This post was initially conceived on my Mirror weblog in July 2022. It can be collected as an edition of 1 for 1 ETH on Optimism.
0x-GM.
Dear reader,
Forgive me for I have been surfing that fame endemic solely to Juried Protocol Galleries’ beta curators for the last 24 hours thanks to that interview (special thanks to William Matthew Peaster, and the expanded field of unconditional particle acceleration camaraderie at JPG [pronounced jpeg]).
Hence, I have totally not been able to follow my writing diet, and missed the 5th sense… sorry, day of my own private PLAYLIST (and, 6th, 7th & 8th).
Lastly, we have covered Holly+ & Deafbeef on the 4th installment, & mumblecored why and how art that incorporates sound into that well loved body of a single entity that we also happen to call art can be considered within the limitations of that vertical asset class Music NFTs.
Meme me, Amadeus!
As I delve deeper in the nature that which musicians, creatives, developers, and influencer-investors call out to when they utter, or type, Music NFTs; I have really started to appreciate that cultural evolution happening on the main street—personally as an audiophile who used to hand-tag my own FLACs and utilized Rapidshare and the like as a portable cassette player back in the day.
I say “mainstreet” in that there have been NFTs that focused on the sound aspects of the overall composition somehow, and they are more of the nerd street (later on this in another piece).
Delirious EVM
If Manhattan is still in search of a theory, then this theory, once identified, should yield a formula for an architecture that is at once ambitious and popular.
Manhattan has generated a shameless architecture that has been loved in direct proportion to its defiant lack of self-hatred, respected exactly to the degree that it went too far.
Manhattan has consistently inspired in its beholders ecstasy about architecture.
In spite — or perhaps because — of this, its performance and implications have been consistently ignored and even suppressed by the architectural profession.
delirious new york (1978[1994]), Rem Koolhaas
Above block-quote is off Koolhaas’ ‘78 book in which he attempts at procuring a theory for Manhattan. A theory of Manhattan is strictly, in his writing, tied to an “exploitation of congestion.”
Those who have fared well on the spicy sandboxes of Layer 1, or the mainnet, Ethereum is well acquainted with that which is abstracted into words as in the above quote.
An ecstasy about the architecture of the state machine, Ethereum thereof if I might offer, is network agnostic as far as have witnessed regardless of all the pros and cons on this plane of that genuine gnosticism which some layman call maximalism.
TradArch in this instance have learnt to appreciate such per block time based architecture in that all asset classes can be a vertical during the primordial soup phase of such new evolutionary market funnels, and infrastructures thereof.
…and, there is nothing wrong to call a market a market when all that which our species have been trying to do is to provide practical solutions to local knowledge problems so that we can beat entropy happily ever after.
Music as an asset that can navigate markets and non-market environments at the same time is going to set the standards for UI on the crypto-cultural UX environ for a couple of years to come, IMHO.
I know that people have been playing with the on-chain implications of scaled musical products for a couple of years now; and before music NFTs we had streaming services partially tethered to on- & off-chain blockchain related planes of infrastructure that were partly gated through ERC20s or their equivalents on non-EVM competitors.
It all feels good.
Here, one needs to pay respect to all those musicians who were minting art coming with locked audio files, or direct audio files—where supported—before all this frenetic influx of musical creatives unto the chain.
Any Piece of Contract (2022)
As you turn the 38th page in Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice (2005), a relieving header welcomes you: “Any Piece of Music (1980).” She notes,
Everyone answers the following questions in as many ways as possible:
1) If you could write any piece of music, what would you write? Assume that no kind of restraint exists, i.e. time, money, existence of resources or technology etc.
2) How would you achieve it?
The “solution” to such questions is of infinite scales even when the media that is home to that music faces scalability problems—at least, in our not so technologically advanced day.
For people like me who knows no limitations—yes, I like to boast that my only limitation is this wetware we call the body, when it comes to emergent technologies that render existent music, and sound art, & their societal tools (in any part of the [both abstract and tangible] supply chain), the only problematic for which I can care is block size, and the longevity of the these digital objects that we can deem as music NFTs, or maybe simply music when people have understood what an abstract gadget that is more abstract than a single .mp3 is—deploying a Hudsucker Proxiness here: You know for music like ye’s DONDA but as a smart contract but simply as music you can in actual toy with. I assume that Spores DAO is kind of helping us kids do that in the remixocene parts of teh KONTRAKT.
What do you call music when the smart contract is both the DAW, the music, the remix, the file, the player, and the album/ single itself—redeemable through the nearest dAppresso around the hood as a custom design vinyl.
