This is my dad’s weight chart over the last few months. The lowest point marks the darkest days of a perfect storm for me and my family.

This chart says the impossible can happen. It says there is always hope, that there is no limit to what can happen if you turn towards hope.

Over the last few months I’ve been treated for bladder cancer and nearly lost my dad while running Endlesss and parenting our twin baby daughters.

Until now I’ve been telling the story of the darkest days. Now it’s time for light.

This has been a short term setback, but myself and Endlesss have emerged stronger and more focussed than ever.

The magic started when I surrendered and asked for help from our closest supporters. The first task was to find continuity leadership for Endlesss if I was taken down temporarily or permanently.

We smashed it — we now have the most incredible team of superstar advisors around us. Huge shoutout to Justin Evans (founder @ Landr), Will Evans (ex-CEO @ Spitfire), John Flynn (founder @ Sonantic by Spotify), Ben Perreau (3x founder, advisor to Warner, PayPal), and Gareth Deakin (ex-Sony Music). If I was taken down today, I know the company would be in safe hands.

The next task was to raise capital. The goal was £200k for contingency if things got really bad. We got to £80k just from within the group. I’m filled with gratitude that even in the face of such huge uncertainty, people came forward to back us.

Then it was biopsy results day. I learned that my tumour, although the most aggressive type, hadn’t spread to the muscles in the bladder, meaning I have time on my side.

I have more surgery to come, next date on 2nd November. I may still have to have my bladder removed — an invasive procedure that involves creating a new bladder from a piece of my bowel — but it’s been caught in enough time that this procedure would cure the cancer for good.

As soon as we knew the news wasn’t the worst, our superstar advisory board stepped in with the most beautifully executed tough love.

I need to add some context.

Endlesss started out as a collaborative creation tool. An inspiring community of devoted users have formed around it. They’ve put the time in to learn the tool and taken a punt on collaborating with complete strangers in the app. They found their way to a magical experience.

But the bar to having that magical experience is incredibly high. Only a fraction of people who have come across Endlesss have had this experience. We’ve tried many ways to lower it but nothing has generated the step-change that’s been needed.

We’ve been planning and building Clubs for a few months, a place where music communities can get a taste of that magical experience instantly without having to learn a new creative tool.

Our superstar advisors were sold on the Clubs strategy but they weren’t sold on the approach. Our plan was to build Clubs into the existing Endlesss apps. It was a multi-month development timeline to integrate them with everything we’d built over the years.

The uncomfortable truth that our advisors presented to me was that, given the setback of my health situation and its knock-on effect to fundraising, the time this would take would be incredibly risky. We needed to be fast and focussed and get something new out in the world without any other distractions.

When death stares you in the face you realise how important it is to get to the point. That’s exactly what we’re doing. I’m incredibly excited to show the world what we’ve been building next month. I have to pinch myself about how we got through this given how impossible everything looked just two months ago.

Without the help of some very experienced fellow founders I don’t think we would have made it through.

Always surrender, never give up.

Here’s a vid about what we’re building:

If you want to get your hands on Clubs, join the Clubs waitlist

I’ll be starting my own club soon. Sign up for that here

If you want to be part of our journey we have a small allocation remaining for investments. Reach out to investors@endlesss.fm if you want to know more.

Last week I wrote about the wild rollercoaster I’ve been on over the last few months. Opening up publicly felt scary but important. I knew unexpected things would come of it. I had no idea the biggest thing would be learning how much the world suffers below the radar.

My heart goes out to the many people who have opened up to me about their life-threatening challenges past and present. It’s an honour to hear those stories and inspiring to know how people have overcome their challenges. I haven’t been able to get back to everyone yet so this post is in one part a reply to those people, in another part the next chapter in the story of what’s happened.

I left the story last week at the moment of peak hopelessness, sitting in front of my laptop, my dad in his hospital bed downstairs, my daughters waking to the world in the room next door and me facing the possibility that I might not be around for much longer.

I’m used to finding a way through hopelessness — you get good at that as a startup founder — but this was different. I sat staring at my laptop screen searching for a way through, realising that this situation was something I couldn’t rely on my usual path of strength to get through.

Rather than trying to clench my fists around the situation and steer it my way, I needed to let go and open up to something bigger than me.

As I sat there, two instincts came to me — that I somehow needed to be “all of me”, and I needed to be all of me together with all kinds of people. This felt incredibly powerful but scary. I’m so used to “having my shit together”, only showing my best side and going out to the world with an answer for everything.

In the heat of the moment I lurched from ‘tell no one’ to ‘tell everyone, immediately’. I reached out to a couple of our advisors to tell them that I wanted to be radically transparent and tell the world. They gently asked some questions which I knew meant that they thought it was a bad idea.

It was! And it didn’t take me long to find out. I started to write a mailer to send out to everyone I knew but it just didn’t feel right. I was trying to write both a plea for help and a reassurance that everything would be OK at the same time. Everything wasn’t OK — and any reassurance that it would be OK would be a lie. I’ve always been a terrible liar and the uncomfortable feeling in my stomach told me this wasn’t right.

I realised that first of all I needed to bring together a small group of people who it was OK to not be OK with, people I could say anything to. The ‘all of me’ was not OK, and the ‘all kinds of people’ were those I had been with on the many phases of my life’s journey. These were people who knew where I was at and I’d be OK to not be OK with.

