( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) Sounding Good & Competing with Everyone in Existence for your attention ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
If anyone ever wanted to see me play live, now's your chance....
Live from Tokyo, it's my most recent show or the first 15 minutes to be exact.
Ironically in 2025, it feels 100x easier to get 10 people to show up to my concert than it is to get a single person to watch a 15 minute live video of someone they aren't obsessed with.
To be fair, you are literally competing with everything in existence for every single person's attention. There's all the other music in all of existence, both recorded albums, and live performances....not to mention every movie, every game, every book, everyone speaker, every celebrity, every single individual on social media...and I'm hoping you take 15 minutes out of your day to listen to my strange psychedelic folk.
When I put it like that, it makes perfect sense.
You don't have the same easy access to a live performance by every band in existence so maybe that's why it's not too hard to bring people to the show.
I felt kind of shocked to listen to the recording though. Aside from the major slip up in the beginning when my loop pedal stopped working (twice!) it sounds really solid! I actually love how it sounds.
It's amazing how much good 3 months of seriously drilling scales did for me, not to mention the new sounds I make with electric guitar compared to acoustic which I played for years.
The video kind of masks one weak point though. Tone.
Today I spent a good hour talking to a music producer friend from overseas about tone. His advice was extremely helpful. I seriously feel as if I got a year worth of professional education from a few useful metaphors he gave me.
He explained to me how when you strum the guitar, each string is hit with different intensity and if you pluck too hard or if you don't push the fret with the right pressure, an A can sound closer to an A sharp or an A flat.
This leads the note to be out of tune with the other notes in the chord and makes the instrument sounds muddier which makes it harder to mix with vocals and other instruments.
So when you hear at 7:00 I start the loop, I'm actually making a big mistake that only a well seasoned musician would recognize. I'm playing the guitar a little too hard and creating a sound that will repeat through the entire song, but that sound is muddy.
That causes the guitar to sound a bit more muffled and makes it harder to hear my vocals, which already need some work.
I'm just knit-picking here, but that's what a passionate artist does, that's how you get good enough to get people's attention in a world where everyone is spread paper thin.
Overall, I think this was a great performance though.
I know there are many people who don't understand certain aspects of it. The first 7 minutes are completely improvised. There are no lyrics until the second song at 7:00. Both tracks are 7-8 minutes. And they aren't poppy radio stuff, that's for sure. But if you are down, I encourage you to take a the journey with me into my world, in this wonderful mushroom venue that's become a home base for me over the past few months.
I feel very satisfied with my ability to create guitar solos on the fly and string them together into a cohesive layered melody, and also how I turned this once earthy acoustic song into a layered fractal of light that shoots out into the universe.
At the very least you can get a feel for the man behind the pineapple, and the technical difficulties lead to a hilarious finale near the end.
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I really felt your passion come through in this imperfections and all. The honesty about tone, loops, and the grind of practice makes it so relatable. It’s inspiring to see how much growth you’ve had in just a few months 🎶.
Success comes when we eliminate all our fears and focus fully on our performance. Then, when we focus day and night and keep working hard, there comes a time when we achieve success. I also really liked this performance.
Honestly, this is less ironic to me than to you. The Internet is for art - and especially music - a marketing channel rather than anything else these days. This is the case for live recordings as well as for music productions in any shape or form - EPs, LPs, Albums whatever. I've seen the changes happening since the 90s. I have a few music-producing friends, and I see how their productions are struggling. I tell them for two decades already - yes, this all started to shift a long time ago - the attention (and with that also the money) is in real-life shows, in gigging. The age of mass distribution is over - except for a very few. Music on the internet is: 1) for the fans to follow their favourites, 2) for the promoters and event bookers to determine the business aspects when putting an artist on the lineup, and 3) for the random people seeking new artists to be discovered.
You made your case. I took the 15 minutes. I even decided to put in my ears so I could listen being away from my laptop. Am not much informed on psychedelic folk - especially the 'strange' versions - but I did very much like what I heard 🎶 Perhaps because it is strange 😆 Though to me it doesn't sound strange at all. BTW, I wasn't able to hear the error. Something I notice a lot when attending performances of my favourtite artists. I hear their errors, but rarely notice others in the room to hear them like I do. Anyways, please continue with what you do. Bring as many people to your gigs as possible. They will start following you at some point in time, and they will listen to the music you share on the Internet.
Wowwwow thank you so much, not just for watching but also for the thoughtful reply.
It’s interesting that you saw it so early. When I started playing music I was so anti internet that I hardly noticed how much people had prioritized it over anything physical and I so I didn’t really have that foresight. I came back to society and all I could see was that everyone was on their phones all the time and there seemed to be opportunities on YouTube and Instagram.
