The Living Music List #13: On Coincidence and Collaboration
Does everything really happen for a reason? Plus new music from Max Richter, Aphex Twin, Martin Stürtzer, Fred again.., Toro y Moi, and many more
Read the previous issue of The Living Music List:
Currently listening to: All Light Will Remain (feat. Karen Vogt) by Markus Guentner
Today’s featured track is off Markus Guentner’s recent release Kontrapunkt. The record, released on the ambient label A Strangely Isolated Place, is a meticulously crafted web of collaborations between Guentner and several other artists such as Karen Vogt, whose ethereal layered vocals feature prominently here.
Reflection
Hello, friend.
Can I just start off by saying how unfortunate it is that my 13th issue is coming out 1 week before Friday the 13th? So close. Would have been a fun little coincidence.
Speaking of—how do you feel about conincidences, friend? Do you believe they can mean something more—like something is meant to be or a higher power is guiding the way of things—or do you not put much stock into these overlaps of time and space? They might just be examples of entropy at work, like a monkey given a typewriter who eventually produces a Shakespeare play if given enough time to clack away at the keys.
I’d like to tell you a brief story about a coincidence that happened in my life some years ago. To this day, I struggle to believe it was anything other than something beyond pure entropy—it made me believe that everything happens for a reason (in a way). Why that happens, I’m still not sure. We can philosophize on forever about religion and god, cause and effect, karma and free will—but allow me to reflect for a moment on what happened and we’ll save all that for the comments, shall we?
Unusual Event #1: The Ad Hoc Tour
In college, I was a part-time tour guide for 3 years. We had designated times when we gave campus tours to groups of prospective students and their families each day. Occasionally, though, a family would request a private tour for one reason or another, and our bosses at the admissions office would offer up the opportunity to the guides to see if anyone wanted the extra hour of work.
Sometimes, these ad hoc tour requests came at odd times or were last minute, so finding a guide to cover them could be a challenge. Sometimes, one of the admissions counselors approached a specific guide about it first.
On one Wednesday in late fall, I was that guide who got asked to do a last minute 5 PM tour. I can’t remember why my boss came only to me about it—something about it being a good fit with the family, or maybe he just liked me and wanted to give me first dibs on the extra cash. It was odd, because I didn’t work Wednesdays during that semester and we rarely ever ran tours that late in the afternoon.
Whatever—I was free and didn’t mind. An easy hour of work in exchange for a contribution to that weekend’s weed or beer fund worked for me.
Unusual Event #2: The Starting Spot
Every tour of the campus ran in a giant loop, usually starting at the admissions office on one end, near most of the class buildings. For this tour, however, the family happened to arrive at the mansion (our campus included an old mansion formerly owned by the Vanderbilt family) which was right in the middle of our usual tour routes.
When you do multiple tours a week across several semesters, you develop your script and stick with it. You know how to transition between the different building spiels—the little jokes about parties at the dorms and rave reviews of food in the cafeteria—because you know which areas are coming next since it’s the same loop every time, just taken one way or the other.
Starting this tour in the middle of my usual route threw me off a bit. It was nothing I couldn’t handle, but I had to decide how to sort of zig zag around instead. They had actually parked by the admissions office, but the office was supposed to be closed at 5 like usual, so they walked to the mansion to meet me.
Unusual Event #3: The Father of the Family
We set off and I’m doing my thing—making small talk, cracking bad jokes, and trying to get to know the family. When you have just one family to talk to, you dread it a bit because you have less folks to play off of and more focus on their singular experience.
But this family was kind and quiet—very quiet in fact. It was a mom and dad with their two sons, the older of whom was already committed to enrolling at our school the following year. There was something sticking out to me about the father, though. He seemed to silently see through my quirky tour guide banter but hung on every word of history I conveyed. Without any real conversation to suggest it, I took him as a well educated man who wanted to ensure his son had chosen the right university.
I tried to step up my game and pledged internally to highlight certain academic features I usually ignored.
Unusual Event #4: The Unexpected Relative
About halfway through the tour, we reached the library, where I halted us in an atrium to mention one of those academic features—a group of large posterboards advertsing events on campus like panel discussions and workshops.
