I think the idea of we've especially in the music industry you kind of get given this like greasy pole to climb when you first start it's like you start with like the most um innocent intentions and then all the kind of noise starts coming in in terms of like what you should be doing and what looks good to the outside and venues you should be playing and all this kind of stuff and I think it was slightly ignoring deciding just to ignore a lot of that stuff and just focus on the music creation that's kind of what I meant about that idea of positive nihilism and I think, but this is the very interesting thing is that my friends who aren't even in music and working across all different sectors I feel everyone's kind of getting to that point of being like I just want to figure out what I love at this point and just focus on that

27:50Polly Mackey:Hi there, it's Emma here I am Gay Crash and the podcast to quickly tell you about the Drowned in Sound newsletter. Every Wednesday, I invite myself into your inbox, with permission, of course, to share opinion writing and resources, tell you about cool things that you should be involved in within the world of music, activism, etc. I also bring track of the week and a little bit of hopeful news for you, because we all know that the news cycle can be grim at the best of times. Drowned in Sound newsletter every Wednesday in your inbox. Sign up now.

28:34Polly Mackey:One of the other things that I heard you talk about was whether you'd make albums again and how the process of making music is what's giving you joy. but actually the idea that it's always got to be a body of work and you've got to wait sometimes 18 months two years when you finish there for people to hear it um Hayley Williams has talked a bit about this in the way in which she approached her most recent record and Sophia Rizella is still just putting out EPs every few weeks and she spoke to me a bit about that and I wonder if there's a existential crisis for the album itself like the idea that we've had a media based around album reviews and retail based around cd and record sales and the actual act of putting stuff on soundcloud which is i guess one of the ways you started out and so many artists that i love are just making music and sometimes it works as a body of work and sometimes it works on its own do you think that that's going to change your approach just like having that sense of can i just start putting stuff out without having to be in album campaign mode all the time which you're obviously in right now so yeah you might be having more of an existential crisis about it than you were the first time you talked about it it's i'm a bit conflicted to be honest because

29:46Sean:i'm a person that like i adore the album if i think like growing up i couldn't tell you what albums i was listening to on in each year and it was like they were so important to me and like but even when i listened to sound of silver by lcd sound system i am transported back to 2009 and everything that I was feeling and everything that was going on. And they are like little timestamps. And, you know, if they had not wrapped that body of work up in an album, it wouldn't have necessarily had the same impact on me. And I think it's still a really important artifact of process and timestamp. It's just, again, the releasing of it is the problem for me.

30:27Sean:And I feel like maybe it would be the thing of feeling like like just putting songs out and then they get packaged as an album. Or maybe it's just the point where I'll just do a couple of EPs and then an album. But I don't know. I feel like that my workflow of not having the patience to wait so long for the album to come out or feeling that there's too much pressure when it's all based around one thing doesn't really align with then how much I love the album as a concept. So it's me figuring that out, which will be the thing, I think.

31:01Polly Mackey:makes a lot of sense and i hear it from lots of different artists i think that there's like a desire like especially when you're out like you've you dj'd a radio show you've got all these different ways that music flows through your life and like sometimes you see those djs that like drop a track on their set on a friday and it's out on the saturday and it's like it's a really different approach that i think especially in the kind of indie guitar world it's still very like i guess king gizzard and the lizard wizard and people like that put like four albums out in a year and there's like that different flow to things which is a whole different process do you think that the self-sufficiency of making your records yourself um primarily like i know that you collaborate with riley mckintyre um you worked with did you work on this record with him as well as the last one and i did i co-produced my last album with him

31:51Sean:and i remember like as soon as i finished my first one and that was kind of like all done I just text him and I was like, we're going to make up my next record together just because he's a really good friend. And we'd done a couple of stuff. We'd done a couple of days in the studio together. And I was just like, I feel like this would be great. And he's so good because we've got like the same like musical taste. We're into a lot of the same stuff. Like we can spend days on end together without annoying each other. Like it's just, it works so well. And I just really trust his taste as well. and he's an amazing facilitator and he kind of keeps me G'd up and tells me I'm a genius when I've come across ideas and things like that, which is really important in the studio in a way just to keep it flowing.