And so I invited a handful of family, friends, investors and founders to a WhatsApp group. This has ended up being one of the most pivotal moments of my life.

What’s happened as a result of starting that group has unlocked the most wonderful miracles and changed my perspective on how we can be together in the world.

I’ll continue the story over the coming weeks. The only spoiler: I’m going to have a busy year of medical procedures but it looks like my daughters will get to have a dad and I’ll get to continue my life’s quest.

As I’ve learned over the past few weeks, asking for help is a powerful thing. Now we have a bit more clarity on my health, we’re picking up our fundraising activities for Endlesss again and most exciting of all we’re rolling out Clubs in a few weeks time.

If you want to support, we’ve just opened up an investment SPV. Learn more about what’s coming next and how you can be a part of it. Your investment will help us roll out “Clubs”, our new online spaces for communities to hang out, communicate and make music together.

I’m also going to start my own Club and you’re invited. Sign up for news about how to join ahead of time on this list.

4 weeks ago I didn’t know if I’d be alive this time next year. Today I feel like the luckiest guy alive. The last two months have been the wildest, most beautiful rollercoaster.

I want to share this story of surrender and community — the two superpowers that have transformed a terrible situation into a breakthrough for me personally and for Endlesss, the company I founded.

This story is for anyone facing adversity. There is no limit to how hard it can get but you’ll be amazed at your power to make it through. Never give up, but always surrender.

As a startup founder & CEO I’m used to having a dozen guns to my head at any one time but this hit different.

At the end of July, doctors found a tumour in my bladder. They thought it was low risk and would be treated with a simple operation under general anaesthetic.

I had that surgery at the end of August. The surgeon came by the ward to talk to me the day after. He’d removed a much larger than expected tumour which looked to have spread. His bedside manner was encouraging but I could tell he was preparing me for a fight which I could lose. He wouldn’t give me numbers but I googled the survivability rates — about a 50/50 chance of being around in 5 years’ time.

The week before my surgery, my partner and I and our 8-month-old twin daughters had been staying with my parents. The hospital had just told my dad they were withdrawing treatment for his metastatic prostate cancer. Within days of this news he was unable to get out of bed and barely able to speak. On the balmy late-August evening before I returned to London for my surgery I said goodbye to him, prepared for that to be the last time.

A few days later, my family and I would be preparing for the possibility of a similar outcome for me.

5 days after my surgery we returned to my parents’ house. Thankfully my dad was still with us. Monday morning came around and I jumped on team standup at my makeshift desk (my mum’s makeup table).

I was determined that whatever happened to me, Endlesss would continue its quest. We were in the middle of a fundraise in a challenging market and about to launch a new product which builds on everything we’ve learned over the years. It was a sensitive time but it was all to play for. Above all, what we’re doing at Endlesss is the highest expression of my purpose, a torch I couldn’t bear to let go out.

I’d told the team about my condition when I first had my diagnosis, and that the prognosis was nothing to worry about. Now I was searching deep inside for seeds of hope to uplift the team amidst this new reality.

But I came up with nothing. I hopped on the call and shared a short and upbeat update that the surgery had gone well (technically it had — they’d removed everything they could see). Then I sank back in my chair.

I’m no stranger to feelings of hopelessness in the brutality of an early-stage startup. It’s part of the game but there’s always an action to take. You take those days one at a time. It’s a great lesson in reality being different from how you feel about it. There’s always a way through if you look hard and act.

With my dad in his hospital bed downstairs and my daughters awakening to the wonders of the world in the room next door, it was no time to give up. I contemplated how we could get through this, whether we could even continue the fundraise in this new reality, how I could make sure the team would have jobs and my family would be taken care of if I didn’t make it.

It seemed impossible in a way I hadn’t experienced before.

What has unfolded between then and now has underlined the power of community and the amazing things that can happen if you ask for help. There’s too much to pack into one post but it felt important to get started. I’ll continue the story over the coming weeks. The only spoiler: I’m going to have a busy year of medical procedures but it looks like my daughters will get to have a dad and I’ll get to continue my life’s quest.

If you want to support or get involved, pop your name down on this list. As I’ve learned over the past few weeks, asking for help is a powerful thing. Now we have a bit more clarity on my health, we’re picking up our fundraising activities for Endlesss again and most exciting of all we’re rolling out Clubs in a few weeks time.

Clubs are online spaces for communities to hang out, communicate and make music together. The thing I’ve spent my life doing, it seems…

I’m going to start my own one and you’re invited. Sign up for news about how to join ahead of time on this list.

On Thursday, April 15th, 2021, Endlesss will livestream a collaborative jam session and mint the highlight moments as clean NFTs in real-time — one of the first events of its kind — and I want to share why we’re doing it.

Before I get into the why, here’s the when and where: Starting at 8 PM BST on Thursday, l’ll improvise live with musician and technologist 1x1 — the alias of guitarist Stevie J Jones, who’s performed with the likes of Brian Eno, Air, Florence + the Machine and more — on the Endlesss Twitch and Mixcloud. Once the hour-long jam ends, we’ll review all of the Rifffs created during the performance and select three highlights each, which will be immediately minted as NFTs and available on the Hic et Nunc digital marketplace.