As I spoke about these thrilling learning opportunities, I noticed the father staring closely at one of the posters with a perplexed look on his face. He then looked to me, concern or confusion swirling in his eyes. I wound down my thought as he raised an index finger to interject.
“Do you know who that is?” the man asked in a plain voice, now pointing the index finger at a woman on one of the posters.
“Sure, that’s Tracy!” I acknowledged. Tracy was one of my superiors at the admissions office.
The man looked at me, his expression somewhere between a slight smile and deer in the headlights, and said, “That’s my sister.”
I couldn’t hide my brief suprise, though I quickly recovered to say, “Oh, I didn’t realize you folks had family here.”
But I wasn’t the only one taken by surprise. The man’s wife looked at him as if he had just told an obvious lie and she was trying to calculate why and how she should cover for him. His sons looked between their parents, equally confused.
The man shook his head gently, “No, no. I haven’t seen her in… Does she work here? Do you know if she’s here today?”
I explained she worked with me at the admissions office but that she had likely already went home, since it was well after 5 at that point. The dad nodded in understanding and after a pause to recalibrate, we continued the tour. I snuck a few more peeks at each of the family members along the way, wondering what the real story was behind this sudden family connection.
Unusual Event #5: The Late Clock-Out
The tour was winding down as we headed to our final destination, which was one of the class buildings. It was directly next to the admissions office and I was going to do my final goodbye there before letting the family walk through the building and out to the parking lot. But fate had other plans.
As we made the long walk up the hill that approached the building, I shot glances off to the left toward the lone admissions office, looking dark and empty now at 6 PM. Just before we went past a large fir tree that stood in front of the building that was our final tour stop, I noticed movement out of the corner of my left eye.
I peered around the edge of the tree and saw a figure emerging from the front door of the admissions office. Holy shit, it’s Tracy! For some reason, she was leaving the office over an hour late.
I almost yelled in excitement at the family to wait. I did yell Tracy’s name across the 100 feet of distance between us and her. She heard and started toward us, walking slower than my heart could take. I let the father know his sister was, extremely unexpectedly, still here. His brown skin went pale, but his face wore a growing grin. His wife and kids still looked utterly confused.
Finally, Tracy rounded the tree and we greeted her. She smiled at the family, then saw the father who was walking closer to her. Her smile faded as shock washed across her face.
The man and Tracy embraced. They both began to cry. I stood beside the rest of the family, the four of us looking on in wonder.
Eventually, the man stepped back and explained to us all that Tracy was not his biological sister, but an honorary one. When he was young, his parents were absent and he struggled in school. He was close with Tracy’s family, however, and was essentially adopted by her parents as he reached high school.
Like a big sister, Tracy was a few years older and helped the man improve his grades and apply to college. Without Tracy, he explained, he likely would have failed or dropped out, and certainly would never have considered higher education. Instead, the man attended college with Tracy’s help, but the two of them somehow lost touch after his freshman year. They hadn’t seen or spoken to each other since, and the man’s family knew not of Tracy’s existence nor her impact on the man’s life at a young age.
And now, the man’s eldest son had enrolled at the university where Tracy happened to be employed. The man happened to notice she worked there thanks to a poster that most families would overlook because most tour guides would skip them. And Tracy just happened to stay an hour late at the office on this random Wednesday, walking out of the adjacent building as our paths overlapped—at just the right moment.
It was all too perfect. It was all so unbelievable. I thought of the film SIGNS (2002) and Mel Gibson’s monologue considering the two types of people in the world: those who see signs, who see miracles in these kinds of inexplicable occurences, and those who write them off as pure coincidence. How many just the right moments can occur in such a condensed period of time before you question if you just witnessed predestination or god or actual karma at work?
A few days later, I saw Tracy in the office, happier than I’d ever seen her. She told me that she and her once lost brother were planning a dinner with both of their families to continue to reconnect, and that they had already spent hours catching up, making up for all the lost time. She thanked me, as if I had any active role in that seemingly preternatural series of events. But as I walked back to my dorm after that conversation, headphones in, looking around at the familiar campus and noticing little details in the walls of the buildings or on the faces of students who passed me, a reassuring thought settled in my mind: this must be the place.
