Music in the making Music in the making

Piecing it back together, by relying on notes from the process. Here’s one:

1:

Re-enact important parts

recognize progress

show pleasures you allow yourself in the practice

finish something

2:

use everyday sounds

resemble the world

use a protagonist

make a point

**

“What have I done?”

In my ongoing creative process, assembling fragments—sounds, words, ideas—offers a path to new artistic territory. It’s not about crafting a seamless whole from the start but gathering what’s at hand and letting it take shape. I’ve written somewhere in a note that creativity often means heading into darkness, piecing together bits without knowing the endpoint (#70). This isn’t a linear puzzle with a fixed solution; it’s a method where the act of combining parts reveals something unexpected. A lyric scribbled late at night, a rhythm tapped out in the studio, a stray thought—they don’t arrive as a plan but as fragments I stitch together, each collision sparking a facet I couldn’t predict.

This approach thrives on constraints. I’ve noted how boundaries, even silly ones like fitting instruments on a tabletop, funnel ideas into focus. Assemblage here isn’t random; it’s deliberate piecing within limits—vocals layered over a percussive pulse, a cut-up text reshuffled into song (#74). The result isn’t polished perfection but a living item, born from tension.

I’ve found that narrowing down—stripping an instrument to its essence or splicing lyrics with noise—forces new outlets, not less creation (#85). It’s like building with broken stones: the cracks dictate the form, and the form becomes something.

This method avoids predictable.

I’ve mused over the notion that standard forms can (and should) be tweaked—skipping rests, jumping ahead—to break free, but I’ve never wanted to break the form completely (#140).

Piecing fragments together in this way keeps the work fluid and open to surprise. It’s not about good or bad; it’s about what emerges when parts meet—wether a soundscape from everyday clatter or a story from scattered words (#109). Each assembly is a gamble, a trust that meaning lies in the overlap, not the blueprint. By gathering what floats by and letting it melt together, I uncover artistic facets that feel alive, unscripted, and mine.

From note #15

Someone makes the tool

Someone makes practical items with the tool as it was intended

Someone has fun with the tool, and this sometimes leads to unexpected places

From note #5

Gear and the rabbit hole of new gear is a continuing source of inspiration and a key element in the search for new music and outputs.

The difference between coding yourself and buying a new box is that the modularity of features, happenings and output becomes greater, and less predefined, for good or worse.

In my situation, it was the next logical step, because I've never liked to press play on a drum machine, or start up a sequencer, and sit back and relate to it as an instrument that has its own value.

Coding the Fibosine, however, is different, because I'm part of the curating all the way through, there is not a nice sound + an unused sequencer in this, there is not a new algorithm + some feature I don't understand. It's a composition, really, and in that sense it's the endgame of hunting for gear. It will take a lot for me to buy new stuff now.

**

At this state, I build tools—mostly Python scripts—to break free from borrowed frames, GUIs and functions of design from others.

Coding my own stuff cuts through that. It’s not about pressing play on their machine; it’s piecing my fragments—loops, logic, need—into something I can control.

Constraints still apply: there has to be a task to solve, a boundary of some kind. But within that, I assemble freely—no sequencer I don’t grasp, no feature I didn’t shape. The script is loaded with my intent only.

Drift Engine // coding as artistic practice & connected issues

• You can’t build real software without being precise about what you want. Every successful programming tool in history reflects this truth. AI briefly fooled us into thinking we could just chat our way to working softw0are.

https://danieldelaney.net/chat/

Why is this text here?

It’s important to note that figuring things out through practice isn’t limited to artistic research; even in environments that seem logically structured from the outset, some challenges are better addressed through a practice-based approach—hands-on ‘doing’—rather than relying solely on automated services and theory.

I am still piecing my practice together, but I am more sure that I will be able to do so than I was 6 months ago. It’s not really significant to the research process as such, but I mention it because the reason for being more certain now comes from acknowledging the fact that information does not disappear, and the realization that leaving out, holding back, as often noted by Karl Seglem, a long time collaborator and friend of mine, do not mean abandoning prior ideas or stopping to do something.

What it means is that the artistic practice, and the visible results from such a practice, is a palimpsest structure, where all prior knowledge is visible in new creations. It’s there, even though it’s not there. It gives shape, even if it has been removed. In a way it allows for interplay with a historic, or archival, self, either when composing, or when performing.