(image: Sina Schulz)
Conclusion
Realizing this changed my perspective on making electronic music fundamentally. Producing, as I understand it, is a lot about using well-defined ideas, delivering a rounded product. Dealing with machines is about the process, the dialogue. Recently, I played a live show for Blank Pages Collective using only the Behringer Neutron, sequenced with the Beatstep Pro, and a Reverb Pedal. I developed a generative patch from scratch and although I had some modulation ideas and prepared sequences, I didn’t have a fixed plan where to go. It wasn’t the first time, I tried something like this, but the first time it really worked. That’s because I embraced the dialogue: I knew that there would be moments when everything starts to fall apart, things become weird or unpleasant. Before, I was trying to avoid those moments, now I embraced them as part of the process, an invitation from the machine to interact and find a knew sweet spot, a sound, a movement or rhythm that I could keep for a while before disrupting it again. And then again. I came to realize that when you share that process, the audience appreciates it as well. “You could feel the patch come alive”, Boris told me afterwards.
What does all this mean for me as a producer, in the sense that I still want to finish and publish my music? First, I stopped seeing production as a process for itself. I improvise and compose for live situations instead of playing my finished compositions live. Tracks are only byproducts of that process, documents, recordings, artifacts. Second, some of those ideas earn to be developed further. But it’s not necessarily me who should do that. I will give more of my ideas to other people to interpret them. And third, I will keep focusing on machines and the dialogue with them. I am a machinist!
1) Blank Pages Gig with a single synth + reverb pedal, May 2025