I’ve been thinking about this question for much of the last year. I was drawn to web3 because it reminded me of the blog era I came up in - independent curation, direct artist-to-listener interactions, and an emphasis on the music itself above story and brand. But as technology increasingly became the leading story in music NFTs I struggled to think of concrete ways I could do my part to refocus things.

About a month ago I was up late browsing Sound.xyz when I came across ‘i close my eyes but only for a moment’ by bloody white and stopped in my tracks. The choices he was making opened new musical doors in my brain - I felt so inspired to make something. Something directly in response to what he had made. I texted bloody that night and proposed we conduct an experiment.

THE EXPERIMENT

Today my song “DIALOGUE.02 - i should” drops on Sound.xyz.

I made this song directly in response to the first song in our DIALOGUE series, “DIALOGUE.01 - i”, released by bloody last week.

I sampled the opening three vocal notes from “i” and built a beautiful texture around them - then because there was a thrilling switch-up halfway through “i”, I decided to mirror that with a similar switch-up in my arrangement. I was so inspired by the freedom of having these drastic changes every 30 seconds that I decided to end my song with one more crazy moment. You’ll have to listen to it to find out exactly what that is.

After “DIALOGUE.02 - i should” is minted, it’s bloody’s turn. He’ll make something directly in response, sampling parts of “i should” in the process. And then I’ll make something in response to that response. We’ll keep going until we have six total songs.

1 song each week.

Each song made in real-time, in dialogue with the song that came before it.

This is DIALOGUE.

BACKSTORY

If you don’t know Bloody White, I’m not sure where you’ve been. A Sound.xyz fixture, he’s a producer who makes some of the most interesting and intricate electronic music onchain. As we got to know each other this past year, we connected over our difficulty reconciling the need for self-promotion in the music industry with our decidedly non-self-promotional personalities. We're both producers that love focusing on the music. So for this release, the concept is the music. The way it is made, the way it is released. 

The current advice in the music industry is to space out your singles by 4-6 weeks if you want the Spotify algorithm to smile upon you. This feels so disjointed from the process of making music. As a producer I’m working on something new every week that I’m so excited to show people. For my CACOPHONY rollout with Reo Cragun, we dropped every song from the project in tracklist order on Sound.xyz over the course of 2 months.  I loved celebrating every track on the project, and with DIALOGUE I hope to take that even further. The weekly rollout will be the creative process itself.

It has been kind of crazy planning a six-week rollout without knowing what any of the songs will sound like. As I write this, I have no clue how bloody will respond to DIALOGUE.02, and how I’ll respond to that! But I can’t wait to keep making music for this specific purpose. I won’t be thinking about making sure it has a catchy hook or gets to the chorus fast enough. I’ll just be trying to make the coolest shit I can to inspire bloody. And we’ll all see what it sounds like this time next week, and the week after, and the week after.** **

In April of 2020 my hands started hurting. It was terrifying. I had built a career making music - my band Marian Hill had grown from an up and comer on the Hype Machine charts to a platinum-selling major label act, all the while making my wildest dreams come true: I was making a living making music I loved. But to keep doing this, to keep living my dream…I needed my hands.

The following several months were the worst of my life. It was the early pandemic and I could only see doctors remotely, and they all advised the same thing - rest, wait, it should feel better. Resting meant I couldn’t make music…without it in my life, I fell into a deep depression. I would sit around bored and hurting, vowing that if I could ever get back to a place when I could make music again I would never take it for granted.

Eight months of physical therapy, doctor visits and endless patience later I was able to start making music again. It still often hurt to do so, but I have never appreciated more how much making things is my lifeblood. Without it I’m a shell, and with it I’m me. During the following months I made three albums. One with Marian Hill, one with Reo Cragun, and one of my own under the name Clear eyes. I was overflowing with ideas after being shut down for so long, and it felt so good to finally get so many of them out into the world.

ENTER WEB3

Way back in 2013, I put together a spreadsheet of 60 Hype Machine blogs and emailed them all the first Marian Hill song…in recent years I have missed that flow so much. Those independent curators gave me a career in music, but in the following years I watched their power fade away as streaming companies took over. When I started hearing about Music NFTs, I was filled with a hope that this could be the paradigm shift I’d been waiting for, a return to an ecosystem of many empowered curators.

I think the first Music NFT I really stopped and took note of was RAC’s $TAPE drop… after that I started asking questions and learning more, from early adopters like Verite and CoopahTroopah and Michail at Zora…I joined FWB and before I knew it, I was minting music NFTs.

I was one of the first artists to mint on Catalog and I will never forget the experience…Jeremy Stern reached out to me soon after I applied and after talking with him I was so excited about their vision. I chose a beat that I had made, that I loved…a beat that didn’t have a place in the streaming ecosystem as I saw it. Earning money for that beat was one thing, but having it be appreciated and heard by a unique collector was even more special. I continued to drop occasionally on Catalog over the following months, always choosing songs that felt like they didn’t fit anywhere else. I loved that there was now a place for them.

I was then lucky enough to run into David Greenstein in a Discord channel and started talking to him about the future…a few months later he called to tell me about Sound.xyz. Marian Hill premiered a new song as one of their first drops and the listening party in the twitter spaces was the first listening party I’d been a part of in years and years. All I ever want is to play my music for people who want to hear it and somehow that part of the industry had been buried…Sound resurrected it.

Since then I’ve also had thrilling experiences on other platforms like Arpeggi, Glass.xyz and Foundation. I’ve found more visual artists in a year than I did in years combing instagram. I loved this new future…but I had yet to make it my own.

BUILDING ON MY OWN

As I spent more and more time in the NFT space I started to think more and more about what my own project might look like…it was overwhelming at first to conceive of, with so many possibilities and variables to consider. The idea of “utility” stressed me out…I wanted the music itself to have value and not be dependent on other factors. So it occurred to me…what if music was the utility?

I make so much music. As we covered earlier, I need to, or I will quite literally lose my mind. But only 5 or 10% of this music is ever actually heard by anyone outside my immediate circle of friends. I longed for a way to share more of it with more people, without putting pressure on all of it to “succeed”. And finally I arrived on the idea of the Dreaming of Flying collection, and the utility of the CLOUDS series.

Every holder of every Clear eyes NFT has access to the CLOUDS series, a free monthly grab-bag of some of my favorite unreleased songs. CLOUD 1 is currently live on my website, and very soon I will be replacing it with CLOUD 2. I want anyone who wants to hear this music to have access, so I built a 200 piece collection of gorgeous images from my album’s visualizers on my own contract, all made in collaboration with artist Anna Chandler. All of these come with access to the CLOUDS series, and also certify you as a member of the Dreaming of Flying community.

I’m in no rush to sell these out. I’m searching for people who are here for the music, who want to be part of building this world with me, and I believe that these people will continue to find me over time. Maybe you are even one of them.

I’m proud of what I’ve built so far in this community, and I’m excited for the road ahead. I feel so very lucky to be in a position to make music and share it with you all. It means absolutely everything to me.

https://drop.dreamingofflying.xyz