The event is powered by Endlesss’s unique technology for real-time collaboration, which allows musicians to play together live from anywhere in the world while maintaining a complete browsable history of their collaboration, separated into individual Rifffs — our short-form musical equivalent to the tweet, Vine or TikTok video. Rifffs are an innovative format invented by Endlesss that encapsulate the magic moments from a live jam — a unit of creative expression perfect for capturing spontaneous highlights of collaborative creativity.

The entire process — from the first notes of the performance to the Rifffs being selected and minted as NFTs — is livestreamed to embrace transparency and provide inspiration to artists, who are more curious than ever to explore possibilities for reclaiming agency over their creative output both within and beyond the NFT ecosystem.

All that said… Why are we minting Rifffs as NFTs?

If you’re involved in music — or any sort of online creator culture — those three letters have almost surely popped up on your timeline over the past few weeks. There have been multi-million-dollar auctions, controversies about their environmental impact and concerns about what you really own when you buy an NFT.

I’ve been watching the world of NFTs since autumn 2020, enthralled by the evangelists and skeptics duking it out on Twitter and Clubhouse and the future potential of a technology that is nascent but advancing at a dizzying pace. There are plenty of viewpoints about how and why this all happened, why NFTs are the future of the music industry, or why they should be banished from the face of the earth.

As I’ve wrapped my brain around NFTs, they’ve helped me get even more deeply in touch with our mission at Endlesss: to re-define musical success around the magic of creating music in the moment.

Music as we know it has an enormous over-supply problem. There’s a huge appetite for musical creativity, but simply not enough ears to go around. Most creator tools focus on simplifying the journey from ideation to getting your song on streaming service playlists, but at Endlesss we believe this is the wrong problem to solve. That just makes it easier for musicians to create and upload ever more music that will never get heard. This doesn’t help musicians achieve their goals, or help listeners find music they like. In 2021, 14 million people will make a song, and 22 million new songs will be uploaded to Spotify. Taking a track all the way from ideation and arrangement through mixing, mastering, distribution, promotion and playlist marketing is painstaking and takes days, if not weeks or months. After all of that effort, many of those tracks won’t be played at all, and only about 55,000 artists will earn enough revenue from Spotify to survive.

The most enjoyable part of musical creativity is getting lost in an unhindered flow, following your instincts in search of those peak moments where everything comes together. We’ve streamed numerous events on the Endlesss Twitch channel as part of this attempt to reframe the spectacle of live collaborative music creation, and these experiences are thrilling for both creators and their audience, the musical equivalent of a sports match where the outcome is unknown. The magic of witnessing and taking part in those peak moments of a jam when everything comes together is unique to that moment, deeply human and irreplaceable.

Until now, that magic has mostly been ephemeral. There’s no reliable way to collect mementos of those moments. This Thursday, April 15th, we take our first experimental step towards changing that. I will jam live on Endlesss with musician and technologist 1x1 for an hour, livestreamed on Mixcloud and Twitch, and at the end we will pick our three favourite Rifffs — the peak moments from the jam — to mint and sell as NFTs on digital marketplace Hic et Nunc.

This is the beginning of a journey giving musicians and fans on Endlesss the opportunity to realise the value of the magic they create in real-time as collectible musical moments.

Hic et Nunc is the first widely-adopted NFT site using the Tezos network instead of Ethereum. Tezos uses Proof of Stake technology, as opposed to Ethereum’s Proof of Work, which means it uses a fraction of the energy required by Ethereum. Aside from the huge reduction in environmental impact, this also means that prices are more affordable for creators and collectors alike. Minting an NFT on Ethereum costs up to $150, and other network fees mean the lowest economical price to offer an NFT on Ethereum is over $200. This is way out of the price range of most music lovers. On Tezos, minting costs just a few cents since the network fees are so low, and in many cases NFTs are changing hands for less than $10.

Over the weekend of April 9th I stepped out and minted my first NFT. I put up 100 editions of one of the latest Endlesss Rifffs from my solo jam for free on Hic et Nunc, and was amazed to see them snapped up within an hour, with many already listed for sale on the secondary marketplace.

On an emotional level, I learned a ton about how it feels to mint a digital work and to have it collected by an enthusiastic community. It’s a new outlook on the world which I can’t quite describe. But after 20 years of feeling the things I and other people created had no intrinsic value, it feels like the economics around creativity now more accurately reflect the way I relate to it. As I move away from the experiences in my past, my memory forgets pretty much everything apart from a few key events, which become almost infinitely symbolic to me. They become part of my identity, keystones in the stories I tell about myself, navigational waypoints which help me relate to others around me through our shared culture.

I want the rest of the Endlesss community of creators to share in that feeling. I hope you’ll join us on this journey.

What do I own when I own an NFT?

There have been legitimate concerns about the clarity of the legal rights transferred when you purchase your NFT and the extent of the immutability of the media asset itself. The legal framework around ownership of a digital token which references a piece of media — a concept which is a little over 5 years old — has not yet caught up with the legal framework around physical ownership — a concept which is as old as legal frameworks themselves. The ‘immutability’ of the digital asset depends on the technical implementation of the platform. Most platforms including hicetnunc.xyz use a service called IPFS, a decentralised storage platform that is much more resilient that for example a corporation storing media on Amazon AWS servers. There are newer technologies such as ARweave which offer a similar service to IPFS with a different financial model more suited for ensuring the permanent existence and discoverability of the asset.

