I’m pretty sure it’s music, but I’m also pretty sure there’s no genre for that. Either way, it doesn’t seem to obey many conventions of what most would call a “song” or a “track”, aside from a simple looped keyboard part, and yet the “piece” (the fuck else would you call it?) is so much more than that.

The reason for my sudden interest in this stupid question is that after spending over a decade aspiring to produce gurn-inducing, dancefloor drum & bass bangers, with some success, I found myself suddenly and inexplicably bored. I had become bored of the genre itself for various reasons, bored of the “scene”, of rules, formulas, engineering, record labels, club promoters, networking, DJs, you name it. It all seemed fucking boring, bollocks, or both.

The music “industry”.

With all that in mind, I decided it was time to branch out a little bit. I had already decided that I wasn’t sending any music to labels anymore; I had started my own one, so I didn’t have to feel like I was making music to a brief. Alongside that, I decided that I didn’t want to DJ anymore as I was never that into it anyway, and “networking” makes me want to peel my own skin off with a balsamic vinegar Kettle Chip. I wanted to immerse myself in music, without any of the additional crap. That meant looking past engineering, too. I had spent the last few years studiously shoving my head full of technical jargon and honing my skills as a mix engineer so that I could deliver perfectly polished, derivative club jingles with a degree of precision. Luckily those skills are transferable, so I can now use them for more interesting stuff, but I also see them as secondary to the actual creative concept and aesthetic of a piece of music.

Evidently, I had formed a pretty comprehensive list of “things I hate”, but had yet to replace them with the thing I was looking for because I honestly wasn’t sure what it was. I found myself faced with a blank canvas, and an infinite range of possibilities, free from my comfortable and familiar formula for tempo, instrumentation, arrangement, and context. These limitations had been the framework with which I wrote music for all those years. Without them, I found myself creatively lost, with no way to get my bearings; no point of reference from which to approach my journey. It was at this point; this empty little void of choice, that I found myself asking the question: “WTF is music, anyway?”

If you’ve read this far and are still expecting some kind of concrete answer, you might find it more productive to try sexually arousing a eunuch. And, if you can pull that off, maybe this question will seem trivial to someone so gifted.

As Spiderman once said to the Biker Mice from Mars; “With great limitation, comes great creativity”.

I’ve found it to be true that limitations are a necessary prerequisite to creation. How can you deliberately create anything if you don’t know for what purpose you are creating it? I believe this is why genres exist; they provide artists with a framework with which to express themselves. To claim to be free of genre is to claim to have developed a matrix of parameters for music that are entirely your own, and to actually develop a set of such completely original parameters, on your own, without any external input, means that either you’re an egomaniac engaging in a prolonged period of aural masturbation, or your music is crap (most likely both). Even the most avant-garde of IDM chinstroke administrators steal parameters from various sources to provide context for their work; a box from which to think outside.

I’ve identified two clear steps to identify WTF music is, for you. They don’t need to happen in any particular order, and they shouldn’t be set in stone. You might change them after writing an album, or a track, or halfway through a track, or eight times within a twenty-minute-long ambient, lo-fi, drone soundscape, exploring your inner feelings about Brexit. I digress. The two steps are: define your parameters and define your process.

Defining your parameters can be easier said than done. Some people may be comfortable writing a list, whereas some may prefer to experiment with sound design, melodic or rhythmic ideas, mood boards, introspective contemplation or hard drugs before settling on a framework. In fact, any combination of the above might also yield interesting results. Some examples of such parameters might be tempo, key, instrumentation, duration, live/recorded, or ape banjo quintet. By creating this frame of parameters, you have a skeleton from which to hang your meaty music bits.