32:38Sean:And that was the thing when I was working on my own, it was that thing where it's kind of like one day I'd come in and be like, this is perfect. This is great. What I've made is amazing. And the next day, the doubts would start to creep in and actually not having another person to just in that moment, just be like, no, it's great. It means you start on the cycle of, of, of doing that which was actually a great thing to do and i'm glad that i did it and it taught me a lot about my own monkeys on my shoulders kind of thing but um what was really interesting is that i was quite pure retinical about wanting to completely make this album on my own just to see what would happen and then i was then going to attempt to mix it myself and then i got about three tracks in and realized that was a terrible decision because it will make me hate the song so So I actually got in touch with Riley and I was like, look, I know you're a producer, writer, but you can mix.

33:25Sean:I know you can and you've done some mixing really well. But I kind of really trust your ears on this to not do a traditional mix and actually keep a lot of the smeariness. And I was a bit scared about getting it mixed because, you know, a typical mix is the idea that it kind of makes things punch and makes things land. And I didn't I wanted to have a slightly anti-mix approach to some of the tracks. and so he was very sensitive about taking it over the line in like the way that my ears really heard it but then also sometimes kind of offering different outlooks and maybe in oh yeah that actually really works so yeah we'll always make music together like i was even in the studio with him last month just playing around so yeah he's a great collaborator when i spoke to gazelle twin

34:08Polly Mackey:um a few weeks ago i talked about the kind of sensory overwhelm of a record and when i read through press release to this record you talked about it being designed to overwhelm how does that work like where did where did that come in your like manifesto for the record and is there were there some other notes that you had about the record of what you wanted it to do or be or feel

34:27Sean:yeah I feel like this record has a lot of um contrasting stuff so a lot of those moments where it does kind of overwhelm because I was feeling quite overwhelmed so I do a lot of kind of sound design to mimic the emotions that I'm doing but then it will be immediately like countered by something that feels like super serene and super calm so on doing laps for example all this i've recorded i don't know if you can see it over there there's like a little akai miniature radio from the 70s and i just recorded loads of static off it like all the clicks and everything and it was like cycling through stations and then imported that and turned that into like a little beat moved all the transients around and then just had a section of the song where it all just builds and i've just got layers and layers and layers of all the static recording off that radio just building but then it all just bursts and it all comes serene again because that's kind of what all of our brains do isn't it we all spiral and then we're like oh no

35:20Polly Mackey:everything's fine my first experience of meditation was like that it was like a kettle went off in my brain it was like and i didn't notice it and then it just kept going and going and going i was like

35:30Sean:what what just happened it just stopped wow and um when i spoke to the person afterwards that like

35:35Polly Mackey:have you ever been exposed to a really loud sound i was like at the drive-in icarus line like all these gigs i've been to where i was like i left and i was like couldn't hear probably for like a day they're like you probably were holding tension in your ears wow that is crazy they were like it's a bit like when a bone cracks like the it's just the sound of the oxygen being released and she said it could have just been that and i was like really is that possible can my brain hold tension

36:02Polly Mackey:yeah definitely there were quite a few other things I was going to ask you but you've been out playing this record in Dublin a few weeks ago and you're about to go on tour how does it feel translating what you've been doing in your lovely little room on your own onto a stage and into