For this first event, we are relying on the legal and technical framework provided by hicetnunc.xyz. If this initiative proves successful, we will begin to move towards creating our own technical and legal framework for creating, storing and transferring rights for NFTs. In layman’s terms, we think of the model of ownership of NFTs as akin to ownership of physical media eg a 12” vinyl. When you buy a vinyl record, there is a complex legal framework that describes very clearly what you can and cannot do with the physical item and the media stored on it which can be played back. As the owner of a record, you’re entitled to play it back in various contexts and to do anything you want with the physical media — sell it, destroy it, display it, grind it up and sprinkle it on your pasta if you wish. But you don’t have any rights to alter, copy or broadcast the music.

In the long-run the successful adoption of NFTs will depend on the quality of the product — the media itself, how that media can be accessed, displayed, played or consumed and how technically durable the format is. Just like physical media. At the very core of the NFT is the token containing the metadata which references the media. This technology is considerably more robust than the physical media we used to collect and in some cases trade, which I believe is why we are already seeing such a buoyant NFT market. The next frontier is to develop the technology around it.

Our pledge at Endlesss is that as our platform and technology progresses, we will honour the spirit of our intent behind what we’re offering as NFTs on hicetnunc.xyz and any other platforms we might use. If at some point in the future we create our own NFT infrastructure, we will make all reasonable efforts to re-issue NFTs on this new infrastructure to the holders of any Endlesss-derived NFTs from other platforms.

To find out more about Endlesss, head to https://endlesss.fm/

Additional Reading
Memo Akten — The Unreasonable Ecological Cost of #CryptoArt (Part One)
Duncan Geere — The Environmental Cost of CryptoArt
Shawn Reynaldo / First Floor — Unpacking Crypto Cooties with Jacques Greene
Anil Dash / The Atlantic — NFTs Weren’t Supposed to End Like This
Ashleigh Kane / The Face — Why Should We Care About NFTs?
Ray Philp / Pioneer DJ — How Will NFTs Reshape Dance Music?
Dominik Schiener / TechCrunch — NFTs are Part of a Larger Economic Development in Finance Capital
Declan McGynn / DJ Mag — What Are NFTs and Why Should Electronic Music Care?
Hiroko Tabuchi / The New York Times — NFTs Are Shaking Up the Art World. They May Be Warming the Planet, Too

In 2019, 96% of royalties went to the top 4% of musicians.

The pandemic has destroyed the live incomes of musicians, but even before it hit, the music industry wasn’t working for the millions of independent musicians and music enthusiasts who aren’t stadium-tour artists or passive consumers.

Dark present, bright future

It’s an incredibly painful time but it’s accelerating a positive shift that’s taken root over the last decade. A radically different, fairer, more resilient music industry is springing up around us. It’s focussed on creating communities rather than just content and the global lockdown is only going to accelerate its progress.

The leading voices in this new music industry share their processes on Instagram, Youtube and Twitch, regularly release music on Bandcamp, meet with their audiences on Discord servers and fund their work on Patreon through the support of their audience. They welcome new voices into their collaborative way of working, knowing that each new voice enriches everyone’s musical world.

Music as a process not a product

This new industry approaches music as a dynamic creative process which we participate in rather than a static product we consume. It casts musicians as educators who lead conversations and help communities navigate their lives rather than untouchable gods who hide behind the opaque myth of their brand. It puts skills and relationships first and treats content as a document of a process rather than an end in itself.

I’m fascinated by the creative technology which these new musical leaders put at the centre of their practice and the stories they tell. Music production technology has evolved over more than 100 years to give creators near-infinite control over the details of their creations so they can produce static pitch-perfect results for mass-consumption. But these values of staticness and perfection don’t apply in this new dynamic world which has more in common with gaming than it does with a traditional media industry.

Music as gaming

The new gamer-like musicians gravitate to instruments where the basics are easy to understand and simple to pick up but hard to master, that allow them to quickly demonstrate skills, educate their audience and involve them in a collective creative process. They tell stories and build communities around modular synths, collectible hardware, acoustic instruments and compositional techniques.

Ever since I was a kid I’ve experienced music as a process not a product, an activity not a thing. My first instrument was the violin which requires constant physical intervention to make music. When you watch someone play the violin it’s obvious how the music is connected with the person. Even if you can’t play it yourself you understand the basics of how it works and appreciate the practice the player put in to get that good.

With hindsight I realise my career as a musician and technologist has always been driven by framing music as a participatory activity. It’s exciting that this way of seeing things is now gaining so much momentum and I’m grateful to be working on Endlesss, a new creative tool which is built around these values. I hope it will play a central role in this new world.

Building Endlesss

Endlesss started life as an instrument I developed to allow me to take a spontaneous performative approach to improvising electronic music. I wanted to liberate myself from the perfectionism that I fell into in long solitary hours in my studio. The workflow evolved over a decade of regular touring at a time when process-based music was an arty experimental niche. At first I wanted to build a career for myself as an improvising musician but I soon realised there was much greater potential in what this workflow could do for others.

When I set out with the team to start work on Endlesss our aim was to build a social musical instrument that reimagined music creation for this new world. These are the goals we set

Simplicity

It has to be simple to understand the basics so creators can relate their process easily to their audience and allow their audience to replicate it.

Depth

While the basics must be simple, it must also allow ever-increasing mastery so the most dedicated users can keep progressing, develop their own playing style and build culture around their practice.

