(Forgive me if this is rambly; I’ve just gotten motivated to release a piece of music that’s been sitting around mostly-finished for months, and I wanted to be kind of transparent about a few things alongside that release. To do so, I don’t really want to plan or edit all that much. So this is may be a messy post. Scroll towards the bottom if you just want the tune.)

In all honesty (and I’m significantly less depressed about this than it will sound), it’s very hard to—in a number of senses—find the energy required to create and release music.

The least depressing reason for this (not that it’s super rosy) is that a major motivation for me in any creative avenue I’ve explored is being inspired by the thought “[x, y, or z] doesn’t exist yet; I’m not going to wait for someone else to make it”. But, with music in general and music that I like…

Between what seems to be my ever-expanding tastes and the ever-increasing availability of music (via sites like this and others), I’m just never like “oh, there’s not enough music in the world; I should make some more so the world has more”.

Not to be “back in my day” about it, but there was something very inspiring in the 2000s about sitting at home with my Death and Cynic CDs and being like “man, it’d be cool if there was more music like this” and going ahead and doing everything I could to make more music like that myself, as Chuck Schuldiner definitely wasn’t going to and it really seemed like Cynic wasn’t going to either (though they eventually did). But now… not only are my expanded tastes far less exhausted by what’s available, but—and I mean this with vanishingly little self-pity—I don’t think I’m the most qualified to make more of what I like.

I mean, more of what I like is sitting around waiting for me in extensive “play later” playlists on my streaming site of choice. I don’t need to make music I like to hear new music that I expect to like. There is no lack of good music available. (And like any self-deprecating artist, I’m not always super high on my own music. Listening to others’ music is way less time-intensive, way less work, and way lower risk.)

Also, there is the interrelated matter of attention. Because of the absurdly convenient availability of almost all recorded music from forever and tomorrow and the next day, it’s hard to end up listening to the same music more than once. In the streaming age, there are bands I’ve fallen in love with and then—after two weeks—almost never thought about again. And these are prominent artists. So considering that landscape as one in which I’m trying to get listeners’ attention in some way… it’s extremely discouraging (in a literal, not-exactly-mopey sense of the word).

Finally, in all honesty: releasing music is not a satisfying activity. Not for me, anyway. And again: I’m far less self-pitying about this than it sounds; I’m honestly just realistic about, like, what my brain is going to release dopamine for, you know?

Making music is often pretty fun. But even just noodling around has some barriers to entry. And sometimes it can be a little frustrating or unsatisfying.

And there’s a very thin line between making music in a playful way and working on music in a pretty dull way.

The main point is this: at least in my adult life, I have never expected to make a living with music. I hoped (did not expect) that it could become a hobby that paid for itself. With (again) vanishingly little self-pity, I think even that is extremely unlikely at this point. So the only incentive left for me to release music is the intrinsic satisfaction of it.

It’s not satisfying. It really isn’t. My “discography” is fairly modest in runtime, but even short pieces of music represent hours of effort. You would not believe how much time I spent on “The One With the Skull On It and Clavinet”. It’s 90 seconds of music and it really demanded a lot of time to compose and produce, and after I released that piece of music I vowed to streamline my workflow because it was just really deflating on the other side of its release.

And so, again, just sort of “planning ahead” re: dopamine (as it’s all that’s at stake for me anymore), I know that I just will not tolerate a full, careful production process at this point. It’s not fun enough. I’m not saying it’s the most painful thing ever or that I don’t enjoy aspects of producing and releasing a track, but because so much of it does feel like work and I only have so much free time… making music becomes—like—a fourth-place pastime. I need to have gotten bored with the three hobbies I like better to end up working on music, and realistically I will have run out of free time for any given day before I start getting within striking distance of exhausting hobbies one through three. Then the novelty on everything sort of resets.

And even though I do think that over time I’ve become humbled by the lack of success I’ve had in music, I cannot emphasize enough that I’m ultimately only so self-deprecating about my music. I decided to release a rough version of a new song (“If the Sun Ever Rises Again”) because my music streaming app played a Dereification tune on shuffle and I got in the mood to listen to a bunch of Dereification. And you know what? I sincerely like a lot of it.

