As mentioned in my last post, this album is in some ways a counterpoint to my previous release; while Interlinked (2024) was more intimate and hopeful, much of the feelings that fueled DISILLUSION resulted from experiences and observations of tension and challenges over the past couple years, both on personal and societal levels respectively. Rapid change, chaos, overwhelm, saturation, helplessness and nihilism met in equal measure with a defiant will to push back and fight for what’s genuine and beautiful and worthy of effort. I think it’s the intersection of all of these things – the pressure and violent collision of these opposing ideas – that I ended up channeling into these tracks. As a result I’d say it’s a bit more aggressive and noisy than anything I’ve made since Metamorph (2020), though still not without its contemplative and hopeful moments.
Looking back from here on my process, I almost never start with a clear concept and carry it through to completion. Having the luxury of time to spend on a hobby like music allows me to do whatever I want with it and the result for me is a fulfilling and subtly cathartic expression of whatever I’m feeling at the time – oftentimes something I would struggle to even put into words. So every couple of years when the timing feels right and I compile the best of my efforts together into some kind of cohesive whole it’s interesting and somewhat illuminating to see the through-line develop, almost like reading back through a very abstract journal.
On the technical side, I experimented with multiple approaches this time around. With a Push 3 standalone I tried some “dawless” style sketching and production with the Elektron Syntakt and Digitone, Moog Labyrinth, DFAM and Subharmonicon (“infinity”, “memento”), but also did a lot of daw-only production using some of the amazing Fors m4l and vst instruments (“succumb”, “spellbind”, “risk”). Also quite recently got an Ableton Move which formed the basis for “acceptance”. Aside from Live’s stock instruments and effects though I think my most-used piece of hardware continues to be the unassuming Arturia Minifreak (owing in no small part to its complementary 1:1 vst). On “sphere” I took one of the tracks from my Sonic Sanctuary Live Set and brought it to a more polished level, which was another new approach for me. Overall I think working with different instruments, layouts and techniques helped keep things fresh and interesting, avoiding same-y ruts that I’ve fallen into before, and likely something I’ll continue to try moving forward.
Man it’s been awhile since I’ve updated here. Hard to believe my last update was almost two years ago. I’ve got so many thoughts and things to update that it’s hard to know where to start, which I suppose has been compounding the problem of not updating. But it seems the stars have aligned in terms of circumstances and motivations to dust off this old blog, so let’s see if I can form some kind of a coherent post here.
Let’s start with my primary focus of these last two years, Hades II. Somehow I neglected to even update here both at the initial announcement and the Early Access release. But 1.0 has been out for a couple months now on Steam and Switch/Switch 2, and I’ve been grateful to see such a positive reception of it overall. Having contributed meaningfully to a game that now sits within Metacritic’s top 20 PC games of all time feels like some kind of lifetime achievement to me, beyond what I’d ever imagined.
As a kid who was awed by visual effects in games, I remember thinking that some day I wanted to work on games that gave me that same indescribable feeling where the orchestration of all of its disciplines meld into a unified and memorable, bordering on spiritual experience, becoming much more than the sum of its parts; that if I could work on something that was as inspiring to others as I felt, it would be a meaningful career. Seeing so much positive feedback around this release has felt like a resounding confirmation of that dream.
At the same time, the fulfillment of that dream has come at some cost. While I generally stick to a 40-hour work week, in hindsight I also put a lot of pressure on myself and have been hyper-focused during those hours, which isn’t easy to simply switch on and off (especially when working from home.) Since I really have the flexibility to set my own goals I’ve tended to default to prioritizing my own high ambitions, especially considering the degree to which work ethic and drive are generally valued in our (western, silicon valley) culture.
Part of what I’ve learned from this project is that self-discipline is more than just prioritizing work and doing the hard things first, it’s also finding balance and knowing when to let go of ambition. And I don’t think the two are incompatible – “working smarter not harder” for example by trusting the player’s imagination rather than spelling everything out visually has been something on my mind during this project as well, and perhaps something to carry into the next.
I may have more to write specifically about my VFX work on the game at a later point, maybe even some animation breakdowns or other insights, but for now I’ll move on to some more personal work.
