Do you want to lift people up, make them feel good about the work they are doing and who they are?
It is easy for us to fall in the trap of looking down on others and putting ourselves first and it is surprising to see how behaviour and ego can change when a person receives a promotion or when they interact with another person in an occupation they deem below them.
There are little things we can do to ensure we treat everyone around us with dignity, from acknowledging them, sharing gratitude for the work that they do and treating each other with empathy.
These moments can matter, and can be the difference in shifting how the day goes by for another person.
My fellow musicians, Rich and Dean (who are currently based in Hong Kong) decided to put an album of original songs together, to which I had the pleasure of working on.
The album is a mixture of rock, grunge and blues with a plethora of attitude. There are riffs galore and it was really fun to mix.
If you are working towards a goal and trying to achieve something, feeling frustration is a natural part of the process.
The frustration of not being able to succeed in what you are doing (yet).
If you are frustrated, you are working towards flow and conscious of the fact that you are making mistakes and not quite where you want to be (yet). It can be a useful motivator, a challenge to overcome and it is very often that moments of frustration also can lead to moments of a high level of learning.
If we can perceive the process of frustration as a good thing and use ‘yet’ as a useful lever to move ourselves forward, we will reap the rewards.
One of the best books I ever used to learn to develop and expand my guitar technique was Troy Stetina’s ‘Speed Mechanics for Guitar’.
He’s a monster guitar player but explained perfectly in the paragraphs amongst the exercises as to why we were doing the exercises and what benefit they had.
An entire section of the book was dedicated to the left hand whilst the other focused on the right. Amongst them were details on finger movement efficiency, dexterity and independence as well as a wide range of different movements that are idiomatic for the electric guitar.
The main idea that was re-enforced throughout the book was that speed is a pointless goal unless you aim for accuracy as well.
As I worked through the book along my metronome as a teenager, there were things gradually improving throughout the entire manner to which I played. I felt more in control, used the required amount of energy but nothing excessive and could play passages I thought were well beyond my ability.
These technical exercises played and still play a vital role in my journey for control on my instrument. Looking at the little details and the small steps you can take to level up is always something worth dedicating the time towards.
Most people listen to music in a way that is average in quality.
It will be most likely that you are listening to music in ear buds from your phone or worse, a laptop.
This undermines the work that producers and artists have done to make their record sound as good as it possibly can, spending hundreds of hours carefully writing, engineering and mixing their music.
Listening to music through well designed speakers or headphones and if you get the chance, atmos can open up an absolute world of sound quality you didn’t realise was there.
Companies are starting to work hard to make break throughs in quality sound systems that are affordable and it is an exciting time for that development taking place. The development of atmos is also a really exciting where you have a fully immersive sound set (2 speakers at the front, 2 at the back a sub and 2 to the side above).
If you get the chance to listen in a system that is high quality, take it, you will not regret it.
100 years from now, when Historians study the pandemic, there will undoubtedly be the analysis of how countries managed it and the fact that those who were led by women had a significantly lower mortality rate whilst many countries led by men, particularly those who had been peddling the trends of populism, had a higher death rate.
Of course there are a multitude of other reasons, including ageing populations, population density etc. but there is pattern where men who have had a dubious relationship with truth and facts, have led to tragic consequences.
It seems embedded in the culture here in the U.K. that is much more a sign of strength to stand by your viewpoint and double down on it than change your mind. It is pathological in many of our leaders that you can’t be seen to be wrong.
This has had toxic results.
Moving forward, we need to change the culture to shift in a way where changing position on something as more information comes to light is part of being human and is a desirable value.
We also need education to encourage students to leap from the safety net to be wrong so they can learn to be right.
There’s no point having a mind if you can’t change it.
Calls for unity don’t mean anything unless there’s accountability.
It’s hard when looking at detail of what happened three weeks ago over in America and not be sickened by it.
The world moves faster than ever as does news but this can’t be let go of quickly.
This was an insurrection, incited by the former president and his cronies. the white supremacists that charged on the capitol that left five people dead, had the intention of killing members of Congress along with stealing information. They openly admitted it online and bragged about it. Listen to AOC’s account of her experience and the fact that her life was put under threat.
This is unacceptable.
And just because they didn’t succeed in their plan doesn’t mean they should be let off the hook.
Just because some of them claim that they had no ill intention doesn’t mean they should be let off the hook either. This was the capitol they marched on, you can’t just do that.
Just imagine if this wasn’t white supremacists. The systemic racism on display could not be any more blatant.
The culture needs to stop coddling criminals.
A precedent needs to be set. Otherwise you are practically sending out an invite for this kind of thing to happen again.
* For more details, I highly recommend the Gaslit Nation podcast.
As was the case with many major releases, dates were pushed back from 2020 into 2021 in response to the pandemic for fear of exhausting creativity.
I think they should have just gone and released the full thing and moved on. I held my hat to those who went ahead with releases last year as new music could certainly serve as a tonic for enduring lockdown. Considering the way things have gone for the live music business and the ever sense of uncertainty, there’s no point but to continue creating and shipping in the present circumstances.
The design of the overall record is that it generally should be experienced as a play-through album and I find it quite frankly irritating that artists are finding themselves compromised with this during the streaming, algorithm era where the push out of singles is more an act of racing for attention than an actual artistic statement.
‘The Future Bites’ is an interesting listen. Steven Wilson has gone more down the synth and electronic stylistic pathway and to anyone who looks closely at his catalogue, it is of no surprise that he would pursue this further.
The response on social media, typically propelling the loudest angriest voices, cried betrayal of Wilson selling out, going pop and leaving behind his guitar driven, progressive pathway. It will be completely expected that he will disregard this noise, as with many of the artists that have influenced Wilson, he is never eager to repeat himself and continue to evolve.
It is perfectly fine to not dig the aesthetic and many of my friends much preferred the records where Guthrie and Marco offered their instrumental virtuosity to Wilson’s artistic vision. As they are fellow musicians, that’s an understandable stance.
I am enjoying the record. The production and sound design as always is stellar, in particular, the synth work in ‘King Ghost’ and the accompanying animated video from Jess Cope.
The key thing that continues to make SW captivating is his ability to make an album focus on contemporary themes with clarity and relevance albeit with a familiar sense of melancholy and doom. ‘The Future Bites’ is very much about our interactions with technology, identity, behaviours and consumerism. There is subtle humour and irony amongst the songs. Whilst Wilson critiques social media, there is the self awareness that he is equally as any of us required to interact and to an extent, depend on the technology available to us.
Ryan Mark Elliott Music 