When I finish a piece primarily using sampled materials, I sometimes feel a certain sense of depletion (or anticlimax). That said, it is not that I am dissatisfied with the resulting music; rather, it is accompanied by a sense of fulfillment upon its completion.
However, in a different layer of my mind, something like a void sometimes remains, and I have long left the true nature of this sensation ambiguous.
Recently, I feel I have finally begun to see what it really is. It was likely a feeling that the “amount of energy depleted during production” and the “amount of fulfillment” were out of balance.
Furthermore, I might have unconsciously taken the very fact of not being exhausted as “proof that I wasn’t serious enough.”
The cognitive load in dialoguing with sampled materials is distinctly different in nature from that of traditional composition, where notes are stacked one by one. The process of structuring musical time while listening to the “voices of the sampled materials” that speak when I strain my ears feels, in a way, like an “easy task” to me.
And this “ease” was once the seed of my discomfort. I couldn’t help but think that being able to do it easily meant I wasn’t deeply committed.
But if I stop and think about it, being able to do something easily must also be a manifestation of skills internalized over time. When a master craftsman’s hand movements are smooth and efficient, it indicates the depth of their mastery, not evidence of laziness.
Thinking this way, I realize that the feeling that “consuming a lot of energy is the sincere way to be” was likely an assumption I had fabricated somewhere along the line.
Tracing the origin of that assumption leads me to the point where it might have been akin to preparing an excuse for the outcome in advance. The fact that “I exhausted myself this much” functions, to some extent, as an exemption if the work falls short of expectations.
In the early stages of my career, such self-defense might have sometimes helped me move forward, but by continuing to internalize it for so long, I feel it eventually bred a different set of problems.
So, where should the energy spared from exhaustion be directed? When contemplating this, the question that comes to mind is, “What is this work?” It is not about the precision of individual notes or the quality of the materials, but about sensing and carving out the overall form of the work. It is about continuously questioning its true identity while facing the piece.
In other words, it is a question backed by a state of being—being the creator, yet existing as one element within the space of creation, and simultaneously being an observer who watches this dynamic state from a slight distance.
Realizing such a state of being still requires a lot of energy from me at present; so to speak, what is visible here and now might be a transitional phase toward a more favorable allocation of energy.
In parallel with these realizations, I feel my perception of my own production environment has also gradually changed.
My days consist of using my website as a hub to place musical works, writings, and traces of my daily, fragmented thoughts. There are periods when I carefully polish highly sculpted works, and there are periods when I scatter music in a prosaic manner while listening to the voices of the materials. I have realized anew that in both processes, I equally feel a sense that “the mechanism of my self is functioning and circulating comfortably.”
In the past, there was a part of me that believed accumulating highly polished works was a proof of sincerity in creation.
Now, however, I feel that on a more fundamental level, it is more important whether the mechanism that sustains and nurtures me as a creator continues to circulate moderately. The perfection of a single work and the quality of the soil from which it was born are perhaps things that should be questioned separately.
There is the word “biotope.” Originally an ecological term referring to a small ecological space inhabited by a specific community of organisms, its nature—being moderately isolated from the outside while matter and energy continue to circulate within—feels overlapping with the current state of my production environment.
Rather than proceeding with “creating a good work” as the ultimate goal, it is about viewing “cultivating and developing the very environment where good works can be born” as the foundation, and continuing to face and tend to it. I feel that this reversal of order (a shift in perspective) brings about an unexpectedly significant difference when actually put into conscious practice.
Such a state of being, to varying degrees, is likely something many artists already experience and continue to tackle in their daily production. This time, I decided to write it down here, thinking that putting it into my own words once would serve as a foothold for my next practices and developments.
