[EN]Doing music for fun
Pour la version française de l'article, it's here.
The other day, I was talking to my psychologist about my hiatus from music production and the internal pressure I was feeling to produce music again. I tell her that I am convinced that it is linked to a capitalist discourse that I internalized during my periods of unemployment, to do something with my life, to be “gifted” somewhere, to be “better than the others and distinguish myself”. And talking to her about my musical experiences, she told me that my massive production of music is not linked to a capitalist impulse because, even if I was looking deep inside me to satisfy a desire for notoriety, to be the most productive and therefore the best at something, the main focus of my musical production was fun. And I don't know why but it clicked in my head. So I had to talk about producing things for fun because that's where I want to go in my musical production.
Making art for fun is possible, and it feels really good. But as soon as there is pressure to obtain a particular satisfaction, it starts to become more complicated. This is evident in me when I compare music and drawing. Music is a way for me to make money and that's where some people know me from, so I have a reputation related to my music production. But nobody knows me for my drawings while I apply myself as much to making music as to making drawings (that is to say: not so much). And my drawings, I do them without pressure, they exist, and it's great.
High Quality Drawings
In short, making art for fun. How to do ? Alone ? With a community ? We will see that, with some musical examples that I draw from the practices that I have had, from the communities that I met and from people that I find very inspiring and funny.
My first musical experiences are intimately linked to music for fun. They come from a duet I had with a friend with whom I learned guitar and improvisation. Our idea was to produce albums by pressing the REC button in Magix Music Maker and start playing guitar and improvising lyrics. We kept most of the stuff even if it didn't make sense and was frankly very messy (and sometimes really bad), and shared it with our friends.
But my first community experience of music for fun comes from the site Le Marathon de la Semaine (The weekly Marathon), which is a site that, from time to time, propose to group of musicians to produce music inspired by a theme for a week, and this over several consecutive weeks. The faster we post our music, the more speed points we earn, but the more our music is appreciated, the more kiss points we can earn (which are distributed by the musicians among themselves once the week is over and all the songs put online). Which pushes either to bet on producing music very quickly to be assured to win speed points or to take your time to compose a funny banger and try to earn the maximum kiss points. Sometimes you win a prize at the end, but nothing more than a mug (and that's already a lot).
I created the alias Frederic Lardon for the occasion and released a whole bunch of songs (including that shitty flute banger). And it was super funny, everyone is full of fun ideas, we make covers of other songs, share musical jokes, we meet people...
A similar experience was the discovery of the FAWM (February Album Writing Month, in progress at the time of the redaction of this text). The idea is to produce 14 titles during the month of February, which is a good amount of titles for an album. It's a very funny experience to do, the community is massive and extremely benevolent. There is a system that I find very interesting called the Zong. A zong is a song that has no comments and is therefore classified in a particular section of the site to highlight it so at least one person can leave a feedback there.
In parallel, when Free Music Archive was administered by its original team, there were regular calls for participation in compilations, for example for defending net neutrality or an audio cookbook .
If I'm telling you about all these initiatives, it's because making music for fun is, in my opinion, more accessible when you have a community to rely on, participate in and share with. It's easy to feel alone in artistic creation, and much easier to de-dramatize the creation of things when you can share it with comrades who have the same objective as you and references that you can create in common. One experience I admire is ton one by the streamer Sean Morl who has crafted with the help of his streaming viewers an album where Morl had to recompose the soundtrack of the video game Sonic The Hedgehog (1991) from memory but also including elements imposed by his viewers. The result is very chaotic and funny to hear.
Yes, but how do you make music for fun? Well, that's the part that can be both fun and complex. But here's a list of things I like to do for fun:
- Changing instruments and not using the ones I'm used to play with, it mainly consists for me in letting go of the guitar. Most of the time it consists of using a keyboard and playing with it.
- Improvise with other people on the same instrument. Play four-handed keyboard, play four-handed vibrato guitar (one person playing the guitar and the other playing the vibrato)
- Impose creative guidelines: produce only using a particular tool, play the same chord for an hour, make music using just samples of animals or corporate music
- Do covers that sound passionately out of tune.
- Write very short or very long songs on random topics.
- Find a project name, imagine the associated musical concept and create it even if it sounds bad.
Music for fun is for the most part having an idea and taking the time to do it. And for the sake of the experiment, try to always record it if it's something you're okay with.
Music for fun has no quality standard, and that's what makes it super fun to produce. Sometimes it's just shitposts and jokes on Twitter. Like Chel Wong's super short banger I JUST WANT SOMEONE TO TOUCH MY BUTT, or like my album Dog Wave which was born from a Twitter discussion about mixing Sunn O)))) and dogs. Sometimes it just comes from an observation that a discord contains a lot of people who make music or want to make music but don't know how to make it and decide to make a Christmas songs compilation.
I'm only mentioning online experiences right now because it's a bit more difficult to set up those kinds of experiences offline. But these experiences still exist. I lead a musical games workshop where I try to develop rules for a music group to bring out forms of improvised and experimental music, and this is what we can see with improvisation jam sessions, or brut music practice workshops.
In my opinion, these are experiences necessary to bring back essential notions to our actions, they are experiences which move us away from capitalistic music production and bring us back more towards the happiness procured by the sharing of an activity which tends to become more and more individualistic because the only horizon offered by capitalism to art is the career of an artist. Making art for fun means bringing art back into everyday life a little more. Personally, it is in these experiences that I have lived some of the best musical moments of my life.
All that to say that producing music for fun and jokes can be an incredible path for having new ideas, working on new techniques, approaching new philosophies around art, being a little happier. So, to celebrate you reading this article all along, if you're excited to make music for fun and you're looking for a community for that, I opened a French / English discord to set up recurring challenges, share discussions on making music, writing music, making images of music, with kindness and respect: https://discord.gg /qeWjSMWBVQ