Leave my shit unquantized

“Leave my shit unquantized,” which could also be read as “Leave my music unquantized” but shit sounds better to me. It’s a title that broadly encapsulates the sentiment of this painting. I have a deep love for music, as my love for painting and art grows so does my appreciation of music. Anyone who tracks what I draw probably already knows this, but I want to share some extra thoughts on this in writing.

For the most part, my knowledge of music is based on my own digging, which gets more eclectic and artistic as time goes on. I say that in order to preface that I really know nothing about music, other than what I do and don’t like. I'm trying to learn little things from my wonderful partner who is musically inclined but only bits and pieces. 

I think the main reason I’m even asking them about these questions is that my appreciation is maturing into a love similar to my art, to the point, where I want to understand the rules of the game that is music. Now! I am not saying I’ve developed an aim to make music but being able to understand the language helps my ears understand what they’re hearing and this requires a bit of knowledge of the rules of the game. For instance, I’ve been getting into music where there's a bit of (what some might call) sloppiness and grittiness that I can get lost in. For some reason, the drums would be just a bit off, but in the right way. I came to realize that this was because I enjoyed live drums as well as unquantized drums. This brings us back around to the title.

 “Leave my shit unquantized,”

In the live drums, I found that it was the textural sensation I appreciated most. I keep my music very loud with pretty nice over-the-ear headphones so sometimes when I’m listening to a song the little things can hold my attention. Hearing a drum ring out with the right reverberation is a holy and meditative experience, I close my eyes and just listen, waiting for the next crack of the drumstick. Or in the case of my favorite producers, waiting for the next calculated press of their MPC.

This is an MPC by the way

If you look at the background of this piece, you can actually see it is an MPC 3000. Those blue squares in the back are the iconic pads of the MPC 3000 with the iconic AKAI logo above them. 

In a lot of the music, I listen to, computers aid with the production. A key ingredient in musical performance and the recording process is of course the input of the artist. With the aid of computers, artists' inputs can be altered, corrected, over-corrected, etc. An example of this is quantization. Quantization is a mathematical process that involves taking many values and reducing them to a distinct set of values. In music, this process snaps somewhat imprecise playing to a more exact format. It’s a lot like auto-correct for music; if your notes are coming off short or rushed, then quantization will nudge those notes back to where they “should be.”

To leave your musical input unquantized as an artist is quite the statement. It means you're letting more of yourself shine through in the music. By not being limited to a strict pattern/ set of values, you're able to have more creative and energetic playing. I think quantization has its place in music but there is something wonderful about hearing music that isn’t corrected. It’d be cliche to say it’s the human aspect but it’s true that the flawed aspect of the music makes it more true to life. Which in many ways is the aim of art, to be an expression of life. Because in order to make great art you must live life and make art from your life. To make art that sticks to a strict set of values or format is to restrict the expression of your own life, which seems like a contradiction to me. Everyone's lives are different and I don’t see how we could tell our stories in the same format. Now! When I’m listening to music, is that what I’m thinking? No. In the moment it’s far less cerebral. When I’m listening to the right song and focused on the music everything just kind of disappears and I close my eyes to let the grooves and textures of the instruments wash over me. I’m not debating in my head why this person has decided to play this or that drum in a certain place. Those sorts of thoughts fall more into the post-listening set of experiences. I’m just trying to rationalize why this area of music is so worth exploring. At the end of the day, I just like it and it’s as simple as that. It’d be the same as me explaining why I like garlic bread, “because the shit is tasty!”

I think leaving music unquantized and letting the artist play without the aid of computers is a more natural process and leaves a more clear/ readable artistic fingerprint. That’s why in the background of the painting you can see fingerprints on the MPC’s pads. I wanted to emphasize my appreciation for hearing the different ways people organize their music. You can also notice that the squares are shaped/ spaced differently, this is an ode to unquantized instrumentation. If the notes are being played with varying amounts of time in between then I wanted the MPC pads to have varying space between them.

If you look closely at the pads you’ll not only notice the fingerprints but also that the center of the pads is darkened, this was to convey a sense of aging and repetitive use, communicating a labor of love and dedication to one's craft. This darkening is done with particular brushes that have a lot of texture and this is a representation of my love for auditory textures in music. You should be able to see four very distinguishable circles on each pad, those represent a pressing of each pad and they’re meant to be read from left to right.

This would make the farthest pad to the right the top of a 4/4 meter, hence why it’s the most worn out, it’s usually felt more than the rest of the notes. That’s also why it has the most chaotic storm of red waves fluttering around it. 

My love for live instrumentation and un-quantized playing is married in the art of sampling which lets producers harmoniously mix a lot of these ingredients to make something absolutely wonderful. I’ve been trying to articulate this musical technique into how I make my artwork, especially over this past summer. Recently I’ve been incorporating this with visual texture.

If you look at my old artwork when my music taste was much less developed you can see so is my use of texture and the background overall. As the music I intake becomes more developed I find the aspects I’m looking for include a lot more going on in the music than in the vocals. In Hip-hop, lyrics often take the spotlight but the music underneath is arguably the more important component and in my learning of this, you can see how it’s affected my art. While I do have a great appreciation for lyricism I think what is occurring now in my mind is a shift towards looking for what makes me feel good. Sometimes feelings can’t be put into words and we need music, certain vibrations & sounds, to put us in the right mental state. Music has the freedom to be understood without being so heavily processed by the brain, it kind of just slips under our mental defenses and does what it does.

The difference between these two pieces, besides a little over a year's worth of time, is my use of texture. The image on the left when you examine it closely has far more texture in the brushstrokes and more abstract rhythmic patterns. Meanwhile, the painting on the right is made up of mostly solid brushstrokes. The painting on the right also has rhythmic patterns, mostly the waveforms, but their lack of texture is likely due to me just not having the current ear for music I do now. And that’s kind of the heart of my writing, that my ear for music has been developing and it strongly impacts how I communicate as an artist.

The painting on the left goes with this

This song goes with the song on the right

Also here is an introspective list of why I felt I should write this

Because no one else can look at my art and explain all the decisions and details like me

Because I want to share my love for art and music. I want to find some sense of comradery over these interests and build a space for geeking out over them.

Because it feels right and because it feels like it’s time or even, overdue.

In general, I feel guilty that I don’t explain myself, I feel like because I don’t explain myself a lot of the nuance in my artwork goes unnoticed. The fact that much of the nuance in my artwork goes unnoticed, from my perspective, is saddening. Do I want praise? Nope. I’ve learned from myself and others that praise doesn’t really help you out except for a brief moment. I just want people to enjoy my work and be made happy by it. I thought my art could do this by itself and maybe it can, but maybe not, so I want to try writing this explanation in order to boost my artwork and make it more palatable for everyone. By doing this, maybe its intended effect will be more successful. I just don’t like the feeling of creating in a vacuum of silence.

I heard this from Yasiin Bey, the trees do not exist for themselves.