In my home the microwave oven is a time saver. It’s a fast way to heat, reheat or defrost foods. Used right, it’s a smart tool with little need for bells and whistles. That’s my perspective. Engineers and marketing staff at microwave oven manufacturers think differently. They see a need to differentiate, to offer more features for a premium price.

At a company I worked for, there was a lunchroom built with 8-10 microwave ovens for the staff to heat their lunch. Naturally the ovens were new and fancy with digital displays and a control panel with many buttons. The ovens could probably do a lot. But the users were puzzled on how to set the basic parameters, time and effect level.Every time I went there all clocks on the microwaves were showing different times. Everyone of them wrong.

In the music studio there are tools that can be Swiss army knives, with lots of features. But whenever I read interviews with experienced pros it seems to me they use each tool for a specific purpose. They often have a lot of gear, but they use each piece for a specific task. It gets the job done and it’s a fast way to work.

In the last year I’ve seen a few famous boxes get significant updates, the Roland SP-404mkII sampler and the Teenage Engineering Op-1f. I wouldn’t say no to any of them. But it’s interesting that each box has become updated with ever more features to turn them into more capable digital audio workstations. That is, each box is a studio in itself.

And I wonder if that actually is a good thing. Despite an initial onset of gear-lust I feel pretty good with my old boxes. And they still have more features than I have CPU upstairs to remember.

For Caribou’s latest album Suddenly, Dan Snaith created 900 different projects (livesets). That is, he more or less started the recording of a new song every day for three years. The figure can look impressive or unimpressive depending on your perspective.

I take some comfort in realizing that even an admired artist obviously hasn’t got a clear plan for what he is doing. He just shows up throwing spagetti on the walls to see what will stick.

I also realize I spend too much time looking for the right place to start, instead of just starting. Winging it, might be winning it.

A family is a complex fabric of many interwoven threads. Love, trust, loyalties and responsibilities. Both within the core of the closest relatives but also other relations, friendships and acquaintances. History and memories with threads that go long back. Some thick, some thin.

A family can be torn apart in many ways due to different things. Sometimes the rift in the fabric is beyond repair. There’s nothing to patch up and sewing up a metaphor to explain it seems daft. But here goes.

Even though the torn up family isn’t mine and I’m just a thread among many I still feel frayed. We were many that met up to celebrate a graduation last night. There were joy, love as well as hidden feelings of uncertainty. Inside we were many loose ends experiencing the phantom pain of something amputated.

If you step into a messy old barn, with centuries of old tools and discarded junk, but where each square foot has a story to tell and the atmosphere has a certain personality and mystique. It probably doesn’t take a lot to make it into a cool place for a party, or a summertime café. Just sweep the floors, get rid of the crappiest crap and hang up some lights.

To arrive in a neat and tidy hotel room and think I’m going to make this more homely by throwing your stuff around, tearing up the made bed and rehanging the art. Well, it doesn’t really work.

To turn chaos into something more orderly is the right way to go.

I’m writing about this to present an analogy for music production. I spend quite a lot of time thinking about workflows and how songs get produced.

It seems to me that it’s a lot more interesting to throw together some loops and chopped up grooves into something funky and uncontrollable – and to see what it inspires. You can always turn down the chaos, add some structure. If I instead start recording a perfectly written song with a few clean backing tracks, it’s a lot harder to add chaos and charm afterwards. It just feels as if I’m messing it up. Which I am, but the result is not what I intended. The charm needs to be built in, otherwise it just feels fake and impersonal. Like a hotel room.

If you’re a freelance press photographer covering big events you have a choice. Either you hang with the other photographers and shoot what happens from more or less the same angle, or you go to the side to find a fresh perspective.

If you’re lucky this may lead to unique pictures from the event. On the other hand, there might be lower risk hanging with the competition.

Having an alternative perspective, a different point of view is often what makes us interesting. It can also be what makes uncomfortable, provoking and unwelcome. We might be the chafing friction. But friction creates heat and inside an oyster the grain of sand becomes the pearl.

Find your own voice, then exaggerate it says Jerry Saltz. It’s our idiosyncrasy that makes us interesting argues Seth Godin. I know all this. So I better not sand off any edges, especially when I’m not sure that I’m edgy enough. Being too nice is the worry of the gentle kind.

It’s fine to love your country. There’s just little need to turn it into a cult. History has shown us many times that patriotism and nationalism taken to the extreme can lead to catastrophic consequences.

Today, June 6, is Sweden’s national day. It’s been a national holiday all way back since … 2005. Why? Don’t ask a Swede, hardly anybody knows what we’re celebrating. Or rather, very few celebrate at all. Nobody knows why, how or what?

The simple truth is that we’re having a national day because Norway has one, and of course France and the USA. The French and the Americans celebrate the freedom and independence of the people, their respective revolutions. Norway – well, they’re celebrating that they became free of the Swedes.

We’re also celebrating a national day to shut-up the voices on the far right demanding we have one. Now we do. The most honorable thing we could do as citizens is therefore to head to each municipality’s welcoming ceremony for new citizens, refugees and immigrants that have found a new home in Sweden.