Momentum

Features which allow the creator to question or second-guess what they’re doing will take them out of the flow and encourage them to perfect their past ‘mistakes’ rather than hone their future skill.

Storytelling

Documenting and sharing the creative process should be as easy as possible. Ideally the instrument should automatically document everything during the creative process, allowing the player to choose what to share after the fact.

Collaboration

The instrument should make it easy to collaborate, either co-located or remotely

Connectivity

It should be easy to use any other instrument with it and should integrate seamlessly into other musical workflows.

Sustainability

The process of playing the instrument should be energy-giving for both the player and the audience.

If you’d like to find out more about how we’re building Endlesss, head to studio.endlesss.fm. Our iOS app is in the appstore already and we’re launching a Kickstarter campaign on 19th May to build a Mac/PC standalone/VST version.

We want Endlesss to become a place where the most dedicated creators can make a living for themselves by providing creative value and meaning for the communities they help build on the platform. We’d love your help in achieving this.

Right now we’re focussed on building the core creative and social functionality of Endlesss. If you share our vision and want to join us on our journey then head to studio.endlesss.fm to find out more and sign up to back us.

Live looping has been coming in and out of modern music’s favour since the 60s. It’s been adopted by composers like Steve Reich, beatboxers like Beardyman and singer/songwriters like KT Tunstall.

It’s had another renaissance recently with Ed Sheeran and Marc Ribellet. Whatever you feel about their music, it’s a fascinating development. Live looping 1.0 was about technology and magic; wowing the audience with the ability to turn one musician into many. Like all tricks, it was time-limited. The magic is over once the third rabbit emerges from the hat.

Today looping is mainstream — everyone knows how it works so we can forget about the magic and focus on the bigger picture (thanks Ed — no seriously!). Now, a new generation of loop warriors with a new generation of loop boxes are creating captivating improvised experiences. These raw and fresh conversations with intimate audiences create a feeling of engagement unmatched by a rehearsed performance.

This is far from a magic trick. It’s deeply human. Live looping 2.0 is about craft, context, spontaneity and interaction. It’s music catching up with the times.

Today, we’re alienated by the mass consumption of over-produced content and exhausted by the ocean of anxiety-inducing social media. These are the hallmarks of the old world — Music 1.0 — the industry built on huge artists with huge fan-bases.

We yearn for our new world to be about real, right-sized communities with which we can deeply collaborate, co-create and engage. This is what Music 2.0 will offer and Live Looping 2.0 ticks more of its boxes as a means to get there than any other trend in music.

At my new project, Endlesss.fm, we’re thinking about how we can facilitate the transition to a music more focused on communities and engagement. We hope to play a small part in this big change, recognising that this monumental shift will be powered by brave, open-minded creative people.

Immersed in intimate communities, these pioneers will be finding new ways to connect deeply with each other around music. Personally, I’m fascinated to see where this will go…

Join in the discussion

I’d love to know your thoughts on this and the future of music

• Twitter — @timexile #livelooping2
• Join our Facebook group Project Rockpoool
• Reply here (and donate some applause via the green hand to help this article get noticed)

Keep up-to-date

For more information about Endlesss head to endlesss.fm and sign up. We’ll send out more details and roll out shortly.

For more news, thoughts and articles about the future of music and things I make sign up at timexile.com

Links and references

Marc Rebillet

Steve Reich On Tape Loops, Rhythm & Sampling In Minimalism

Lesson: Looping Basics Using KT Tunstall’s Method

Ed Sheeran Gear Guide (guitars and looping tech — a big fancy custom pedal but at its core a free VST)

Why small groups work and what makes an optimally sized community

Amanda Palmer explains how new community focused business models are helping her create the art she wants to create.

Beardyman is livestreaming improvised live looping and even doing community assisted production streams — getting feedback and suggestions on unreleased material as it’s made.

A decade ago I was an artist pursuing an aesthetic dream. Then I ran into problems I wanted to fix. That was the beginning of my dual life as an artist/entrepreneur.

I started writing this on the plane back from Eurosonic, a festival and conference in the Netherlands where music bookers make their picks for who’s going to play at this year’s festivals around Europe. I was presenting my new startup Endlesss.fm to the conference’s new music tech section. 10 years ago I came to Eurosonic to play a showcase as an emerging artist. I’d recently signed to Warp records and was promoting the live show for my new album Listening Tree. Back then I was clearly an artist first and foremost. Then my passion for tech took over…

I’ve been interested in music technology for over 2 decades in parallel to my interest in music. I first started to mess around programming my own sound toys as a creative pursuit. I wasn’t trying to solve problems with the technology I was making, I just felt that the available tools were too limiting to my artistic expression. I was looking for new worlds, the pot of gold at the end of my imagination (which isn’t really there… this if the that keeps artists striving so beautifully).

But in the last decade since my showcase at Eurosonic in 2009 my relationship to technology has evolved beyond the purely artistic. Having netted a golden opportunity to take my artistic career to the next level I was hit with a big empty ‘now what?’. By the end of 2010 I was burned out from touring, isolated from my social sphere by my almost-permanent absence from home. I was fed up with the way the music industry operated, with how I’d lost touch with the raw spontaneous creativity I enjoyed when I first got into making music.

