On drift and saving yourself from what you want.
Hey y’all — did you see this video of Kenneth Blume (producer and musician)? He’s speaking to aspiring beat makers, but it’s easy for any creative person to take something away from it. It’s worth a watch. Here are some quotes.
“This is the new shit in 2026. We’re gatekeeping again.”
“We need to bring the magic back. Being able to figure out how someone made your favorite song in five minutes ruins your favorite song.”
“It doesn’t feel good to just go get a one to one answer. How did they make this song? Boom. Here’s all the info. It ruins it for you. I think you’re better off going and trying to figure some shit out yourself than watching six more tutorials and then using everything in those fucking tutorials and wondering why your beats don’t feel special to you.”
Though his point is framed in a pretty edgy way (“we’re gatekeeping again”), it totally resonates with me.
So many creative resources online — YouTube videos, asking A.I. for advice, etc — are about nailing a particular guitar tone or visual effect. You want to sound like Mk.Gee? Get on Reverb and add these three items to your cart. You want to simulate risograph printing? Check out these Photoshop plugins.
Though they are well intentioned, these resources are introducing an unnecessary level of precision into our creative lives. They’re reducing what was once an exploratory process into a checklist. It is easier than ever to achieve a desired outcome. Set your knobs like this. Pause if you want to take a screenshot.
The problem with all of this is that it robs the creative practice of something I’ll call drift — when an artist sets out to achieve one thing and ends up with something else. It seems to me drift happens for a couple reasons:
You want to do something, but you don’t know how. You try to figure it out on your own, but for whatever reason access to know-how is restricted in some way. So you try to teach yourself in a hands-on, self-directed, and stumble-y way.
Our brains are chaotic, opaque boxes. Whatever “prompt” that goes in is filtered by a million subtle parameters — a book you recently read, the song playing on the radio, the Chicory you noticed on your last walk around the block. Whatever “product” that comes out is changed by these parameters in all kinds of ways.
Drift is powerful because the place you end up is often stranger and more interesting than the place you set out to go. It creates newness — like gene mutation. As viewers or listeners, encountering newness keeps us awake in the world; it’s what keeps our reality fresh and bendable. This feeling of encountering something new is what made Kevin Parker’s drum sound so cool to us.
I feel like this is the core misunderstanding: people are invested in breaking down the Tame Impala sound because they are after coolness. But in a weird way, the coolness didn’t reside in the sound itself. It was in how the sound made us feel.
Here’s another strike in a long list of strikes against A.I. As a creative tool, it’s meant to minimize drift. You get what you ask for, and if it isn’t quite right, you make your request more descriptive, more precise.
What would it mean to run in the other direction? When we’re trying to be creative, what would it mean to make our requests less descriptive, more imprecise, more open?
What does that look like in practice? I don’t know. Maybe watching one less tutorial? Maybe making a bit more time to just mess about in your own freaky little world. What I can say is that when it comes to creative stuff, getting what you want is cool. But getting what you didn’t know you wanted in the first place is magic.
Thanks for being here. Hope you’re swell. See ya next month.
Recent Work
Some of what has recently flown the coop. To see more, you can always head over to the home page.
Whiskers on kittens
A few of my favorite things.
For any designers in the house — in case you don’t know about it, the illustrator recolor function is quite handy.
I’m listening to this excellent audiobook of The Grapes of Wrath and getting right and properly pissed off. This book about migrant workers in dustbowl-era California has a whole lot to say to us in 2026 — more than I’d like.
This whole album is good medicine.