Everything Happens for a Reason(?)
Being in the right place at the right time is an exciting experience, partially because we seem to have had little to no responsibility in the matter. Or at least, it feels that way in those thrilling moments of overlap, of coincidence. Something perfect occurs and we think, God, how lucky was I just now?
This assignment of pure luck to our alignment with coincidence reduces our role in the matter. Usually, we are somewhere for a reason. I was on that tour because I got myself into that university, and I applied for that tour guide job and got it, and I made a good enough impression on my boss that he asked me to take care of that ad hoc tour request. In a way, I earned that moment of witnessing an unexpected family reunion. I was there for a reason because the thread of cause and effect is constantly untangling itself throughout our lives.
When people say everything happens for a reason, they usually mean that an event has taken place to be the cause of some future effect. To teach us a lesson we didn’t know we needed or make room for something new and important to happen. While I think there is some truth to this, I think that coincidence is more retroactive than that by nature. We should be seeing that some overlap occured due to a long line of causes and effects, often in multiple people’s lives, leading to one perfect moment. Everything doesn’t just happen for a reason, but for many reasons. An unfathomable amount of reasons.
It’s our gift as conscious human beings to be able to take away meaning from these isolated moments of special effects, and to notice them in the first place. That reunion could have just happened but everyone involved in it seemed to understand that this was a special, almost once-in-a-lifetime sort of moment. And I know that I walked away from it considering what it could mean for the future.
Sure, it might have “taught me a lesson” in that it did make me think about the beauty of overlapping events, especially as the result of unusual ones. But it also made me think that, now, those families were intertwined again. That one moment would change the course of all of their lives significantly, especially the lives of Tracy and the father. And it would later lead me to writing this post, maybe leading you to consider the coincidences in your life and the meaning of them.
These moments change our way of viewing the world, of understanding our place in them. They make us reconsider the steps we’ve taken and if we feel like we’re on the right path simply because we’ve seemed to be in the right places at the right times. These seemingly miraculous events are just another moment leading to another overlap in the future.
Collaborate to Dwell in the Overlap
Collaboration is a key facet of creation. Often, we collaborate without even knowing it—unconsensually, perhaps, though not in a harmful way. In my very first issue of this newsletter, I pondered on the way that great artists steal from other great artists due to inspiration and a desire to build on the work that came before ours.
Art is never a solo project. We make it because we want others to take it and use it to make their own. We want to feel seen and validated about our art—our small blips on the timeline of human self-expression—in the same way we feel validated by the art of others.
Active collaboration is a different creative experience entirely. It can unlock a very different kind of artist inside of us, because we must both overcome and lean into the version of ourselves that we present to another person. It can be daunting—we may want to impress others, especially fellow artists we respect and admire.
The overlap between our self and another artist’s self, in a way, creates a new artist. A combination of both artists’ experiences, desires, talents, traumas. When we find a fellow artist with whom we work well, it lights us up. That validation and act of inspiring another person is like a thrumming feeling drumming up new ideas inside of us that we never could have had alone, because we are, in a way, making stuff up for this other person first the way that our solo art is made exclusively for ourselves first.
There are countless examples in music history of unexpected artist pairings, of bands created by duos and trios and fab fours and fives—people who met at school or in bars or in childhood hometowns as neighbors. There are stories of artists recognizing each other in the wild and this coincidence leading to a feature on a song. There are artists who give song lyrics to other artists because they think the song will fit the other person’s style and talents better. So much good music—so much great art—has arisen from collaboration as a result of coincidence.
Likewise, collaborations between artists are breeding grounds for coincidence. Whether sitting in a room with a collaborator or sending ideas back and forth virtually, this open line of communication is keeping you centered in the middle of the venn diagram—the overlap, where new, beautiful, unexpected things happen.
Embrace this place to create—dwell in the overlap. Look for the reasons you’ve arrived here. Wonder about the ways this moment will change the direction of many lives, including your own.