Now I realize this stuff only works if you have some kind of gimmick or are so specialized at something that impresses people that few people would swipe away.
I’m quite happy with my 20% retention rate on YouTube considering it sends my stuff to far more people I don’t know than people I do, but that’s not enough to win at the whole social media rat race.
I do it when it’s fun now. After sharing this I realized how rare it would be for me to watch 15 minutes of someone’s show in the environment of Tokyo when I am still trying to build up my music and other work. If I were more established and lived in a place with less stimuli sure, but its hard now.
It made me want to make a kind of music video version/short. That’s fun for me, solving a problem and creatively finding a way to present my work in a new way.
But doing it with any real expectation of it being able to replace physical interactions is pretty naive, right? It’s not impossible and it may even have a simple path to get there but it’s work and it’s not the work I want to be focusing a majority of my energy on.
That being said, getting people to come to a show isn’t easy either here! I think I’m doing ok cause I’m coming out of a 2 year hiatus.
Tokyo is so over saturated. I found Xiamen to be way easier because there was much less going on. Sometimes I think Fukuoka or Kamakura or Kumamoto would be much better for me to build something because I’d have some base of people’s undivided attention but so much of my life is rooted here already.
I will keep looking my for ways to connect to communities outside the city though. f
Also i dont really think of anything about me as strange. Its just that when i don’t know who my audience is (like on hive where random people find my posts too and i have many frienda who arent into the same stuff) I just dont lnow how else to call it to them.
What kind if music do you listen to thse days? I think i remember reading your music selection posts! We defiently talked about music before!
Thanks again!
Internet is a necessary tool for (music) artists to get bookings, that is for sure. But also productions. This, I conclude based on my knowledge in the electronic dance segment, but I suspect it is similar in all other music segments. No productions, no/little presence on Internet, no/little followers, means for most promoters and event/club bookers, too high a business/financial risk. Those receiving higher/highest fees, are those who have a large presence on the Internet. Some promoters still book respected artists with little following on the Internet, but mostly these are the 1st generation in electronic music, those who started back in the 80s/90s. You are right, to get attention on the Internet one needs to be different in one or the other way.
These days, the attention span of the youngsters is super short, hence, super short vids are needed. For a reason even politicians are now testing and increasingly using short vids on platforms like TikTok. YT is much less relevant, I think. Even Snapchat isn't that relevant anymore. TikTok is the platform, so it seems.
With the enormous amount of talent, the higher level of business focus by the venues, clubs, event owners and their promoters, it becomes increasingly difficult to become relevant for music artists. However, every single day new artists are born; I mean, new artists picked up and experience an increase in their bookings. However, it is all relative. When every day lets say 1000 new artists start, perhaps 1 or 2 are picked up.
As it was the case in the past, having a network is important. When a promoter is your 'friend', it is easier to get a gig. IRL connections is key. Attending events is key. When not having a gig, showing up at someone elses gig and chat with the promoters is something I see quite a few artists in electronic music do. My best friend is artists booker and manager. I tell her often enough to go to a club evening, or a festival, when important people are around, even when the music isn't to our liking too much. In such cases, it is simply business. Of course, we will always find our ways to still enjoy wherever we go to :)
Honestly, I don't listen much music at home. But when I do, it is a mixture. For sure I listen to electronic music, mostly more relaxed variants of Techno. Like atmospheric Techno, but also a lot of other Techno substreams. Also ambient, the classic ones from the 70s, but also the modern variants. But I also like to listen to my favourites from back in the days (such as Talk Talk, but also more know bands like Dire Straits or singer like Phil Collins and a bit more modern, like Massive Attack (triphop). In between I listen other genres, including Classic (I mostly like modern classic), some styles of Jazz and such. I even like Louis Armstrong a lot, and Ella Fitzgerald, but am not knowledgable in these genres at all :)
When I go out, it is mainly Techno I like. Though I must admit, these days most of it I don't like, or even dislike. Since Techno became mainstream, it became business for many in the industry. Business means, too much music that is created with business in mind. The artist isn't creating and playing/performing from his/her heart anymore, but doing the things which they think the audience likes and preferably the mass likes. And we all know, the mass usually likes music when it belongs to a genre/style that is hyped or at least the favourite at the moment, and mostly the music itself is quite simple.
This became more a book rather than a comment hahahaha I do hope you find your ways. Networking is important I believe, as I wrote before. I also think for any artist it is important to do the things one likes, but when part of that is the urge to grow bigger, business aspects need to be respected.