36:19Sean:crowds how has that felt yeah well actually when I went and played in Dublin I just did it solo and I think I played only the Peaks actually a lot of it was the older stuff because I had a half an hour set one of those kind of city festival things and we're actually for this album in terms of properly going through it I've been setting it up with this amazing guy called Sim of London Electric who just helps turn all your live ideas into reality and goes kind of like through your projects with you and because I made it all on Ableton we kind of transferred it into like an Ableton project for live and so it's going to be a different completely different setup to my last album tour which was a five-piece band I was kind of mostly just singing I'd play guitar sometimes but I was liberated of that really because I had this amazing band around me because it's such a live sounding record it just felt like it really needed to be played live so it was less electronic than the record even sounded it was definitely a lot more kind of live drums live guitar that kind of thing but with this album because it is a little bit more internet a little bit more electronic it's kind of going to be what my my new solo setup is which is where I'm doing actually quite a lot and it's I've got this kind of like tray of synths and little modules and pads and then I've got a synth over here and then I'm playing guitar which is being looped back through stuff and so it's doing a lot of the the layering stuff live and everything's being sent midi which is then going back out and then i'm gonna have aj my

37:54Polly Mackey:thing that the anchoress and tori amos do where you've got like two arms going out

37:58Sean:like octopus playing yeah exactly and then sorry then you said you got a drummer yeah so then like kind of on addition to this kind of like setup then i'm gonna have aj my drummer and then my wife marika is we both play in each other's bands now which is really sweet but she's going to be doing bass keys and backing vocals as well so it's going to be this kind of little three-piece situation it's going to be a lot more a kind of like electronic sounding than the last tour i

38:26Polly Mackey:think that's a good way not to be left home or leaving your partner at home on the road as well to take family on the road with you 100 it's definitely got that emotional thing but it's

38:37Sean:also you know touring so expensive now so any way to um make it a little bit cheaper does that mean

38:44Polly Mackey:that you and marie have to schedule your album so that you're not on tour and in promo at the

38:47Sean:same time now yeah we've actually been quite lucky we've never we've never clashed which is good

38:57Polly Mackey:this episode of the drowning sound podcast is presented in partnership with cobus the platform that pays artists four times more than the industry standard, that has high quality audio, that has human curation, which as a human curator is something that I truly value over the kind of algo slop that you get on some platforms. You can really hear the difference. I know lots of places talk about the audio qualities. And as soon as I moved across, it sort of felt like I was rediscovering music, which is one of the platform slogans. If you're worried about your playlists, you can use sound is it's a really good tool that's part of the sign up process when you join cobuzz it just transfers everything across if you'd like a free trial of this platform that's independently owned and made for music enthusiasts head to drownedinsound.org forward slash playlists where you can hear not only our playlists but get a free trial you can also find these details in the show notes to this episode and now back to this episode of the drowndin sound podcast brought you in partnership with Cobuzz.

40:13Polly Mackey:So when I was researching this interview, there was a few things that you've done that I didn't know. And I thought maybe there's other things that, I mean, your Wikipedia mentions that you're on a Maccabees track. I didn't know that. And that you're in a film with Arlo Parks that you'd soundtracked. Is there anything else that the internet doesn't know about you that the more people the um and can you tell me a bit more about the film you soundtracked as well because it sounds really interesting and that you were in yeah so it was

40:40Sean:my friend tom dream is a director and i lived in margate between like 2016 and 2019 and it reminded me of like growing up in my small town that any like-minded creative just knew each other it's because such a small community and me and tom became really good friends and he did a bunch of my first videos and um he then but then at the same time I also ran this little bookshop um which was kind of a bit more of like an art bookshop but then we did a lot of queer stuff as well and we'd stocked this book called shy radicals and Tom came and brought and bought it in there so he he bought it and was like oh this looks cool and took it home and then read it and he was like this would make an amazing kind of like meta documentary but also like fictionalized short film and got in touch with the author Hamja and they just started kind of coming up with loads of ideas for it and then yeah they got Arlo Parks involved and she did a like a cover of Radiohead Creep on the piano for it I did one of my songs for it and then scored the whole thing um and so it was just very like amazing kind of oh and I was also in it as well as like a cameo so it was this amazing kind of I don't know stars aligning for this thing and it was I scored it during COVID as well and it was just a great project to have outside of making music and what's the book about or the story about it's called shy radicals it's it's I don't want to get it wrong it's about um it's like a manifesto for the introverted so it's the idea that they've created this kind of new not religion but this new kind of group of people that have got their own like flag and they've got their own like hand signs and it's this idea of like the world is designed for the extrovert and actually for like the neurodivergent community it's not designed for them so like how do they come together and create their own kind of manifesto and so but yeah Hamja is an artist so it's this kind of like art book but also with this really cool idea I like the

