i'm an independent sound and visual artist. my music often combines traditional and modern styles and techniques with experiments in electronic, ambient, generative art, and abstract collage.
i've previously released music under the names Creature367, Sisk, smpl, and Todd and Tucker.
my process is very playful, exploratory, and iterative. every time I open FL Studio, i feel like a kid in a candy store that's inside of a bigger candy store. i'll often start by just playing around with different ideas, sounds, instruments, and effects until something clicks or feels right.
sometimes i'll find the core idea of a song in one session and sometimes i only get a piece of it. but once i do, i revisit it over and over until i get a feel for what needs to be added, changed, or removed. some songs take shape over weeks and some take months or years for me to find what's there and then shape it into something i want to share.
from Riley's "in C" to Eno's classic Ambient albums, generative systems have had a history and impact in music and art that goes back long before the word was adopted by the AI industry.
i've personally been using generative systems in my songwriting for many years now. these can be as simple as Eno-style tape loop systems to extremely complex modular-style patches with logic gates and self-adjusting variables.
creating and working with generative music systems is a bit more like song-gardening than songwriting. you put a lot of theory and craft into every individual part of the system.. but once you hit Play, the music starts to move and grow all on its own, driven entirely by the input, rules, and parameters that you've built into the system. in generative art, the system itself is the actual work of art.
there's a simple kind of pleasure and satisfaction in building a system and then letting it surprise you.
