“They look just like waveforms!” It was my first official crypto-finance lesson, and I was getting distracted.
“What now?” My teacher leaned back with a puzzled smile.
“The charts.” I pointed along the craggy, upward graphs as we flipped through each cryptocurrency. “They look like wavetables that I’d use in my synthesizers.” This immediately felt like cosmic foreshadowing; we had just met, bonded over mutual interests in music tech, and agreed to trade lessons: sound design for crypto. “Maybe I could make that my first NFT?”
It had been a whirlwind of a week — starting out as a girl merely dabbling in crypto, wanting to learn more — and ending up with feverish notebooks full of ideas spanning music and crypto technologies, the beginnings of new creative collaborations with the European startup Staxe.
The world of investments and trading had always been peripheral mysteries in my life. Since I was a teen, I’d toured festivals and clubs, where I have been lucky enough to perform my quirky synth-laden beats around the world. But this lifestyle was something like treading water — always making enough to keep going, to upgrade and repair my gear, and plan the next album. As a passionate music technologist, I’d landed in Valencia to teach sound design at Berklee, and was eager to connect with other music tech entrepreneurs in town. The buzz of NFTs was echoing through my community, and I couldn’t wait to get started.
“Crypto is blowing up like crazy — what does that sound like?” I wanted to take the excitement, the rush, the revolution, the complete overthrowing of the system. And in the spirit of making something unique, I wanted to weave a rich story, a puzzle with clues scattered throughout. So I set some guidelines for this journey:
- I would make a four-track EP, telling a story both universal and completely encoded with crypto terminologies.
- Every sound on this EP (aside from my voice, or a few environmental sounds taken in the creation process) would be sourced entirely from wavetables generated using 2021 first-quarter charts for four cryptocurrencies.
- Every song title would both represent a chapter in this hero’s journey, and correspond to an actual finance term. Lyrics would also have these phrases and words deeply embedded into the storyline.
The four currencies I picked were Bitcoin (the original, of course); Ethereum (the current artists’ medium and my first major token purchase); Uniswap (for the beauty of decentralized token swapping!) and Doge (come on, we had to do it for the meme!)
Contrast is a prevalent theme in my art: organic sounds alongside highly synthesized alien waveforms, sentimental lyrics intertwined with brutal basslines. In this spirit, I ordered a paper notebook and a set of angled calligraphy pens to brainstorm and transcribe this tale of existence in cutting-edge technology.
My first night was spent in a dizzying yet meditative six-hour crash course on crypto-finance. I read article after article, picking out the tastiest words and phrases and carefully handwriting them out in Italic script. After some hours, certain words started to almost glow on the page and to my excitement, they built themselves very easily into the story of a young digital avatar.
Is she a glitch in the matrix? She finds herself alone and floating in an explosive new universe, the Big Bang as a Black Swan event. A tiny lonely block, she is The Orphan, stumbling through her new empty existence until she discovers joy and wonder as the first soul in the blockchain, the Genesis Block. Living hedonistically and cartwheeling through indulgence, she builds impressive connections so quickly that many take notice, and she is targeted for an Eclipse Attack. Sabotaged and lost in this prison of chaos, she must believe in herself despite all odds and survive the isolation, rejecting the lies she is being fed, and finally realizing that she has had the power all along and needs no-one else. She has a direct line to love, passion, and the entire universe — through the Atomic Swap we all become equal and connected.
She has taken me over completely and utterly. I have written day and night in these pages, the lyrics almost floating off the page as she will not let me rest until her story is told. I have bent these four humble graphs in insane auditory ways, over and over again, crafting my entire universe.
As a musician, I used to look at economics as a bit of an antithesis. I now realize it is just as much a story of emotion: longing, trust, fear, greed, anxiety, highs and lows. Music tells it with words, notes and cadences; finance tells it with numbers. I hope The Orphan will captivate you as much as she has me - an energetic vessel for collaboration between music and crypto-economics.