42:47Polly Mackey:idea of making things like protests more neuro-inclusive there's tons of things where it's like people with injustice sensitivity are expected to suddenly like now you need to go get kettled by the police to stand up for the thing you believe in i'm like exactly no i reckon there's better ways of standing up for the stuff i believe in um so the question i ask all my guests is if you had 500 million pounds which is roughly what spotify invested in joe rogan um and it's roughly what daniel leck has invested in war drones um how would you spend that to improve something or lots of things about the music industry don't worry don't do it to the pound just 500 million is both a lot of money and also a not a lot if you wanted to completely revolutionize everything so how would how would you spend it to address some of the things that you faced and maybe going back to what you said at the start about when if you were entering the industry now as an 18 year old the barriers that would probably mean that it wouldn't be something you'd feel that was right for you as someone growing up in North Wales?

43:49Sean:Yeah I mean when I first moved to London I could have a flat I rented a room in a flat in Dalston for 350 pounds a month so I could work in a bar three nights a week four nights a week have money left over to pay for rehearsals go off and tour with my band and not worry too much whereas now it's like you know I don't know how anybody would well my I don't think I'd be able to so when I first came down like my parents helped me with my first month of rent before I got a job. And then that was it. I was kind of then making it work and you just couldn't, you couldn't do it now. Like you can't, you have to have a corporate job to make it work.

44:25Sean:So I feel like what that does is it just means that like, if you grow up in London, you can stay living at home. You've just got such a better chance at making it in this industry than anyone else. So for me, it's not a class thing. It's, it's a, it's a geography thing. And I think that can definitely be in the same conversation, but I think it gets overlooked looked a little bit i think you know when we've got like statistics about the brit school being a state school it's like well but there is no brit school in manchester there is no brit school in scotland there is no brit school in the northeast and i feel like if i had 500 million pounds it would just be to massively invest in in in helping artists sustain for those first few years and the ones who will make it will make it and others might not that's just the way the world works but I think the problem is that when we're not even allowing the ones who would be really successful to break through and it's this it's like talent gap that I think we're going to have in a few years and probably are already having and also like if I think about my life like London is my home I've lived here since 2011 and it's where I came out it's where I met all my friends it was just like where I completely formed as a person where I have my job it's where I do my music and if the one limit to that back then would have just been you know the price of rent and not being able to do it here I would have a completely different life it's not even just the fact that I would be in the music industry but like I probably wouldn't even be married to the same person I wouldn't have the same friends so I think it's seeing what the bigger picture is and I feel like the problem is with the government or the music industry in general is that and I see it in university culture as well the idea that everything is measured on its kind of financial return so we will put funding forward for something if it will bring that back so even you know the megs funding for artists going abroad or you know the way that they're cutting arts education and universities it's all because they're not seen as bringing money back in and it's like but that can't be the only metric the metric might be immeasurable it might be about you know human growth it might be about learning empathy it might be about forming communities so I feel like putting investment into stuff that you're not expecting a fiscal reward in is probably

46:44Polly Mackey:one of the most important things I think it's also like the innovation that goes into music that maybe doesn't turn into that pop record but it inspires the artists in the pop band to make that record yeah like we can look at Sophie or Arca and those aren't commercially successful artists on paper but they are artists who have completely reshaped the sound like there would be no brat without those two artists and Bjork sound would be very different and like there's lots of examples of the innovation of different people in grassroots music in particular like I I often think about wet leg and all the different bands that did that kind of satirical punk kind of sound to allow for them to be a global success.