I just checked Wikipedia to see what we’re celebrating. And sure, it’s the crowning of king Gustav Vasa 1523. That’s a long time ago. Apparently they also signed some kind of government declaration in 1809, depriving the monarch of his power. It’s funny that we first celebrate the crowning of a king and the impotence of another.

So, today I didn’t go to work. I didn’t go to the welcoming ceremony because no one in the family wanted to join me. So, I went for a walk. I got bitten by a tick. Not much of a celebration and no meaning whatsoever.

I baked pita-bread for the first time today. I hadn’t done it before, so it was a step outside my comfort zone. Not a big step, but I had to read a recipe. Which I didn’t exactly follow. It worked out just fine, but I’m confident that next time I’ll be able to do it even better.

Baking pita-bread was a small achievement, but not an unimportant joy when I’m summing up the day. And the best thing is I think life is full of those small joys waiting. Achievements not like conquering Mount Everest, but just taking one small step outside of our comfort zone. Growing our skill and experience, and well yes, I suppose the comfort zone grows as well. I could bake pita-bread tomorrow. The threshold is super-low.

With every new experience our comfort zone and capability grows. It also means that every step we progress we diminish the distance to the next. Just imagine how much we could grow and learn if we decided to make something for the first time every week.

Amateurs wait for inspiration. Professionals just show up and get to work. The gurus of creative self-help books are pretty much in unison on this, I think. Not that I have studied them all. But sure, in my day job I’m a pro. Provided that the job at hand is well defined – I just start writing.

There’s an Einstein quote… well there always is, isn’t it? … “If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”

If I reverse this thought I can see that the reason for my failure on my unproductive days is mostly due to lack of problem definition. I don’t have a plan. I show up at the studio, but … I haven’t got a clue. Where do I start? On a synth, on a drum machine.

On a day when I’m fresh, energized and awake this isn’t much of a problem. I will get some idea and run with it. On a tired day, after work, I need to have a concise list of idiot chores. Something I can do in my sleep, because that’s about the cognitive level where I’m at.

The professional attitude of just showing up and getting to work works fine when you feel like a formula 1 race car. Your acceleration goes from 0 to hyperdrive in just a few… well, minutes. On tired days I feel much more like a long heavy freight train that stretches for miles. The effort to get this monster moving is enormous, and it takes time to get it up to speed.

On those days, it’s absolutely crucial to be undisturbed. Slamming the brakes because family duties call and having to start over from zero. Well, after three or four false starts it’s hard.

Despite being tired I often keep pulling my box cars long into the night, long after the family is asleep. Because it’s not until then that I might reach hyperdrive, free myself from gravity to steal some magic dust from the stars.

The morning after, I’m not sure I’m that much of a professional at work. I’m a freight train stuck in a loop, running in circles.

The cultural idea of having lawns seem to have sprung from our wish to show our wealth. Not from some idea of barefoot bliss. Idle land. Not used for growing, but for decoration.

As a lawn owner you’re a lawn mower, or it’s welcome to the jungle. I’ve got a basic manual cylinder mower. It’s nice, civilized, doesn’t disturb the neighbourhood. Makes you think of England. But using it is work. The grass better not be wet. And in longer periods of rain – you get the green green grass of doom, better put on your best halloween costume and grab the old sickle.

My partner is not very fond of our mower. She’d rather we bought an electric. Which isn’t unreasonable, it’s what people do, after all it’s more convenient. Less tiring and more rain-resilient.

We do a lot of things looking for convenience. It might not be in our best interest. I’ve found that wearing running clothes is a good way to change my perspective on the effort. I might actually go out to see if I can cut it one level shorter today.

What if we trusted our guts more? If we allowed gut feeling and intuition to lead more of our decision making and control of our lives and our work? Would we be happier, more successful? Would it lead to more interesting art?

We probably all rely on intuition in varying degrees. But some people may do it more than others. Jon Hopkins, the electronic musician seems to be one of them. I listened to him talking about his work on an interesting episode of the podcast Tape Notes.

Where were quite a few nuggets in there. His trust in his intuition leading the process was one of them. He would work on a sound with very little idea of direction, but being confident that the next step would show itself. 

Looking at his method as a travel analogy, I imagine him going on a trip with neither map, guidebook nor any accommodation booked, certain that wherever he would end up would be his destination. 

This way of working of course lends itself well when the desired result is dreamy free form music not adhering to any specific tempo  – knowing that it would not be dance music.

Another interesting thing that ties in with intuition is his method of heavy processing of audio samples. He will send audio through long chains of effects and mangle them til they’re just right. Trusting his gut feeling and arriving at new kinds of beauty.

One way to argue against this process could be that transforming his piano playing beyond possible recognition would take away all his personal touch, arriving at something less human. It turns out the opposite might be the case. Through a series of intuitive decisions he arrives at places and sounds that are unique, and absolutely his own.

Maybe if we allow ourselves to let go of control, to get lost more and choose to rely on the compass inside, we might find the way to a truer part of ourselves.