But like I’ve been saying: it’s only so satisfying to make my own new music when I have nearly limitless amounts of new music from other, more motivated people that I intend to listen to.

Listening to music is way easier than making music. And whatever gap there may be for me between the pleasure of listening and the pleasure of making… it’s just overwhelmed by how much time and energy it takes to make new music.

I’m not saying “hi, here’s this demo, bye forever”. I’m saying “I happened to have the energy to mostly make this track back in August and now it’s November and I’m doing the bare minimum to get it out the door because I’d rather watch an old All Japan Women’s Pro Wrestling match after work than tweak the EQ on drums or adjust the volume of vocals by a decibel, especially when almost nobody is listening to my music but me”.

Accordingly, I’m not daring to ask for money for the demo (I mean, it’s a demo). You can pay for it if you want.

And, to be clear, I don’t dislike this track at all! I just don’t feel like working on it more than I already have, but I don’t really want it to never see the light of day (no pun intended). I wrote the lyrics the day after watching a particular movie (which one is pretty obvious to those who have seen it). I was on a really prolific streak of both writing lyrics and falling back in love with Death, even with Schuldiner’s sophomorically angsty lyrics sometimes making me cringe a bit. (Full respect to Schuldiner who is one of the absolute most influential musicians for me, but… like… some silly lyrics to be sure.)

These lyrics (along with some other songs I wrote at the time… one of which I’ve recorded but don’t like the state of) felt pretty angry (not that this particular song was actually written out of anger; it’s from the perspective of the protagonist of the movie) and I was listening to so much Death… it was easy to want to put together a song that felt like it wouldn’t have been out of place on Individual Thought Patterns or some slightly alternate-universe version of it.

So here it is! “If the Sun Ever Rises Again”. I really wanted to get a good chorus out of it and I think I achieved that, which is big for me because traditional song structure with lyrics has not generally been the goal of this whole Dereification project. It was intentionally strictly instrumental for a long time, but I think I can only get so much satisfaction out of that mode of music-making now. The poetry and storytelling of lyrical songwriting is a challenge that is one of the few things that can get me motivated about music lately, so while instrumentals are not off the table at all… it’s probably songs with words for the most part, from here on out. (Which unfortunately just adds to the complexity of making music, which just makes it more discouraging to do, etc etc.)

I do hope that I find the time and energy to sporadically release (at the very least) demo tracks, because being a musician has been such an integral (if inconsistent) part of who I think of myself as being, and there is an element of needing to prove it to the world somehow with either performances or releases. I have almost zero interest in performing in public, so I hope this isn’t the last you hear of my music. But I did want to express “boy, it’s not super fun to make music anymore and it’s typically hard for me to wanna” almost as much as I wanted to express whatever it is I wanted to express with “If the Sun Ever Rises Again”.

It’s the new one! It’s a really weird mix of styles! It’s got songs with lyrics! And vocals to match!

I made a video about some generative techniques I’ve been using lately to make groovy metal(ish) music in Ableton Live.

These techniques will likely be at the heart of a lot of Dereification music moving forward, so you’ve got EXCLUSIVE (okay not very exclusive) behind-the-scenes access (is that an Ableton pun? who can say).

Algorithms & Archives (which I wrote about a little bit ago) is out now, on Bandcamp (see below) as well as major streaming services.

Some of this music is more than a decade in the making and it’s also the first Dereification music with vocals (just the final track), so I’m very excited to put it out into the world.

Until the end of 2020, I will donate 50% of your purchase of anything Dereification on Bandcamp (not just this new release) to the Philadelphia Bail Fund.

I recently put out a very short collection of music called Brief Inhalation. The suddenness of its release and brevity of its content was partly due to how the music on it just didn’t spiritually match the rest of the music I was close to finishing.

That other stuff is now—after many years, actually—finished, and it’s being released on December 18th, 2020 as Algorithms & Archives.

While this release represents a fairly dramatic shift in how I’ve conducted myself under my Dereification “avatar”, it’s almost disingenuous to emphasize how radically new this music will be (though it is also that, for the moniker at least).

This is because various aspects of Algorithms & Archives are a long time in coming: not only were these pieces of music written between 2008 and 2012, but—after letting them collect digital dust for far too long as neglected tablature files—I’ve been anxious for a couple of years to sit down and finally produce them properly… or however “properly” my approach counts as.

