#14 Yesterday in a glass box: a complimentary appetiser
Here, have an amuse-bouche before I legit kick off my most hectic year of new music. Also, I ask you to fill out a Google Form for some baffling reason
Helloooooo you. it is me. meeeeee.
I am here with a warning and a peace offering.
The warning: I am going to release a lot of music this year. New tracks from Achingdrum, my collab with Mindy Meng Wang 王萌 and the Distractions series are all coming in the next weeks and months, plus I’m even planning to revisit the Duet musical universe this year. Strap in.
The peace offering: before things get properly OTT, today I’m sharing some music from late last year you might have missed.
Consider it an amuse-bouche - in French, “to amuse the mouth.” Below is a small complimentary appetiser that is designed to put you in your happy place before we embark on the proper messy degustation. And it will get messy this year, I promise.
Speaking of happy places, here is a picture of me in a box:
Last November, someone put me in this glass box and told me to make music for a couple of hours. So I did. I did that. In a box.
I improvised new music from scratch, building on top of samples from friends like ANGE, an amazing singer who I got to hang out with in Barcelona last year, and Lucy Roleff, whose vocals I cannot stop messing around with (Lucy has previously appeared on both “Get Into Your Love” and “Get Into Trouble”).
Passers-by seemed confused, perhaps disinterested, but not inconvenienced. The organisers were stoked. My daughters were amused. I had a lovely time lost in my sounds.
The day after, I collected the work I’d made and put it on Bandcamp.
I called it - accurately - Yesterday In A Glass Box.
It is a seven-track release, free to download and only on Bandcamp:
It is (I think) a gentle and unassuming collection of musical fragments - the work is intentionally unfinished, echoes of a specific time (yesterday) and place (in a box), a document of the creative process suspended. Sick.
hopefully this chilled out fragmentary music is a good way to warm up to what is going to be a Very Hectic Year of Very Tim Shiel Music. And/or, of course you can use Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, and all the other places, to catch up on my ever-expanding musical catalogue.
I’ll be back in a few weeks with my first proper new music for the year.
Oh, still here?
*cracks knuckles in exaggerated fashion*
Well, if you’ve made it this far… maybe I can ask you about something that is on my mind. And be warned (again) - at the end of this I am literally going to ask you to fill out a goddamn Google Form like the massive, desperate, needy nerd that I am.
You’re embarrassed, I’m embarrassed, it’s a Google Form, it’s embarrassing. But let me try and swallow that embarrassment down somewhere deep and dark inside myself, and then begin by saying:
I want to talk to you, but I don’t know where to start.
I want to “help”, but I don’t know what’s most important.
I want to start conversations, but … how, with who, where, why, and what about?
I have been feeling blocked up. A little paralysed, a bit detached. I find myself wanting to share my thoughts, my music, ideas, but keep questioning my motives.
I care about the world - I want a better world. I want you to do great. I want you to feel great. I also want me to do and feel great. These things are on my mind as I type.
I have a sinking feeling that there is no version of "this" - me doing and saying "things" and you the imagined audience receiving those "things" - that is not compromised, twisted. Maybe there is no version of the intangible "connection" happening between us that isn't perverted or simply pretend. We are all learning so rapidly that the modern internet has made some things we thought infallible - truth, connection - become brittle and untrustworthy. Are our noble attempts at connecting to each other only grist for the mill of the attention economy? Are newsletters like this, and podcast feeds, and live Twitch streams, and radio shows, and EPs and albums and is it all a kind of adult make-believe, a parasocial theatre inevitably hollowed out and corrupted by wait wait wait wait ok ok ok
Ok.
Ok wait. Rewind.
Maybe I just need a break.
I am currently on an indefinite break from social media. I left Instagram 2 months ago, Twitter about a year ago. I never started with the clock app beyond some experiments out of professional curiosity, and a short literally viral moment with Dr Karl.
I think social media is, on balance, toxic. For me personally. And for you. And for Society. You know, The World. A definition of “toxic” is: very harmful or unpleasant in a pervasive or insidious way. Sounds about right.
I am aware that “it’s not all bad.” But on balance, it’s bad.
