IdleRich
IdleRich
I went round my friend Pedro's house to make a tune. He has loads of equipment making one room of their house into a studio bristling with synths and fx boxes and so on, all plugged into some version of Ableton.
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Thing is, I had a bit of a feeling that he's too much of a perfectionist, one of those guys who spends three days getting the hi-hat sound in the fade out exactly right while forgetting to make the tune any good.
But I've started to wonder if he just has an actual fear of success. He's often told me that when he was young he used to play with these guys who are now big names, he claimed he just got bored of the straight up techno that they were doing and chose to walk away from a life of fame, drugs, money and adulation because he refused to make music he didn't believe in. I'd always taken that with a pinch of salt, but the other day he showed me all these videos of his mates playing to enormous crowds and messages from them saying "Pedro you twat, come back and play with us and make some money" so who knows...
He says he gave up on techno when someone asked him to make them an EP and he experimented by just turning on a basic four four beat and then spending five mins adding a few shitty noises and some half-arsed fx etc on top. He sent it back to the guy who had asked for it and, not really much to his surprise at all, he got a response saying "Sick! Amazing choons man!" and that was the final straw for him. In other words people were seemingly impressed by him just doing the most basic four-four tune with no effort or originality and he took that as confirmation that the whole scene was tasteless idiots spinning bland nonsense to morons who would never notice how rubbish it was. Anyway, I've no idea about when that was supposed to have happened, or how reasonable his conclusions were...
... however, I do know that recently (last couple of months) he made a album with this guy here in Lisbon and a DJ from NY was keen to release it. Do people know this bloke Curses? I dunno if he is well known but he's a DJ who put out some pretty cool synth/dark techno comps and I guess he puts out new stuff too on his own label. Liza has a comp he put out with about forty tracks on it, and I'd say that it's a good comp in that it has a load of stuff in a genre that is pretty well dug over, and yet he's found forty tracks that are unknown and good. So the fact that he wanted to release the stuff that Tadas and Pedro were working on was pretty exciting. And they worked hard on it and completed the record, and they gave it to Curses and he said "Cool this is just what I wanted, I'm definitely gonna put this out" and then suddenly at the last minute Pedro said "Ah, you know what, I'm not happy with this" and he just blocked the release.
It seems to me that there is a definite pattern going on here, of almost self-hindrance . I just don't get why he wouldn't put this record out with Curses, like even if he wasn't totally happy it would still be a sort of marker of an achievement and something to remind him of where he was and what he was doing at a certain time. He could also compare later releases to it and see if he had improved. The work was done, the record was ready to go... why not just put it out? I guess he would have got some money too. I just don't get it at all... I'm also surprised that Tadas wasn't more annoyed with him as well what with being the other half of the band. But is it just me? Does that make any sense to any of you?
As well as that Pedro makes a load of songs for himself, he said that he often makes a new track for every DJ gig he plays... and so you'd think he should have a library of unreleased floor-burners, and at least some of them ought to be pretty good right? Except he deletes them all after he's played them. And that makes me really wonder if he's afraid of having a permanent record of anything he's done.
View attachment 17096
Thing is, I had a bit of a feeling that he's too much of a perfectionist, one of those guys who spends three days getting the hi-hat sound in the fade out exactly right while forgetting to make the tune any good.
But I've started to wonder if he just has an actual fear of success. He's often told me that when he was young he used to play with these guys who are now big names, he claimed he just got bored of the straight up techno that they were doing and chose to walk away from a life of fame, drugs, money and adulation because he refused to make music he didn't believe in. I'd always taken that with a pinch of salt, but the other day he showed me all these videos of his mates playing to enormous crowds and messages from them saying "Pedro you twat, come back and play with us and make some money" so who knows...
He says he gave up on techno when someone asked him to make them an EP and he experimented by just turning on a basic four four beat and then spending five mins adding a few shitty noises and some half-arsed fx etc on top. He sent it back to the guy who had asked for it and, not really much to his surprise at all, he got a response saying "Sick! Amazing choons man!" and that was the final straw for him. In other words people were seemingly impressed by him just doing the most basic four-four tune with no effort or originality and he took that as confirmation that the whole scene was tasteless idiots spinning bland nonsense to morons who would never notice how rubbish it was. Anyway, I've no idea about when that was supposed to have happened, or how reasonable his conclusions were...
... however, I do know that recently (last couple of months) he made a album with this guy here in Lisbon and a DJ from NY was keen to release it. Do people know this bloke Curses? I dunno if he is well known but he's a DJ who put out some pretty cool synth/dark techno comps and I guess he puts out new stuff too on his own label. Liza has a comp he put out with about forty tracks on it, and I'd say that it's a good comp in that it has a load of stuff in a genre that is pretty well dug over, and yet he's found forty tracks that are unknown and good. So the fact that he wanted to release the stuff that Tadas and Pedro were working on was pretty exciting. And they worked hard on it and completed the record, and they gave it to Curses and he said "Cool this is just what I wanted, I'm definitely gonna put this out" and then suddenly at the last minute Pedro said "Ah, you know what, I'm not happy with this" and he just blocked the release.
It seems to me that there is a definite pattern going on here, of almost self-hindrance . I just don't get why he wouldn't put this record out with Curses, like even if he wasn't totally happy it would still be a sort of marker of an achievement and something to remind him of where he was and what he was doing at a certain time. He could also compare later releases to it and see if he had improved. The work was done, the record was ready to go... why not just put it out? I guess he would have got some money too. I just don't get it at all... I'm also surprised that Tadas wasn't more annoyed with him as well what with being the other half of the band. But is it just me? Does that make any sense to any of you?
As well as that Pedro makes a load of songs for himself, he said that he often makes a new track for every DJ gig he plays... and so you'd think he should have a library of unreleased floor-burners, and at least some of them ought to be pretty good right? Except he deletes them all after he's played them. And that makes me really wonder if he's afraid of having a permanent record of anything he's done.