Have you secured your solitude?

If not, you are making everything much harder for yourself than it needs to be.

In my mind, solitude is the requisite for true creative incubation. For something novel and useful to form or problems to resolve, there needs to be enough solitary time and space in the process.

Solitude is my strongest ally. 

Let’s be clear: solitude is not to be confused with loneliness. 

Solitude is fertile ground.

It gives me the freedom to focus, step into a flow, and to experiment. The space to fail and iterate.

It lets me engage free from the pressure of having to change or explain my natural creative process, or having to achieve something tangible right there and then.

But here’s the problem:

Accessing true solitude can be a challenge. 

Our lives are busy and filled with distractions.

If solitude doesn’t happen naturally, we must create it.

For me, moving away from the city to live deep in the countryside has helped.

It’s easier to achieve the ideal frame of mind in tranquil surroundings.

Even here, I have to actively take steps to create solitude. 

(Indeed I still have a life – a quite busy one often)

My traditional Finnish wood fire sauna never fails to energise me with a sense of clarity and new creative ideas. It’s a ritual I practice several times a week.

I’m not suggesting you should follow my drastic steps by leaving your old life behind and risking everything to start anew elsewhere. It’s not necessary at all to go that far.

Maybe you could get to work in the early hours of the morning, do late night sessions, meditate, take long walks or perhaps retreat into nature. 

What could be your ritual for solitude?

Marcus Aurelius once wrote, “Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.”

Embrace solitude as a resource. Your sanctuary for clarity and creativity.

I mentioned in my last article that working on my Rhytual project is like spiritual practice for me. I did not intend to imply it would be the ”right” or ”only” way to approach making music. Why do you make music?

Reasons To Make Music

For about 26 years (I started at the age of 6) I never thought about why I was making or playing music. When I finally started thinking about it at the age of about 32, I couldn’t get the questions out of my head. What is the purpose of music? Why am I doing this?

I’m now 40. I’ve been thinking about it for the past 8 years or so. I’ve come a long way from where I started, but I don’t feel I’m finished with it yet. Here’s some reflection about how I currently approach my music making.

The Rhytual project for me is only one aspect of the whole. Other major music projects I’m currently involved with include Resound (my drum & bass focused solo work) and my collaborative work with Ink & Loxy (we have a label set up for this called I.L.R. Studios).

I have different thought processes for different projects. They are always evolving, too. Working on Rhytual has become a little bit like meditation in the past year or two. It helps me stay on track, so that I can stay focused and do right in other things. It’s been something that I go to when I feel like I need to take a breather from other work. Altough I’d like to release some material, I’m not too worried about it at the moment. I’ve had other things to tend to.

I never intended to move so slow with Rhytual releases. But life brings surprising events and right now I’m just happy to have my own little spiritual music practice that I can always return to. You should always evaluate your priorities because the world around you isn’t static, and you aren’t either.

For the past 9 months I’ve been focused on a new collaborative project with my friends Loxy & Ink. For us it was not an option to do it half-assed. We were very clear about that from the beginning. In order to do it properly, everything else was put on the back burner for a bit for all of us.

As a result, working with this new dynamic has been very rewarding. We’ve made close to 30 tracks by now, developed a killer routine and started to find our voice as a collective. Working hard we’ve learned many new things that will transfer to anything we may choose to do in the future. With 9 tracks released at the time of writing this, the public has only seen a glimpse of the project so far. But for us the project is already a success.

There is some overlap, but the “whys” and “hows” behind our collaborative project also differ from those of my Rhytual project, for example.

There are many different reasons to make music. Are you aware of yours? It’s good to think about it. It may change how you approach things for the better. Here are a few good ones, off the top of my head:

• Moving yourself
• Moving others
• Spending time with friends
• Connecting with new people
• Connecting to your roots
• Having fun
• Maintaining inner balance
• Learning new skills
• Benefitting another project
• Personal growth
• Making a statement
• Changing the world
• Finding solace in a difficult situation
• Helping someone
• Making a living
• Supporting your family
• …and so on.

It’s usually a combination of many things, but our priorities vary.

A piece of music doesn’t care why it was made. Do you think Mozart’s work is less beautiful because he did most of it to please the clients and to make money?

I don’t think whether you make music for money or perhaps for spiritual reasons makes your music any better or worse. Having clarity about your reasons will make your music better though. It will help you focus and do better work. That process will help you in finding your own voice.

What are your reasons for making music? What am I missing? I’m curious to hear. Let me know in the comments.

The things that make your music distinctive will begin to form and reveal themselves on their own as you throw yourself into the process. Developing a process and being consistent with it is the key that unlocks everything else.

Already back in 1999, I remember having the idea that I would like to create a certain personal musical style and then establish a label to push that forward. Throughout the years it was always in the back of my mind. At times I was really pushing it hard. There were many different iterations of the concept. But none of them eventually felt right to me.