I think we continue to underestimate the damage that these platforms are doing to our brains, our moods, our discourse, our politics. A dark knowledge that something is wrong, something is corrupt, it seeps through the cracks, between the lols and the puns and the (yes) heartfelt moments of realness and the (yes) politically and personally important revelations. Eventually, for me, that dark knowledge became too clear, and it was too heartbreaking to spend any more time in those feeds.
This is not a novel take.
In fact, it turns out nothing I say is particularly novel. I am not having thoughts that others have not had. I am not making music that no one else is making.
Yes, we are all unique snowflakes but we are all just snowflakes. We are all treading common ground experientially and intellectually, and this is actually a good thing to reckon with. It doesn’t diminish the wonder of our individual experience of life to acknowledge that our lives are all on some level the “same shit, different smell” - this knowledge actually can liberate us, and reinforce for us the need to genuinely connect and intertwine and act in communion and empathy with each other. This actually-mostly-the-same-ness of our existence is indeed, the human experience.
But we all so desperate to individuate, to distinguish ourselves from one another, and to say so much all the damn time, in our shared pics, in our comments, in our DMs. To exist as ‘an artist’ aka artisté in this context, in the modern context, is a particularly dangerous and psychologically precarious act.
A good friend once told me “Tim, I think you are the kind of person who likes to test the limits of their influence.” Whether it was intended or not, it stayed with me as a reflection on how ego inevitably drives at least part of my desire for self-expression.
So - I want to unblock. I want to connect. I say I want to do good in the world, I say I want to open dialogue - these things are true but also it’s because I want to feel better about myself that I do these things. Multiple things can be true at the same time. But always, there I am - I, I, I, me me me.
The reality for me is that I came to terms a while back with the fact that the act of Making Stuff (a song, an idea, an email) is, if not a selfish pursuit, indisputably a “self”-ish pursuit. Creating and communicating, these acts help me centre my self, and help me define my self. In this way, I have found these things to be largely a very healthy "self"-ish pursuit. But I also yearn for connection, and that gets poured into the mix and becomes blended in with the process. I like having my thoughts and creations out in the world. The dopamine hit of hearing someone say something nice about my work is.. nice. But on the occasions where I feel like something I've made or contributed to as made a real difference to someone - big or small - when that feels real, it gives me a sense of purpose. More than dopamine.
We have a need to express our selves and then to see our values and interests reflected back in others - this is surely an evolutionary need that goes back to the earliest days of humans gathering in small groups and working together to find common cause. Self-expression, and then the community translation and transmutation of those self-expressions in small groups, is the magic glue that allows us to work together, ideate together, love together. Language, ideas, art, music, all exist to facilitate the process of connection between humans so that we can not be killed by predators and so that we can find food to eat. Those same close community entanglements are what help drive the activism and change in the world now where our immediate challenges are different but no less urgent.
We compulsively share ourselves online in part because we live in a time that has deprioritised the importance of one-on-one and small group connection. Modern life deprioritises the familial, village-level connections that we actually need in order to feel valued, feel loved.
The irony of saying this in an email addressed to 7,800 people is not lost on me.
But honestly - speaking as someone who loves to write, loves to talk about ideas, loves to feel like they are opening conversations or possibly opening up lines of inquiry and meaning in someone else’s brain - words have that power, music has that power - I have found myself paralysed recently.
Here’s where it gets nerdy and in a word: lame.
I made a Google Form for you to fill out.
I know I know. Let’s just glide past how embarassing this all is ok? But if you are “a fan” or “a friend” - or just curious - I would love you to take five minutes out and answer some simple questions.
Why though? Whyyyy Tim. Well, I guess … I’m done with screaming into the void. Writing is cathartic, and fun, but life is short and I want to make a difference. I need to know that emails like this are actually landing with real humans on the other end.
The form contains a short series of questions where I ask you what you want from this newsletter. If no one answers it, I never send an email like this again. If you do answer it - even, like, just ten of you - then I’ll understand better what to do next.
I’m also proposing to make this personal. There are 7,800 subscribers on this list, the majority of whom are fans of the Duet soundtrack on Bandcamp (hi - I promise some very good news re: Duet this year, by the way). I feel that 7,800 number may decline immediately after I hit send on this. That is fine with me. Let’s have better conversations in smaller groups. Incidentally, that’s also what we are doing on the Spirit Level Discord server.
Here’s the link to the Google Form again.
Talk soon - or not!
Tim