When it comes to creating art, I have found that not knowing anything can sometimes leave room for more creativity. At times when I am overcome with writer’s block or things like that, I have learned that the solution is actually abandoning what I know. There is something about not knowing anything that can sometimes force you to look at art from a new perspective. This allows you to approach new techniques and maybe discover something new about the artistic process by starting from scratch.
One of my favorite ways to reset my creative process is usually through the musique concrete technique. Musique concrete is an old sound technique that originated in the 1940s by Pierre Schaeffer, which entails utilizing recorded sounds from everyday life or objects and putting them together to create music. This technique works to get me inspired because I have to give up total control over the content of the music I am creating. It takes a lot more creativity to figure out how to morph keychains and wind tunnels into a cohesive vision, but once you try, it gets many gears turning. This technique has been used in music since the 1940s, and it wasn’t as simple as splicing audio in Ableton — it required countless hours of hand-cutting recorded tapes, speeding them up, and reversing them all in analog. This takes a tremendous amount of creativity and resourcefulness. A lot of the electronic music pioneers had to be very creative to produce sounds and had to abandon previously known ideas about musical content. British composer Daphne Oram would hand-draw on physical tapes for hours to get maybe 30 seconds of unique, never-before-heard electronic sound. Composers who worked with musique concrete ended up creating very impactful works, like Delia Derbyshire, who utilized metal lampshades and recorded tapes to create music as iconic as the Doctor Who theme song. Or Hugh Le Caine, who created an entire musical work, “Dripsody,” out of a water droplet by manipulating tapes.
I have recently started learning the banjo, which is a very difficult instrument to learn. I’ve had to learn a series of new picking patterns and a completely new tuning, which I’m still getting used to. It is a beautiful instrument, and I have learned that starting from ground zero when learning this instrument has actively inspired me more than the instruments I already know. When it comes to music, I am constantly being pulled by perpetual curiosity, which is what makes learning so fun. There is alleviated pressure of having a desire to be perfect by learning something new, it removes my desire to be good enough. I allow myself to just focus on learning new things, which I have found to push me creatively significantly more than just my guitar. I have also used the new things I have learned in my other instruments, and my guitar playing has started to develop more banjo-like tendencies. I have found my songwriting abilities to be more relaxed and enjoyable when I am just doing it out of the curiosity of the thing, rather than a need to be perfect.
This perfectionism I have has been easier to abandon under the microscope of a brand new concept that needs to be discovered. Creating and learning is truly addictive, and I find myself craving to learn more and more every day. Developing new interests, skills and creative strategies from something I expected to know nothing about has been so intriguing. There is so much beauty in learning and being curious, and the best part about it is that there will always be something new to learn.
