Volume up

Hey there. If you’re reading this you’ve either heard of or from me and probably the latter but maybe the former, and in either case you’re here, so welcome!

I’m starting this, a blog about New Dad, for a number of reasons. For one, it’s to post news about New Dad, an electronic music (that’s about as specific as I’ll get) project that I’ve spent the last few years sanding into shape, in a place somewhat freed from the status-tracky attention-sucky thought-flattening strictures and pace of social media. (Hi, Medium)

But I also wanted a place to write about what I’m writing , how I’m writing, how I’m not writing, how I’m recording, what I’m reading, what I’m doing wrong, what I wish I knew earlier, why this sounds like that, how a lyric happens, what this box does, why I prefer this sequencer, who I’m working with, why I’m doing what I’m doing and why I’m not doing what I’m not.

There’s something very private about music once it starts to sound the way you sound, which I understand. I make it at home. But there’s also a kind of opacity to electronic music at large that I’ve never understood. And there’s a cryptic element that honestly feels super bro.

Here’s a thing: The more I worked on my own to understand electronic music, the less that opacity became an obstruction and the more it developed into a strange kind of feature of the experience. And the more I trusted the path I was carving through it, the less lost I felt. That would be a cool feeling to share with people who are considering doing this themselves, which they should.

Hearing through the beat (or the absence of it), learning someone else’s process, preferences, and inspirations, is like hearing between words. That which gets dismissed as oonst-oonst can be sculptural and poetic – inescapably there and very much not at the same time. Dance music can mean absolutely everything and refreshingly zero.

And while learning about electronic music through the ears and ideas of other people didn’t necessarily make me any better at it, it did introduce me to new uncertainties. And whenever that happens – especially now, when everything seems known or knowable, and when not knowing is supposed to feel bad – it feels valuable.

Most of my time is spent writing (I’m a columnist for the Boston Globe), and the nature of that writing, even when it gets personal, tends to be founded on facts and truths or the closest approximations thereof. I also tend to not shut up about things.

But in music, I’m usually after uncertainty — is this song happy or sad? is this noise pretty or not? is melody a salve against the scrape of capitalism or a salvo for its advance? is genre a ditch? did this thing just erase my entire fucking sequence? fuck! —and, more often than not, any clear realizations about process or revelations about gear or any of those lines of inquiry that tempt you forward only form a map once you’ve determined that you’ve arrived somewhere.

So this is a place for me to draw that map, share what I can about which way I’m going, and record all of the stuff I’m not recording.

I hope you enjoy reading & listening.

MB/ND