This was a turning point. Until then my ambitions had been to express my aesthetic fantasies to the world — the archetypal artistic pursuit — but now I had a problem and I wanted to fix it. This is the key difference between the artistic and entrepreneurial mindsets.

Artistry starts with a dream, entrepreneurship starts with a problem.

I wanted to find a way of approaching musical creativity that bypassed all the stuff I didn’t like about working in the music industry, the things were making me disconnected and unhappy.

• long periods alone in a dark studio perfecting tracks
• waiting for months for my records to come out
• having to tour all the time to promote them
• the large gulf between ‘artists’ and ‘fans’

Becoming focussed on a problem and its solutions was a turning point. It made me lift my head up and look around rather than dive ever deeper into my inner world which I could no longer rely on as my sole source of creative guidance and happiness. I now wanted to make an impact on the world by solving problems for myself and other people rather than just selling my artistic vision.

My first attempts at working this way were pretty clunky and mostly involved solutions that only really worked for me. Initially I wanted to transform the music industry into an improvisation-first world by becoming an improvising-only artist and inspiring everyone else to join in. Fairly delusional! It was another artistic vision — but as I pursued it, talking about it at conferences, vlogging, persuading agents, festivals and clubs to book an artist who hadn’t made a record in the last 5 years, I learned about my folly. I didn’t have my head up to see what the real problems were in the world. All I needed to do was ask people “would you like become a live-improvising artist?” and I would have learned very quickly that very few people actually want to do this!

Since then I’ve slowly begun to understand that really solving real problems involves constantly asking real people the right questions. It involves looking out when I want to look in and learning all the time. This doesn’t come naturally to me. My default position is to spin into an excited vortex around my dreams and hope to pull other people into that energy. I don’t think this fundamental tendency of mine will change in this lifetime and nor do I want it to as it’s a great motivator to set out on a path of discovery. But the artistic urge will only take me the first few steps. Very quickly after the initial inspiration I’ve learned that I have to get out of my own way and start asking questions if I want to be in with a chance of creating real value in the world.

3 years ago I founded Endlesss which is now my main focus. Like everything I’ve ever done it started with a dream but it very quickly became about asking questions, identifying problems I hadn’t even thought of and learning… a monumentally humbling amount of learning. So far it’s been a beautiful journey at the border between looking in and looking out — and as we approach our soft launch in the next few months I’m sure even more opportunities to learn will show up.

Endlesss.fm is a virtual place for spontaneous collaborative music-making. We’re soft-launching soon. Sign up at Endlesss.fm Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook

Follow me here @timexile to read my irregular articles about the artrepreneurial life. Please spare some finger time for some applause if you think my words are worth it!

Today is a very exciting day. I’m thrilled to announce Endlesss.fm — a new platform for music-making inspired by my most enjoyable experiences as a producer, performer and improvisor.

Over the last couple of years I’ve been working with some talented friends researching and prototyping a fresh approach to music creation. We’re getting close to something really special. We’ll be talking more about what we’re building and why as we gear up to launch our first products. Right now it’s time to step out of our lab, say “hello world” and invite you to join us on our journey. We want your help to make this yours!

If you love to get lost in making music head to endlesss.fm and request an invite to be part of our limited first wave of users when we start to roll out.

As a musician and technologist I’m fascinated by the potential of musical creativity to bring joy whether we experience it alone or with friends, as a beginner or an expert. Moments like these bring us into closer connection with ourselves and our fellow humans. They can be the peak experiences of our lives. They’re what Endlesss is all about.

My musical journey has touched on many kinds of experience: learning the violin as a kid, teaching myself to DJ as a teen, making records in the studio or playing live on stage. The peak moments of all these experiences have been characterised by the flow state. When I get caught up thinking about the results of what I’m doing I get distracted and doubtful and the results get worse. But when I’m in the flow state all this disappears, I feel weightlessly immersed in creativity and forget about the results while the results magically improve. This is what Endlesss is all about. We’re taking an enjoyment-first approach to instrument-building.

15 years ago my quest for the flow state inspired me to build the Flow Machine, an instrument for improvising electronic music. What I learned from building and performing with the Flow Machine and the conversations it sparked about other people’s musical experiences have been the main inspiration behind Endlesss.

The history of the Flow Machine

When I conceived of the Flow Machine I was frustrated with the process of making records in the studio. I loved playing around with ideas but felt none of them were worth anything until they’d been arranged, mixed and mastered to perfection — the standard the music industry expected. It seemed 95% of my studio time was musical bureaucracy while I only wanted to express myself immediately and freely. As a violinist from an early age my first musical experiences all happened in the moment as live performances. I was used to getting my hands on and playing live but I wasn’t getting that experience with the electronic music I so loved to make.

I built the first Flow Machine in 2003 (it was called the Keymasher at the time). It was a glorified DJing tool that did a lot of the cool stuff that today’s DJing tools now allow you to do such as perform physically and mash tracks up.

Bit by bit I added new features that gave me power to do more. I only added features that were quick to use, needed no thought and were easily committed to muscle memory. Eventually it became a fully-fledged improvisation instrument for electronic music. I was intensely energised by the possibility of creating 5 minutes of music in 5 minutes. It was way more enjoyable than making a record which took days to make the same amount of music. And because it was a performance tool it was great on stage. I could make up previously unheard music in front of a live audience and adapt it to the acoustics, atmosphere and energy of the environment. Over the next few years the live shows I did with the Flow Machine would take me to perform in every continent and make connections with inspiring people in wonderful places.

