Every now and then, while merrily pootling along in the studio making music that I love, I hear a track that makes me feel about as capable a musician as an egg rolling around on a zither. This track is everything that I am not. It does everything that I can’t do—or couldn’t even think of doing. It sounds so good that I want to lie down in a field and sink into the mud. It renders everything I’ve ever done absolute pigeon shit.
I get a kind of heart-sinking, brain-exploding, panic-inducing, joy-of-life and fear-of-death all-at-once feeling that—for these purposes—I’ll describe as Tender Obliteration.
It’s not envy, exactly. It’s something more reverent. It’s the sudden, dizzying realisation that someone has created something so astonishingly good, so unexpected, that it knocks the wind out of you and makes you question whether you’ve been pointing your artistic compass in the right direction at all.
Over time, though, I’ve learnt to see it as a thing of beauty rather than a threat, or a sign to hang up the headphones for good—and I feel ashamed for having ever thought anything otherwise. What an absolute fucking joy it is that that thing now exists. And it existing doesn’t diminish any of my efforts in the slightest—it just adds yet more colour to the seemingly infinite palette.
The beauty of art is that no one thing will ever come out the same when filtered through another lens—including the same experience or the same landscape in the same light. Each interpretation is as valid as the next. My particular set of filters is no exception to that, and neither is yours.
“It’s so important to lean into your own thing—your truth, your own inimitable set of filters, forged in the deep well of your existence.”
That’s why it’s so important to lean into your own thing—your truth, your own inimitable set of filters, forged in the deep well of your existence over years of unique experience and exposure to your peculiar set of oddball interests.
It’s also why it’s important to keep discovering new things. Exploration is key to inspiration, and that voyage of discovery will painlessly and joyfully expose you to things that will throw intrigue and originality into your output—if you allow it to.
Even the mildest dose of those new and exciting flavours can be transformative to your work, without you even realising.
On the same note, I find it useful not to dwell on the mainstream just by merit of it being right there. I may be wrong, but it strikes me as a shortcut to sounding a bit like a pale imitation of the majority of everything else. Eclecticism plays a huge part in the evolution of art.
“Comparison is the thief of joy,” as Joey Essex once said, so if you are to compare, make it to those things that stretch you somehow, rather than mirror.
Authenticity is key to real art, and comparison tends to lead us astray from that.
Pursue your own truth. Tread your own path. And don’t be tricked into mimicking others in the vain hope of gaining a chunk of their brilliance. It’s easy to forget sometimes.
The good stuff’s already there—you just have to trust in it, and embrace your voice with all its myriad idiosyncrasies.
And who knows—maybe the thing you make next will be the one that gives someone else their own little Tender Obliteration.
Familiar with that Tender Obliteration feeling? Or is it just me!?
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Won’t you make some prog trance already?!