47:31Polly Mackey:And the, the way in which like I've worked in music for over 25 years now, and I've seen the different patterns of stuff that like I put bad for lashes first single out on my label. And I was the only record label at her shows. and it was just like why did the music industry not see the success of an artist like that yeah i saw half the music industry walk out the kaiser chief's first like showcase gig in london people didn't get it and within two years they were headlining festivals yeah so it's almost like the people that are trying to predict and preempt commercial success don't really get it either like you always hear those stories about like video games by lana del rey the label didn't want to release or yeah stuff like that anyway i think that's the same label as you so i won't go into that one no it's polydor isn't it not fiction oh yeah no very different yeah very different very different though you sit about five desks from each other yeah it's the ethos though of

48:27Sean:the people that i mean i love fiction and it's so funny because it's like in theory yeah it's i'm signed to universal but in reality you know i'm on i'm on actually a very fiscally indie deal but now i've got my new deal it's like 50 50 like small but good well-measured investment and the people there there's you know it's a very small team and they're really really passionate and they they've actually let me do whatever i want which is great so and you're like label

48:56Polly Mackey:mates of people like self-esteem and claro and people are that on they off the top of my head

49:01Sean:i'm not sure the self-esteem definitely wasn't it but they've done an amazing um bunch of new signings so there's like man woman chainsaw courtney barnett jenny beth orlando weeks um the maccabees obviously still um so yeah it's a great label to be on the good home like a record

49:20Polly Mackey:company should feel like a home and they should feel like a family and i think that one of the things that we lose in digital world is just that sense of where something came from like it's quite nice on bandcamp i can follow sacred bones and get a notification and dig into all their new releases whereas i can't really do that on a streaming platform yeah it's one of the things that Cobuzz I noticed you can actually subscribe to a label I just don't know where the notifications

49:46Sean:go so I should ask them about that yeah the dance I mean this is the thing I've been slightly slightly one one toe in the dance music world just from like collaborations I've done with like Jasper Tigner and Daniel Avery and some other like people have got to do remixes for me and like just following their careers and it's just they've definitely got it better than the indie world in terms of the labels are like powerhouses and so like shall not fade like people will buy every release that they release and the artist doesn't get an album deal they get single deals so they'll pick a label that fits that genre of the music that they've made that month and it's a very like quick I mean there's obviously a lot wrong with the dance world I'm kind of talking about the more like UK left field dance world and yeah it just feels like it's a little bit more grassroots in a way the way that i mean i grew up loving domino records that was my my favorite so i would just listen to everything they released and i think we get that now with like if you think about like partisan records they're obviously having an amazing time as well and i think that is this is the thing i'm so positive about the future i think it's all coming back i think seeing people wanting to be passionate about things and i feel like we're in such a weird spot for such a long time and now people are really looking for like the human connection and stuff now and really getting back into bands and labels and communities so yeah I'm actually ironically despite how I've complained throughout this whole interview and podcast that I'm actually quite positive about the the future of music I don't think you've complained at all I think

51:15Polly Mackey:you've been um what's the term positively nihilistic so I think you're uh and I also think that anything that you've been negative about in the last like 10 minutes or so it's like there's solutions and there's focus and there's like this is how things can change and that's really the spirit of this podcast to try and help music fans one go a bit deeper in the music they love but two look at how they can help and be part of collectively changing things because we're in such a weird time in fact like the question i get asked all the time is how can i ethically support the artists i like like should i buy their record from their merch desk is that the best way of ensuring they get paid um and it's yes that's one way but reposting one of your posts and your new albums out is just as impactful because it it tells the algorithm people care yeah and i think all of those there's things you can do for nothing and it's like i'm working on a big long list at the moment of what can you do to support the music you love yeah but it's just

52:15Sean:the thing that it always gets put back on the consumer which is always the problem isn't it it's kind of like it's it's the top problems at the top and it just gets given the problem the

52:23Polly Mackey:solutions get given to the bottom and it's like if you're a massive fan of something why should it like why should you only be able to pay the 9.99 like if you really love something and you've got more money and you want to contribute all of those things are all a bit broken too anyway that leads me to my final question what do you hope fear expects music to be like in 2050