After time my Flow Machine performances and the technology I was building to improve them became way more interesting to me than making records. I’d found a new role for music in my life, a new way of doing things. The next question to answer was “how can I share this experience?”. That’s where the story of Endlesss begins.

I’m incredibly excited to share more with you as we finish building our first products. Be sure to request an invite at endlesss.fm to be the first to get it and hear news as it breaks.

We’d also love to hear from you. Last year we started a Facebook group called ‘Project Rockpoool’ which is a haven for connecting and talking in-depth with fellow creators about our musical lives. Come and join the conversation and help us shape Endlesss.

More soon!

Tim & the Endlesss team

See the Facebook post

The biggest surprise was the huge number of people who said alleviating mental health issues was their main reason for making music.

Triple heart leap right there:

leap 1 — it’s such a shame so many suffer from mental illness

leap 2 — it’s so wonderful that making music offers a route to liberation

leap 3 — I’ve struggled myself with mental illness

So I thought I’d show some solidarity and tell my story. I hope it’s helpful.

I don’t really consider myself to have been seriously seriously mentally ill. I got to the front door of psychosis but never went in. I’ve been seriously depressed, in-bed-for-3-days, too-inert-to-carry-out-suicide-plans depressed but I’ve never been sectioned and always had enough strength to resist pretty much all drug-based treatment. I’m also fortunate in many ways. I have a loving family who always welcomed me back, who bent over backwards to give me a great education and bailed me out of many scrapes in many ways.

I was also fortunate to take getting better really seriously — a weird paradoxical side-effect of my wild narcissism. When I moved to Berlin in 2007 one factor was that the cheaper cost of living would allow me to afford proper therapy which was impossible to get on the NHS in the UK.

Narcissism was my big problem: I staked so much of my wellbeing on others’ perception of me and my music. That’s an unwinnable and painful game! Music is so subjective there will always be people who absolutely detest one person’s efforts, no matter how many people love it. And desperation for validation is obvious and repulsive from a mile off too. No matter how many hours I spent in the studio making sure every last transient was perfect as I could never master the art of charm. Charm comes from contentment not strife…

But that was the downside of my relationship between music and mental health. The plus side is way bigger. It goes beyond mental health. It’s a spiritual thing. It touches on something outside the stories of diagnoses, character traits and past trauma which define the sphere of mental health. When I’m absorbed in making music there’s nothing but the flow of sounds and the actions that create them. I have very little idea of who I am or how I relate to anything that’s going on now, has gone on in the past or will in the future. It doesn’t directly address anything associated with mental health but somehow, alchemically, it seems to transform it. Falling backwards into the flow state from the intense thought of mental disturbance is intensely nourishing.

Getting better has been a lot about unpicking my thirst for validation from the act of making music. It wasn’t quick and it will never be finished. It started when I admitted I had real problems and committed to taking responsibility for them myself rather than blaming them on others. I made big progress with my counsellor in Berlin who I saw fairly regularly for 3 years. That led me to a point where I had a much clearer picture of what I was and why I felt how I did.

Recently my path’s been more about finding a purpose beyond me — to work out how I can transform all the ingredients that make up this particular skinbag of flesh, bones and weird character traits into something that will leave the world in a better place than it found it. That needs an institutional context as it’s something that’s pretty much impossible to get a handle on through the lens of individualism. That’s why I practise within a Buddhist community. The Buddhist ideal is the end of suffering for all that lives. It makes suffering impersonal — something to respond to equally whether you see it in yourself or someone else.

I’m a lot more resilient than I was 15 years ago but the emotional tendencies are all still there. I still have suicidal thoughts under pressure and I still have a huge need for validation. But outside those tendencies there’s a new gap for seeing those age-old patterns in a new light. The very occasional desire to end it all has become my signpost that I’m about to die to an old, out-moded self and emerge into a better-attuned one that I couldn’t quite have imagined before. I’ll never really get beyond my attention-seeking but I figure that if that’s the case then I’ll do my best to make myself the best human I can be to attract attention to (FYI I massively have my work cut out on that one).

So if you ‘self-medicate’ with music-making or anything else creative I salute you. You’re doing a very good thing. I hope it brings you boundless joy and healing. And if you suffer from mental health issues I’d encourage you to get totally lost in something creative. You won’t be alone and it might make the world of difference.

Thanks for reading! I’ll be posting more soon about music, life and the things I get up to so follow and recommend. If you want to explore my improv world, head to my shop and download FLOWs for free. It’s a software instrument for exploring and manipulating recordings from my last 5 years of improv.

If you’d like me to come and improvise in front of an audience (yes I still do that!) get in touch with Chris @ littleBig Agency chris@lb-agency.net.

And sign up to my mailing list, learn more at timexile.com, tweet @timexile or find me on Facebook.

Making music to stay sane was originally published in Cuepoint on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

5 years ago I gave up making records to focus on improvising electronic music. I wanted to be a one man live-jamming revolution and transform the music industry. Hopelessly naive! But in discovering my naïveté I discovered a new way to think about music — as a game.

I came to improv 15 years ago, soon after I started releasing records. I’ve been creaking under the tension between the two ever since. I was playing improv shows in venues designed for artists to perform their well-known repertoire. Likewise I was scratching my head figuring out how to turn recordings of free-flowing improv into compositions which would work on a record.

