Branching Aliases in Music
It's been a while since I've changed my alias to miwafoxl. My general predictions about that change were mostly correct: I feel way more freedom creating art for this alias in specific, it means more to me. I settled from the beginning that it's gonna be about me, in contrast to my previous (SPACE FOX) that wasn't much about me, being more like a showoff than anything. One can say that this was a phase of my life, which I may agree because even my older self would possibly disagree with this phase based on how I produced music back in the day.
Suddenly I can do anything that I like without being pressed about being popular or caring about streams, poor inherited advice from my older brother that also makes music, which badly haunted my teenager brain for good years. Conveniently, my music taste grew mature over those past few years, even before that change. This whole change in fact was a response to how my perception of music changed. I was so wrong before, everything felt as a competitive field crap, which is sad at best.
With such freedom, came new problems. Those problems were.. expected ... and it can be summarized into a little question: "So, what do I do?". It's kinda how you feel when you wanna draw something, but in your sight there's nothing but a plain, clean and pristine white canvas. The existential thoughts started coming in: "What I am actually looking forward to do?" "What do I like?" There is so many options, directions, paths I can do, but I somehow have to choose one of them? It's so easy to get overwhelmed, lost, unmotivated, maybe tense. For clarification, I can do music and I have no problems starting new music, it's just that becomes hard to pick a "sound" that I like. I often oscillate between genres, ones sounding more modern than the others, more moody than the others, and so on.
Why wouldn't I just stay that way? Is there a problem with that? No, that works, but it feels inconvenient; My objective was to be inconsistent the whole time, creating anything that I personally enjoy... like "fuck it imma do this"... one after the other... even if they have the exact opposite approaches (which happened btw)... Yeah, reading this previous phrase already gives an idea. I could certainly build a little fandom that enjoys this 'not so fleshed out' form of unpredictability; first of all that would be so cool but.. it just weird to me. Not only it feels unnecessary, but it also feels like I'm being inconvenient with the person who invested their time into listening my music by slapping some weird song that I'm not 100% proud of, followed by another that I'm really proud of. I mean, that wouldn't change but, at least the person would know. Maybe I care too much?
Maybe I do, I don't know. Perhaps I'm an accidental artist, where everything that I got out was an accident outta experimentation, excluding sound design experimentation. For example, Felix and Fireheart are "EPs" with seemingly unrelated tracks, which realistically qualifies more as a compilation. The tracks do kinda sound cool on their own, but they just sound really nothing like what I did before, they're are unrelated to each other and I unified them only because they were the only tracks I finished at the time. My best guess is: I developed a mental model that pushes me to always try new things and because of my insistence in this, I didn't developed a sense of "unnewness" (?) between tracks. I don't know. Since I don't have a more scoped vision, this causes me to be overwhelmed. You see, while I'm still alive, there always gonna have infinite amounts of new things for me to try out no matter what. Clearly, this isn't the right mindset in the long-term, it feels too ambiguous, too vague and unpredictable, somewhat devoid of personality.
What I think is a good idea is to branch into many aliases similar to the solution Vektroid / Lapfox / Chuck Person found years ago. It's nothing new, it can be pretty fun if you make it convenient to actually find those and it feels like it can offer great flexibility. I can define a vision for my aliases without going through an existential crisis. If I ever want to try something different, I can just branch out to new alias with that specific vision and keep this going until I hit the hard-limit of my creativity, isn't that great? Well, I'm still figuring out, predicting the long-term effects it may have in my workflow because... Well, it's hard to keep up one alias, imagine many of them - although, not that I'm thinking about it, the cadence of releases may improve because I technically can release more stuff.
It's sorta fun to think this as a tree, where the main stem is your main alias and there would be many branches, even branches within branches that composes what you remember as a tree, that tree being one instance/entity of itself. There could be many trees out there in the wild, but just one belongs to you and represents you.
I'll think more about that. Thank you for reading.
No. 1: Triple The Trouble and new alias
No. 2: Branching Aliases in Music
No. 3: A box I can fit into