Luminous Stones and perseverance of mistakes
- Steam Pink Collection
- Apr 27
- 3 min read
I believe that making music is the way I can communicate to the world what I can't with words, either written or spoken. It makes me go to a place of relaxation, non threatening, but also of huge concentration. I hear people say that music making is a flow, an organic process, that it just oozes out of their hands and voices. It’s not like that for me.
Maybe for more talented and experienced musicians, but for me making music is quite hard. Fun, enjoyable for sure; full of feeling and emotions obviously; fulfilling to the maximum. But it does not come easy, not for me.
It is a matter of focus, trial, error, and minutia.
I am, and I like being, a perfectionist. And being a perfectionist means that even a first attempt should not be just an attempt, they need to be usable pieces of work.
The process of writing and recording for me is very connected, even hard to differentiate at times. Since I am the sole writer and composer, whenever I feel that a riff works or sounds interesting, I go from writing to recording, and then even to mixing and adding layers and instruments, to finishing a song. It has a structural behaviour, an inner rule and regulation, a constraint somehow. I wanted to try something new.
With an open mind, no structure, and outside of my normal guitar-driven, metal music making environment, I jumped head first into a new project. That is the beginning of Luminous Stones.
Not quite, however. The actual start of this project is two-fold. First is inspiration; second is occasion.
Inspiration is something hard to explain. It comes and goes, it doesn't necessarily stick and stays put. What inspires floats about and you, the artist, needs to grab it and squeeze it. For me, when making music, inspiration does not come from music most of the time. It can come from a memoir, a piece of art, a sound, and sometimes silence itself.
At the time, music I was listening to, mainly metal and guitar-fronted, instrumental music, was putting out quite interesting, and somehow strange music. There was much controversy on the new Animals as Leaders, Tesseract, and Intervals. Hip hop, pop, electronic, lo-fi was making its ways into music, aesthetic, and the feel of genre music. 90s and 80s tastes really found in the niche metal corners a home to create much music.
And for me, what got into the music I was writing and listening to, was Kimbra. Her outputs were so extensive and expansive, that it was quite hard to put her sound into a single genre.
From seeing the music I enjoyed being taken by so many outside influences, and seeing them creating such interesting and new new music, my own horizon expanded, and pushed me to also try my hands into this mix of flavours and spices.
And then comes the occasion. Having much time in my hands in the summer of 2018, being in between just submitting my PhD dissertation and being about to start a new job in a month, there was no better moment to dive into music making, without compromise, without time constraints, or expectation.
For the big part of three full days in July, I’ve put all of myself into the music I managed to find inside of my creative brain. From start to finish, from cover art to final mixing and mastering, the Aesthetic Perseverance of Mistakes is one of my most visceral and truthful pieces of music, and one that exemplifies how effort and inspiration do walk together and that not one or the other can make art by itself.
Listen to Aesthetic Perseverance of Mistakes on Bandcamp, and order the Deluxe edition on vinyl here.
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