…& what if that smart contract were to given a controlled or totally autonomous sentience over itself?
Apparently, music NFTs are just more than a mere meme (Coopah emits a grin for the next 333 blocks here).
Jokes aside, you do not need a person such as myself to type some words for the seriousness of what I have tried to articulate above. There are really well structured DAOs such as Water & Music who provide all the analysis anyone in the sector needs.
Well, achieving music is no problematic—at least for some. But, returning to Oliveros, and echo her second Q: How are we going to make sure that media that is right now available on a cross- and multi-chain constellation, and their on- & off-chain storage spaces will be surviving the next Cylon attack from the within or without? Are the Nordic Vaults of blockchain ecosystems, when it comes to data storage and preservation, are so robust in all aspects that they have off-planet beacons for mirrors? I do wonder.
These are the words of compression towards a spatialization of the idea and ontology of sound into a smart-contract born world of tomorrow. As Koolhaas rejoices in the ecstasy about Manhattan’s architecture in one way or another, I think that musicians and sound artists who work with smart contracts need also reflect upon the architecture thereof within the EVM plane—so that, whilst we can focus on how the achieve the on-music in its perfect simplicity of flow, we shall also be able to create that abstract spatiality that is scalable.
The ownership economy indicates sets of asset classes, and information flow tethered to maintained data and infrastructure; hence, it is not a sin to talk about music non-fungibles as an asset class.
…whereby we come to critique yesterday and today’s tracks on this rugged cassette player of ours. After all, if Ethereum mempool is a dark forest, so is the sense of community through it. One needs to be better at bushcraft of smart contracts so that communities won’t rug either themselves, or individuals.
Billy Bultheel — Songs for the Contract #001
I encountered Bultheel’s audio-visual, and utterly spatial, music performance nonfungibles whilst I was digging across the marketplaces with the stern dedication of the cast-out astronaut in Factorio. Songs for the Contract was deployed under Folia, a Bin Berlin project that deploys (personally speaking) very intriguing works that play with the primitives of smart contracts and the media tethered thereabouts—just as the way net dot art primitives, and early conceptual artists played with whatever media available by any media available.
As Rhea Myers notes in her introduction to her own “IsArt” contract, “[l]ate 1960s Conceptual Art and mid 1990s net [dot] art are useful inspiration for thinking about the blockchain and smart contracts;” some audio-visual works such as Bultheel’s (where visual refers to the conveyance of the sense of space with immersive video tech) are proto-”music-NFTs” in the memetic sense of the terms that helps you think about what should not be omitted from the bushcraft multi-tool sheath of the smart music contract dev during this transition towards a mainstream adoption.
…or, maybe it is all irrelevant and I like this Songs for the Smart Contract just because of the personal fact that it reminds me of nights during high school where I used to listen to Jazz Mix session on Mezzo TV at 02:00 a.m. in the morning in a small Aegean town where almost everything is organic—even the sense of isolated ruggery.
ENTER.
This piece is truly sitting in a smart contract. Verbose music nerd critique of the entire album with regard to soundscapes that it offers is the subject of another piece, please.
https://www.folia.app/works/10/10000001
EulerBeats—Genesis LP #01
I vividly recall the day EulerBeats released. I also recall that I murmured to myself that maybe I should “print” one of these for less than an ether. A couple of days in and Cuban decides to cause the Genesis LP #01 to pump up to 50 ethers at one point. The logic was logical:
You decided to “print” (mint) one of these originals, and to which there could be Januses such as Enigma. The Euler Record. Rare af. Math frozen unto the chain that can liquidate itself thanks to any collector. Xenakis would be proud. It is mathematical, and generative. Art for art’s sake. The original music NFT.
Euler Record has two sides, both of which, Genesis and Enigma, have 27 originals, of which there could be derivatives as in print on-demand, which should differ in art, sound, and the bonding curve.
Few recall but the bonding curve ruled the pitch almost a year ago. Then, speculative realism of the greed of those who blamed others for greed brought forth a change of plans—there are still OG projects from those days that awaits to be fully minted out before they become of historicoool NFTs.
Anyway, if there weren’t any cover art, or that Euler signs within the record itself with its ERC1155 architecture, one could easily have asserted that it is just another batch of Aphex Twin SoundCloud dumps.
The good thing Euler is that you can in actual burn the print to redeem %90 percent of your initial collateral—so that you can feel the loss, or print another one. Do the math. They were, and still, is, for me, one of the most exciting on-chain musical projects till and through the emergence of the likes of DeafBeef.
https://eulerbeats.com/genesis/21575894274
GM.