These songs were written in one tablature program or another with no practical intention of learning and recording them by playing the instruments myself. And having listened to these compositions a number of times over the years via the highly mechanical-sounding default playback options in these programs, it would feel odd to me to produce these pieces of music in a completely “organic” manner anyway.

Thankfully, virtual instruments for the instruments involved can be pretty convincing these days. So, I finally used them to produce these songs in a way that balances their original stiltedness (which I’m frankly just too familiar with to abandon completely; that’s just what these pieces have always sounded like to me) with a fuller and somewhat more convincing sound. Vanishingly few changes have been made to the original compositions, with one big exception…

Because another thing that’s a long time coming (but is entirely novel under the Dereification banner) is vocals.

I’ve been putting out music under this name since 2014 and I’ve never created anything with lyrics until Algorithms & Archives: “Escaping Gravity”, which I wrote in 2008, has a pretty traditional verse-chorus structure to it (whereas the other tunes are more like brief sketches), and this inspired me to create a non-instrumental version of this song using its original title as a jumping off point for the words. Algorithms & Archives begins with the original instrumental version, and the EP ends with this new iteration of the song, using vocoder-delivered lyrics that I wrote a couple of months ago. In addition to being indelibly and eternally influenced by the whole aesthetic of Cynic’s Focus (a rare example of a metal record with vocoder vocals), the vocoder vocals are a choice I made to establish the song’s vocalist as a character. This use of characters and—at long last—words are two elements which I hope to make an important aspect of more Dereification music moving forward.

I’m also eager to continue dusting off old compositions like those found on Algorithms & Archives, producing them in a similar way. Even being somewhat selective, I think I have one or two more releases worth of similar music I could put together, so I hope to find the time for that in addition to the brand new and increasingly lyrical music that I would create less retrospectively.

Algorithms & Archives will be published on Bandcamp and streaming services on December 18, 2020. Also, from December 18th through the end of 2020, all Bandcamp sales of Dereification music will have 50% of their price (so, before any fees) donated to the Philadelphia Bail Fund.

Brief Inhalation is out! Two tracks for your ears!

For the rest of November 2020, 50% of this or other Dereification purchases on BC go to the Philadelphia Bail Fund! (The EP is also available on Spotify/etc.)

On May 24th, I uploaded some music to be published on June 5th (today), on your friendly neighborhood music streaming/download services. I set up a Bandcamp release draft for the same date.

This music was produced in a pretty frivolous spirit. You can probably tell from the album art and song/album title(s) that it was all intended to have a somewhat light tone as an art object.

On May 25th, George Floyd was murdered by police and the world has changed a lot since. If nothing else, many of us have been reminded of entrenched and intertwined systems of violence that we regularly forget about due to various axes of privilege. Make no mistake: although the murder of George Floyd was particularly monstrous (and catalytic in raising awareness), it is not an isolated incident that has people in the street demanding justice.

Due to how our national and global discourse has changed so quickly, the levity that built this project feels like it’s from impossibly long ago, and I feel very awkward about putting this music out. Even the simple fact of making all-instrumental music now feels like an unacceptable form of silence when art can and arguably must say much more.

But I have absolutely no intuition for when would be a better time to share these sounds, so I’m just mostly continuing with the release plans I had on May 24th.

That said, I want to say how proud I am of my recently adopted hometown of Philadelphia for being one of the most vocal and tenacious cities in gathering to protest the racist systems of abuse, exploitation, and neglect that oppress people of color every day.

To support the courage and vision of my new neighbors, any money that comes my way via Bandcamp during the month of June will go to Black Lives Matter Philadelphia.

The two best days for you to contribute to this are today (when Bandcamp is waiving fees) and Juneteenth (June 19th, when Bandcamp is starting an annual tradition of donating their share of sales to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund).

I hope this music can tickle your brain and lift your spirits for a few minutes.

All best,
Devin

It’s a short one, but I wrote and produced a new single in the midst of listening to a lot of extreme metal. It’s on Spotify now (as well as other services, and Bandcamp), so I thought I’d make a short playlist that includes the track itself as well as some of the reference points I had in mind.