52:44Sean:50 what i hope and i see this a lot like in terms of like from my friends or their students and things is that people will take up painting they will take up pottery they will take up drawing they'll go to a life drawing class and they never think to themselves i should be able to make a career out of this or i've i should release this to the public i should try and make some money out of this it was it's viewed as is like going to the gym it's a self-fulfilling activity i feel like music needs to be viewed more like that like people should just make music for fun without thinking it needs to be something or that it's silly if they they put it out and not many people listen to it like the shame I see of like students or like fret like some friends who just started making music being like oh I've only got like 100 listens how embarrassing it's like well did you enjoy making it and I remember someone telling me that like anthropologically music was way more of like a self-fulfilling social activities why we have like you know parlor guitars and parlor pianos it was like something you did with your family with your friends and like no one owned a song it was passed down through communities and churches and religions and folklore and I just feel that we've got to this point in music through social media where it's like you know we we make something we post it online for people to consume and actually I think I'd love for music to become some think like how a lot of other countries do it it's a social activity around like in a bar or around a fire or something like that and i think breaking it down from being this commercial act and actually making it just an art form again would be amazing and i think it probably hopefully will go that way i think taking up an instrument is one of the best things you can do that michael

54:32Polly Mackey:is too nice to drop but that's the mic drop ending to the podcast

54:41Polly Mackey:well that was the first time i'd met polly after being a fan and swapping a few dms on instagram over the years um if you've listened to any of my playlists on various different platforms and listen to my soho radio show you'll know that i'm a big fan of her music i think she's great and i think the new record is really special so if you didn't press pause on this podcast already and go listen to it. Go do that now. And then once you've done that, head to dranninsound.org forward slash playlists where you can hear this week's companion playlist, which features tracks from the new Art School Girl for an album, features some of my favourite tracks from some of our older records.

55:15Polly Mackey:There'll be some remixes in there, some LCD sound system. And as I mentioned, a little bit of a Crying in the Club special this week. And that is available with our partners, Cobuzz. That's my streaming platform of choice. If you go back to our Spotify episode, you can hear my guests explain why they are an ethical alternative to spotify and there's a few other episodes we referenced in this episode um it felt like a little bit of a uh whiz through some greatest hits of the recent episode so if you've not heard them the episode with gazelle twin talking about her sensory satisfying i think would be the best way to describe it music which i absolutely adore and we talk about boycotts and protests and all sorts of other things in that conversation there's also the interview with Kelly Lee Owens who's also from North Wales and also makes dreamy electronic music and is also putting out extraordinary records at the moment and I think the other one we mentioned was my conversation with Martin Ware and the In Place of War team and this guy who records with a hydrophone which is the microphone that records underwater talking about how he records melting glaciers if you go back to the interview that I did live from talent music where you can listen to that the guys were really fascinating i really loved what he had to say in that episode i also spoke to someone in that chat who makes music using the electronic sounds that plants give out and it's not necessarily the sounds the plants make it's how he takes their sounds and makes music with it which is really interesting feels pretty relevant to that conversation with the way polly was talking about using the sounds of water to modulate and shift and change what she does with her music so i think the only other bit i mentioned was obviously at the start talking about the quez interview from last week where he talks about the taste of music if you've not heard that one he's a lovely guy it's a really nice chat um yeah so that's your bookmarks hopefully things to go back and listen to this has been the drowndon sound podcast which each week i try and bring you a different interesting guest that can be musicians campaigners, activists all sorts of different people over the next few weeks I'm going to be talking to a few people about AI trying to figure out what the government's doing what they should be doing, what they're not doing what some of the biggest corporations in the world are doing with AI and how we should be a bit more worried about it I think there's going to be some more musician interviews coming up I'd love to know who you'd like to hear on the podcast if you've got ideas for guests email podcasts at drownandsound.org and that will find its way to me and our team our team include tell studios you help mix and produce this episode thank you to owen and the team and i've been sean adams your host this has been the join and sound podcast you have been you i'll see you next time bye for now