Everything happens for a reason, and everyone makes art for a reason.
Music Recommendations
Hello again, friend.
Thank you for reading today’s post. I hope you enjoyed the reflection—I know it was a long one. I would love to hear about a coincidence in your life. Share it in the comments, if you’d like.
Now, on to today’s lists of new music recommendations. Happy listening.
The Living Music List—Ambient
Note: Most of the below ambient projects are available on Bandcamp, except Max Richter’s album which is available on major streaming services.
In A Landscape by Max Richter (album / classical crossover, ambient piano) [5 music videos available on YouTube]
th1 [evenslower] by Aphex Twin (single / drone, dark ambient) [Bandcamp]
Dawn of Time by Martin Stürtzer (album / dark ambient, electronica) [Bandcamp]
Migratory by Masayoshi Fujita (album / ambient piano, electroacoustic) [Bandcamp]
You Are In the Embrace of History by Rafet (album / field recording, jazz) [Bandcamp]
Memory Loop #2 by K I N B R A E (album / experimental, musique concrète) [Bandcamp]
The Voice of Serenity by ProtoU (album / drone, field recordings) [Bandcamp]
Acolytes of the Void by Various Artists (compilation / space, dark ambient) [Bandcamp]
Portals Eroding by Industrial Forest (album / dark ambient, drone) [Bandcamp]
Music Inside And Outside by Sotvorishi (album / drone, field recordings) [Bandcamp]
Ambient V by Various Artists (compilation / drone, experimental, a variety of other subgenres here) [Bandcamp]
my bright abyss by infinite body (album / ambient piano, field recordings) [Bandcamp]
The Living Music List—All Genres
Note: All of the below projects are available on major streaming services.
ten days by Fred again.. (album / electronic)
Hole Earth by Toro y Moi (album / alternative)
seven-twenty-four by Le Youth & Robby East (album / dance)
Endlessness by Nala Sinephro (album / electrojazz)
Kosmos by Bremer/McCoy (album / jazz)
Empty Empty by Cinema Paradiso (album / jazz)
The Undreamt-Of Centre by Laurence Pike (album / jazz)
Belaya Polosa by Mochat Doma (album / EBM)
THE FORCE by LL COOL J (album / hip-hop/rap)
What’s Wrong With New York? by The Dare (album / alternative)
A Stranger Desired by Bleachers (album / alternative)
PRATTS & PAIN by Royel Otis (album / indie pop)
When I’m Alone I Feel Weightless by Criibaby (album / indie electronic pop)
amy allen by Amy Allen (album / indie altpop)
Viva Hinds by Hinds (album / indie rock)
Gap Year! by Laila! (album / R&B/soul)
Manning Fireworks by MJ Lenderman (album / alternative)
A Whole New Sound by Disney & Various Artists (album / holy shit this is pop punk disney songs lmfao)
End Of The Tunnel by Atlas Genius (ablum / alternative)
Luck and Strange by David Gilmour (album / rock)
WOOF. by Fat Dog (album / alternative)
Rose Main Reading Room by Peel Dream Magazine (album / dream pop)
Creator Spotlight
In lieu of an In the News section this week, I’d like to highlight a creator that I follow and whose work I deeply appreciate—Venus Theory. After discovering his work on YouTube, I’ve become a dedicated viewer of his videos exploring different music gear and plugins, how he creates ambient and cinematic music, and how he feels about being an artist and creator in this economy.
Being the based artist he is, he has created a ton of free plugins for Decent Sampler that pull sounds from very expensive music gear like the new Arturia Polybrute 12. I am super grateful to him for helping other musicians like me access new sounds and explore different realms of possibility in their music.
If you like to make music, I highly recommend you check out his library of pay-what-you-like plugins here and check out his YouTube channel here. I especially enjoyed this video from a few months ago: Making Art In The Age of Content.
That’s all for this week’s issue. Thank you for reading. Until next time.
Your friend,
Melted Form
Remember to listen to the hum, buzz, & hiss of the world around you—there is music to be heard there.
I think you can let go of the caveat at the top that readers can skip the reflection. It’s the highlight as far as I’m concerned.