I found a little time to do some more generative art experiments in the last six months or so. This one started as a desire to make a laptop wallpaper for myself and is pretty self-explanatory and also not quite done yet – I wanted to make something that lived between retro techy vector art and a PCB or city layout. I think it still needs more variety in design elements, a more robust random color generator and a better way of creating negative space (currently hard-coded) but it’s getting there. I did setup everything resolution-independent so it’s easy to scale.
Another Processing experiment that’s all about multiple levels of distortion and transformation – the basis of it is randomly placed concentric fading rings drawn with additive sub-pixel size rectangles, but with layers upon layers of modulation. In addition I wanted to add some more hard geometric shapes to contrast with the organic softness of the simplex noise, so some areas get modulated with a sort of random brick-style grid, the edges of which get blurred, brightened and spread for emphasis.
The end result feels kind of alien to me. I like the noisiness of drawing with lots of tiny rectangles but at the same time it’s atrociously slow to render. Some day maybe I’ll look into optimization but my lack of interest in that aspect is I think indicative of the fact that I’m much more artist than programmer.
While I haven’t posted any new music lately, I do have a new album nearing completion. In many ways I feel it’s kind of a counterpoint to my previous 2024 album Interlinked. While I feel the latter expressed a clear sense of love, openness, hope, peace and contentment, this one has a bit darker tone overall. There are still a few quiet moments but I generally felt more like expressing a sense of challenge, defiance, and disenchantment through faster tempos, distortion, more harmonic minors and diminished chords.
Much of it is an ongoing reaction to my perception of the zeitgeist; the way that this digital space I once considered a refuge from the banality of the real world has slowly deteriorated into a space to amplify the worst qualities of it, then reify those amplifications into feedback loops that tear at the fabric of our society and democracy.
It’s possible that this bleak decay of what I once valued so highly has also contributed to my lack of updates here. My purposeful self-exile from social media may be yet another factor – I don’t feel much of a sense of community to contribute to. Even something as specific as SoundCloud feels very commercialized, like everyone is trying to hustle and clamber up to some sort of monetary, or at least numeric, success.
Which tangentially leads me to the inevitable topic of generative AI. Early on I felt an uneasy neutrality toward it, having always been excited by the application of technology to creative art but dissuaded by the almost frictionless potentials for abuse.
But over the past couple of years it’s become quite clear to me just how negative of an effect it has in the hands of megacorporations. While it’s still far from a state where I feel my livelihood as a creative professional is threatened, it already has a subtle but clear effect of further devaluing the skilled work of artists of all types.
I’m still holding out hope that the public sentiment toward AI generated content remains negative. From what I’ve seen people really do value human effort, real stories, genuine emotion, feelings and thoughts – the things that make art and culture worthwhile and not something to be automated. Even my kids have had visceral negative reactions to AI-generated content without even knowing – “Ugh, why does it look so weird?”
I think there’s still potential for creative use of it somewhere – not just in the broad application of Machine Learning, which is full of creative potential (at the very least for tooling), but in a postmodern, self-aware way – someone will do something legitimately creative with it. But I think that will be a niche exception rather than the disrupting/revolutionizing technology that is trying to be sold to us.
On an annoying tangential note – some AI slop songs, probably Suno generated, started showing up on my even-less-frequently-updated YouTube page, under my artist name. YouTube doesn’t make it easy to take them down – they’re still all “Under Review”. And then some time within the last couple weeks another batch showed up, with even more banal titles like “Unicorns and U-Turns” and “6-7”. If I didn’t know any better I would think someone was trying to fuck with me directly, but I think the more likely answer is that it’s just dead internet creep expanding into my little corner. I contacted DistroKid directly as they’re responsible for distributing the slop but they were no help whatsoever. On one hand it feels a little discouraging, but on the other it’s fuel for me to keep fighting with real creative output.
I guess that’s it for now, I feel like I’m running out of writing steam and my eyes are getting blurry. Whenever I have free time and a choice between doing something creative or updating this blog I’ve chosen the former because I think my content speaks better than my words, but perhaps I’ve balanced that too far to one side. Feels good to get an update here now, and there should be another soon when I get this album wrapped up.
Josh Barnett 