The Part of Making Music Nobody Warns You About
Hey friends,
Some of the best conversations I've ever had about music happened with people I've never met. Someone sends over a patch at midnight, we go back and forth about it for an hour, and I close the laptop genuinely inspired.
I don't want to talk that down, because the online community around electronic music gets far too little credit. It has given me friendships, ideas, and a good chunk of what I know.
The thing I couldn't name
But something was missing anyway, and it took me years to work out what.
It wasn't that nobody understood me. My family and my friends are people I feel deeply connected to — they're just not the ones who light up when a detuned oscillator changes the character of a whole pad. And for that kind of thing I had the internet, and plenty of people on it.
What was missing was narrower than "community". It was the version of it that happens in a room. Someone leans over your setup, asks how you're routing that thing, and twenty minutes later you're both under the table looking at cables. Or you end up playing something together with no plan at all, which is not a conversation that fits through a screen.
I had the first kind for years. I didn't have the second — not because it didn't exist near me, but because I never went looking.
What finally changed it
The first time I felt it properly was at my first Superbooth in Berlin. A whole building full of people whose brains work in a similar direction to mine, plus a hundred creative concepts I had no idea existed. I came home wrecked and happier than I'd been in months.
The problem with Superbooth is that it happens once a year and Berlin is a long train ride from Cologne.
What actually changed things was much less spectacular. Last weekend I went to Open Signals, an event series for experimental electronic music here in my own city. Workshops in the afternoon, 15 acts through the evening, everything from ambient and drone to techno, house and glitch. I sat in a workshop on coding music with SuperCollider and understood maybe half of it, which was great.
But the workshops weren't the thing. The thing was standing around between sets talking to people about live setups and performance ideas, and still buzzing from it days later. Same feeling as Superbooth — except twenty minutes from my door, with people I can actually see again next month.
If it doesn’t exist yet, maybe you should do it
Here's what only sank in afterwards: none of it exists by accident.
Open Signals is there because a few people in Cologne decided it should be. Somebody sat at home with an idea and then did the unglamorous part — the emails, the venue, the schedule. The same is true for every act that played that night. At some point each of them decided to take their music out of their room and into a room with other people.
That step is bigger than it sounds, and nobody ever feels ready for it.
Look up what's happening near you — small concert series, listening sessions, synth meetups, open jams. Go once, even alone. Go a second time if it felt good; that's usually when you actually start knowing people.
And if the thing you're looking for isn't there yet, you might be the person who gets to start it. Organize the small show. Host the synth evening. Message the local artist whose set you loved.
It took me far too long to go looking. I hope it takes you less.
Stay creative, Milan (KVNDRA)
P.S.: The new Melodic Minute episode is about exactly this — a slow ambient jam on the Push 3 and the Mother-32 with the whole story on top. If you want to help keep this series going, you'll find me on Patreon, where every episode lands a week early: https://www.patreon.com/kvndra