Only after I relaxed and let go of the notion of forcefully trying to create a style, there was progress. Instead of looking outwards, I began looking inwards. That is where my Rhytual project came from.

Your personality will always show in every piece of music you do in one way or the other. You may not always see it, but it’s there no matter if you try to force it or not. It’s just that by forcing it, you usually end up with inferior quality of work because you’re short-circuiting the process. By doing that you are missing some pieces of the puzzle.

You should first focus on gaining clarity about yourself and what you want to do. Then become aware of the different aspects of the craft, and build up your skills and experience. Once you’ve become more adept at making something interesting and technically expressing it, you can start making deliberate choices on how to approach different things. Choices that don’t feel forced because you know they line up with your personality and goals.

Sticking with those choices then opens up a path for you. By walking that path you keep learning to express your personality in more distinctive ways.

I’ve described the process above in a linear fashion. In reality, it’s more like a loop. Change is a constant so we should keep re-evaluating ourselves. Intuition is always doing its work also. There are many vague ideas brewing at all times, some of which will grow and become part of your process over time. And so the loop keeps going, constantly renewing the music.

The funny thing is that since I began figuring these things out a few years back and established the Rhytual project… I have been mainly doing it for myself. I’ve done some live gigs but only a few tracks have been released even though there is a lot of material. Suddenly, I was not in a rush to push it out there anymore. I have simply been enjoying the process. To me, Rhytual has become like a spiritual practice. And I’ve kept working on my other projects like before. This brings us to the core message I wanted to get across with this article:

Don’t be a producer. Be a practitioner.

Create a process and follow it religiously. Your individual musical signature (and everything else) will emerge from that. You won’t even have to worry about technical stuff. Because if you are making music consistently, your skills will automatically keep improving. But you need to have rhythm. And when you fall off the wagon (it’s normal), don’t let that put you off. Just get a hold of yourself as soon as possible and you’ll be able to keep the beat.

It’s easier to surrender yourself to the process when you realize that it is not up to you to decide what your music will be exactly. In the end, it is beyond your control. Focus on making lots of music. Even if you are not always sure if it’s the right style for you. The process is bigger than you. That is the mystery of art. That is our connection to something that transcends us as individuals. Your work has its own life whether you like it or not. It’s much easier on you to just like it though.

I will leave you with a quote a friend sent me recently (thank you, Jim):

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense— he is “collective man”— one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic forms of mankind.

C.G. Jung

Book recommendation: Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey (affiliate link)

In this article, we continue laying the groundwork for developing your voice as an artist. In order to do that effectively, you need to have the right mindset.

So you want to sound original… Have you ever thought about what originality is?

Purely a subjective perception.

The truth is, nothing in this world is truly original. If something were to be completely original, it would have had to come together in complete isolation from everything else.

Of course, that is not the case with anything.

In a piece of music, some of the ideas and influences live on the surface where they’re easy for anyone to spot. Others hide deep inside the creative process. It requires a deeper understanding of the craft to notice those. Furthermore, some of the influences are not even clear to the creator of the piece. We pick up and do so many things subconsciously.

In this way, our music consists of layers on top of layers. And they all come from somewhere. The music we do is not separate from other music out there. It’s all connected, a part of something larger.

Imagine a huge rapid. You see water flowing downstream with great velocity. But when you look close you’ll notice many smaller currents going in all directions – especially at the edges of the rapid. You are a small part of one of those small currents. You begin merely as a drop of water, splashing around in a chaotic manner. As you develop, you grow into a small current of your own. You begin to accumulate substance, direction, and stability. Sometimes you may even flow in the opposite direction to the rapid itself, yet unable to change its course. You always keep blending into other currents in a process that forms endless new combinations.

An infinite number of variations manifest to those with the skills, experience, and intuition. You have to throw yourself into the rapid, no matter how dangerous it seems. You have to flow with it to make the new combinations you seek happen.

So let’s stop worrying about being original. You can’t force that. The things that make your music distinctive will start to form and reveal themselves through the process. You just need to throw yourself into it and then keep going.

Let’s return to the sentence at the beginning of this article: So you want to sound original? I chose those words to speak about originality but also to point out that the issue is semantic, too. Often when we say original, don’t we actually mean interesting?

Instead of trying to “be original”, I think a good way to look at your creative process is to simply strive to make something interesting.

Work with nature and not against it. It’s ok to steal ideas. It’s ok to imitate. It’s ok to combine influences and build on what others have done before you. You could do nothing but imitate others and still have your own thing going on. As with so many other things, it’s not what you do – it’s how you do it. Do it in an interesting way and people will pay attention.

So once again, we come back to crafting your expression. Accumulating skill and experience. Yes, it requires time and effort. But if creating interesting music is what you want to do, then you should be looking forward to doing that work. Everyone you look up to has started from nothing. And I guarantee they will all tell you it’s a journey that never ends.

Feel free to leave your comments below so we can continue the discussion.

Book recommendation: Mastery by Robert Greene (affiliate link)