For a long time I thought it was the grit in the oyster that might one day make a pearl. But there’s something structurally different about improv that was never going to fit in an industry built on consumptive entertainment.

The big difference with improv is…

It’s about me not you

But not quite how you think.

The recorded music industry is audience-focussed. By the time an artist is on album 3 or 4 their audience will buy tickets for their shows mainly to hear them play material they wrote years ago. I often spare a thought for bands who had huge success early in their career and are still trucking — how selfless they must be to nightly rekindle the enthusiasm for that 90s hit. How painful it must be when they can’t. Because that’s what the audience expects so the audience holds all the power. The performer must surrender totally to the audience’s expectation.

Improv is the opposite. It’s an invitation for the audience to push beyond their expectations. The performer has no hit singles or script to fall back on so the fate of the audience is entirely in the performer’s hands.

The performer holds all the power…

Improv needs the total surrender of the audience

But it’s not an ego-trip for the performer.

Improv is the domain of the id. It’s at its best when the stream of self-reflexive thought melts away and the flow-state takes over. Improv is like the play of a child — unbounded by concepts or even a sense of self and other. It’s a total immersion in experience, hyper-attuned to sensory data, completely tuned out of discursive thought.

Improv is impossible without getting lost in the flow-state. I remember terrifying experiences in front of hundreds, trying to come up with original music while besieged by ego-driven narrative. It’s impossible! So paradoxically improv also demands the complete surrender of the performer.

Let’s recap…

Improv needs the total surrender of the audience + the total surrender of the performer

But you can’t just get up on stage and ask the audience to surrender.

The conditions have to be just so. Everyone in the room has to feel the right way for it to work. It’s very demanding of the audience and often doesn’t work. They must be charmed and it takes more than a performer to charm them. It takes the venue, the promoter, the tone of the copy.

The whole context of improv needs to be onboard…

Improv needs a different context

But it can’t hijack a culture.

The jazz world is a great blueprint for a context of musical improv. When I set out on my quixotic mission I looked a lot to jazz and imagined transplanting its aesthetic to a modern electronic context. I wanted to jazz-hijack the recorded music industry — to co-opt a pop-minded demographic and shoe-horn improv into their sphere of acceptability.

But the crucial bit I missed in my naïveté was that audiences and performers evolve symbiotically. A performer can’t helicopter into a cultural scenario without assiduously studying its vocabulary and rituals. If they ever manage to do this they’ve been indoctrinated by the time they have. Likewise audiences are bound by a tribal pact which conserves unwritten rules for how the music they enjoy should be enjoyed. Even a free jazz audience expects not to expect.

So it’s actually impossible to impose the values of improv on an audience that values songs they know…

My quixotic dream is over! The improv revolution, quashed by the pressures of cultural norms!

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself” — Rumi

But while weeping in the rubble I remember that improv is all about me but not quite how I think. It’s about the id not the ego. The id is immersed in the world of sensations and passing phenomena, paddling out to catch waves of experience.

The id doesn’t need an audience. The id is its own audience.

Actually…

Improv doesn’t need an audience

But the ego does.

Once upon a time I was an insufferable wannabe. I’d carry out relentless demo-bombing campaigns against labels, deploying the phone and email regiments to finish the job. Heads of A&R could only surrender. Embarrassingly convinced by the supremacy of my musical genius I was looking for an audience and never questioned what all my fuss was about.

In hindsight it was a validation thing. I wanted as much validation as I could get. I’m still a recovering narcissist but back then I was at the peak of my habit. The only way I knew to sure up my inflated self opinion was to doggedly pursue the biggest channels for my music. It worked to a certain extent but after the brouhaha I wound up with a deep unconscious belief that musical joy must be witnessed by as many as possible to be valid.

It’s the senselessness of this belief that’s been the biggest discovery on my journey and it’s so great to be free of it. I’ve realised the value of jamming for jamming’s sake, that there’s a way to enjoy music-making without the audience or the goals that are so often barriers to enjoying the creative moment for its own sake. To approach music-making like this is to approach it like a game.

Improv is a game

And I want to make it as playable as I can.

Ironically the pursuit of the ultimate improv before an audience has spurred me on to develop technology, methods and psychological resilience way beyond anything I’d have achieved had I just been improvising for my own pleasure. So although painful at times I’m very grateful for how this journey has unfolded in the end. Knowing that the real value of improv is in the experience of doing it has given me a huge burst of energy to explore the idea of music as a game and I feel I have the tools to explore what that really means.

For now all I know is that the only way to win the game of music is to get deeply lost in the flow state. The rest is to be discovered over the next few years as I set out on this new leg of the journey, posing as an unlikely hybrid between a musician, thinker, technologist and entrepreneur.

Thanks for reading! I’ll be posting more soon about music, life and the things I get up to so follow and recommend. If you want to explore my improv world, head to my shop and download FLOWs for free. It’s a software instrument for exploring and manipulating recordings from my last 5 years of improv.

If you’d like me to come and improvise in front of an audience (yes I still do that!) get in touch with Chris @ littleBig Agency chris@lb-agency.net.

And sign up to my mailing list, learn more at timexile.com, tweet @timexile or find me on Facebook.

5 years of improv taught me that music can be a game was originally published in Cuepoint on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.