2024 → 2025
#A mostly quiet Esem year of 2024, in which I released the Serial Human remaster I meant to do for ages. But I also left Twitter/X, (say hi on Bluesky), and I drastically limited my Instagram screen time (I don't know the right balance between shutting down these unhealthy socials, and having my artist name not really exist.. 'If a tree...' etc).
Perfect Fit Content
Back at the start of the year, I wrote about devaluing art and corporate greed. I'm glad professional media have picked up on this with some evidence to prove it, and there's now some evidence of e.g. Spotify being terrible (the data is ridiculous). Frankly, streaming platforms aren't good. The model is dysfunctional, it's unsustainable and requires injecting unrealistic amounts of energy/resource. Content ID makes things worse.
Slop
I keep thinking about AI. I'm not particularly mystified by it. I use enough LM Studio to have a decent feel for smaller models and what to expect. I also use AI in limited quantities at work (I've seen some good stuff, some useless stuff). I dislike that the UK government wants us to shrug and give corporations boundless access to train their models. It worries me that AI is being used to pump "content" all over platforms, who have no issues filling our feeds with it: Spotify's background listening playlists, Instagram's derivative reels, etc. This is fast going nowhere, but not going away either, and the collateral damage absolutely is / will be the output and livelihood of independent artists. This should need no evidencing, unless you've missed the whole of last year.
Grift Growth
One long-standing nit: Bing continues to refuse to index this site. Whatever it is they don't like in my robots.txt, I'm not sure. Apparently I need more inbound links from high-quality domains (yea, that's how the small internet works). Like all things Microsoft, it's an asymmetrical relationship, and one I'm not sure I can be bothered to maintain, through whatever SEO intel it requires me to invest in. Everything is broken – this is fine.
Books and Music
I've been reading more than before. Mostly fiction, mostly sci-fi: Mountain in the Sea, Termination Shock, Anathem, but also other atmospheric works that have nourished my soul like no online article or lo-fi beat has. I liked a lot of new music: by Arushi Jain, Church Andrews & Matt Davies, The Black Dog, The Cure, Ezra Collective, Svaneborg Kardyb, plus Phexioenesystems, Polypores, Field Lines Cartographer, Skee Mask, the list goes on.
Esem.music
I streamed eight times on Twitch, 14 hours of hardly coherent sound/noise - some of it was OK. None was archived. I've been organising my studio. I'm moving away from Logic Pro, to Bitwig (big DAW change for me after 25 years of using Logic). I'm getting more in the habit of just jamming, like long ago in lockdown times but, you know, in non-lockdown present days. In my mind this is long leading up to recording some new work in 2025. Or later, who knows, this is not an announcement of any kind.
So it's been an OK-ish year, all things considered. Except in politics. Stay away from politics.
Happy next year! 🎄♪♫