Dolo Jones (@iamdolojones) • Hey

Publications

GM Electric Friends! Here’s one I made earlier on my Deluge… hope you like it! What’s your fave piece of gear to perform on?
Can you name this 90’s House classic? 🤔 Wait for it… 😁
Nothing to see here… Just a fly riding a snail?!! 🪰 🐌 I wonder what they are saying? 🤔 …and if they know the owl and the pussycat? 🤔🤔🤔
GM!
Stories are source code. Music is processed pain.
The hours spent here over the years… 🤩🎧🫠 *Piccadilly Records, Manchester* Where’s your favourite record store?
You’ve just been gifted a guitar. What’s the first song you learn to play?
Still my favourite piece of gear ever… The Deluge by Synthstrom Audible. What’s your Desert Island synth?
Artwork and promo I made for John C Pollard’s latest release, “Stay Forever”
A song about long times from a long time ago 😁 https://youtu.be/UCZFK6DaVrs?feature=shared
Opt out of convention. All the most compelling stuff is visible just over the edge …but it requires you being slightly off balance.
You know you’re a producer when… You get distracted packing up to move house… 📦
A quick sketch I did of J. Cole… no apologies, still one of my fave emcees! Track ID: Dolo Jones - ‘Control’
Once upon a time…
3D cameras are actually 4D if you think about it.
As creative people it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by AI. But… Maybe we’ve been looking at the AI vs Us debate all wrong. Attached to this post is a picture of an ant colony filled with cement and then excavated. Each of the resulting structures… corridors, chambers of different sizes and descriptions have unique properties. It almost looks like it was created by one highly intelligent being as opposed to millions of slightly less intelligent ones. In any case I’m guessing you’d agree that it is a natural thing. Perhaps then all human made buildings are natural things? In this context perhaps even AI is a natural thing. If not? Why not? Interested to hear your thoughts.
Once humans have long left the planet, perhaps for other planets, perhaps not… I wonder whether the AI that is left over will ponder if it had a creator?
Fiiiiiinalllly! 🙌🏾🙌🏾🙌🏾
A video I made pre-AI that I now realise would have been way easier post-AI. Track ID: Dolo Jones - Skylines Watch the full video here: https://youtu.be/kWt4ldh8vL0?feature=shared
Some of the gear that’s made it in and out of my studio over the years. I absolutely love gear and feel inspired by it. Counter intuitively though the pieces of music that have done the most for me have been made on the most minimal setups. Best piece of gear is your brain right?! 🧠🤪😎 With that said I LOVE seeing people’s setups so hit me with some pics!!
I think I’m starting to understand this place, and I like it! 🙌🏾
You often hear about manifesting from those who won the numbers game. Plenty of people manifest without anything to show for it. While it’s true that those who say they can and those who say they can’t are both usually right… Determination trumps everything. Just takes a bit longer.
I’ve loved making music this whole time. Through vinyl Through CDs Through Streaming Through NFTs Through AI And whatever comes after that.
Hello Real World!
For anyone interested in the relationship between story and art… The following video features a super interesting tale from @lens/blakefinucane surrounding the global enigma that is, Damien Hirst. His art, and Blake’s story are really intriguing and reminded me... I have my own story about Damien Hirst. …or do I?? I was once on a design placement at a studio where someone sent the word ‘Damage’ to celebrities and artists as part of a project to get something back from them representing the word. Lots of well known people responded, either in an email or by actually making some art. Hirst was one of the recipients and apparently said that he couldn’t send anything back as it would have implications due to the value and scarcity of his work. A few weeks later however the guy from the studio did receive an anonymous package, which by process of elimination and style, appeared to be something from Hirst himself. It was a music cassette tape case. Inside it, instead of the cassette itself were dozens of cigarette butt ends stacked together in a manner not dissimilar from the spotted paintings Hirst is famous for. This was long before the paintings were first seen. Who knows, maybe this was a precursor to them conceptually, the idea still brewing in Hirst’s mind? Perhaps he even smoked the cigarettes while making some of his more publicly known work, we’ll never know. I’m not certain whether the guy who received this tape case piece still has it or the rest of his unusually arrived at collection but I always enjoyed the mystery surrounding how this particular artwork came about. Could it perhaps be that a degree of contentiousness arguably add to a work’s notoriety longer term, attracting a different type of intrigue around it? Maybe there’s a certain kind of value in that? What do you think? Can an artwork’s questionable validity ever add to its value as opposed to detract from it?
If you could have been in any band from throughout music history which would it have been?
Been using Blockchain tech since 2012 and this is the MOST excited I’ve been about this stuff since then!
Nature is like an unfathomably complex computer. What we can experience in our human filter with our five senses is not all there is to experience. Just look at the animal kingdom with its sonar, thermal and infrared. The map is not the territory. AI opens the aperture on existence even wider. But… Remember. The purpose IS the process. Forget that and it’s over.
I believe in decentralisation. It’s almost existential at this point. Centre of gravity needs to shift in so many parts of life and now is a critical crossroads for it. So ye, I guess I believe in Web3.
Music Artists… While making music you need to be V U L N E R A B L E. When releasing music you need to feel I N V I N C I B L E. It’s the only way to both access emotion and protect yourself from it. If only people knew how much ego death artists go through. They’d be astonished. And yet those committed to their art have to maintain enough ego to keep creating things that make people FEEL. It’s a tight rope. No wonder when things collapse for musicians they call it ‘falling off’. But… There is nothing scarier than a life without risk.
Make stuff. Forget who’s watching. Forget who’s not watching. Then. Make more stuff.
The last few days have highlighted how important story is in music. The wake created by two huge artists in Rap going back and forth on records has been almost unavoidable. This proves something core to the industry built around music. Whatever new tech comes along, stories are safe. Keep telling them.
Music Artists... In 2024, what's the optimum song length?
Will Storytelling Save Creatives From The AI 'Threat'? – A Story. (Featuring Drake and Kendrick) A man carving elephants by a roadside was once asked how he made them. His reply was simple.“I take a piece a of wood, and remove everything that doesn’t look like an Elephant.” And you know what? Maybe he’s right. An ‘Elephant’ is essentially an idea that is agreed upon – a story we are all telling about an animal with big ears and a long trunk that, ‘never forgets’. However the actual entity that we experience exists without that name and story attached. This particular man’s carvings weren’t an exact likeness, they were elephant-flavoured riffs on a theme, an impression told through the subjective eyes of one person. Maybe all stories are this. What is being revealed in a story is simply a specific vantage point on everything there is to experience… Everything that ALREADY 'is'. Perhaps storytelling is a subtractive process, rather than an additive one. Strip away everything that doesn’t help you tell YOUR story and there could be a masterpiece just waiting for you to uncover it. But wait, there's a new storyteller in town... And he goes by the name, AL. Oh wait, I read that wrong... A.I. Or to give him his full name, Artificial Intelligence. As creative people it’s easy to feel disrupted by increasingly headline-grabbing tales of just how creative AI can be right now, never mind it's future potential. Will this render OUR art obsolete? The short answer is... No. AI is an extension of our story. Another vantage point on the underlying story of everything that exists whether we observe it or not. Bear with me on this slightly sharp turn but... You only have to look at the latest highly-publicised Rap beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar to know how important STORY is. This disagreement, which sees two of modern music's heavyweights at loggerheads flared up just weeks ago. Compton born rapper, Kendrick dropped a verse on another artist's track – "Like That" by Future and Metro Boomin – a song that sits at the top of the US Billboard music charts at the time of writing. Lamar's lyrics called into question Drake and fellow superstar J. Cole's apparent inclusion in "The Big 3" of Rap – Kendrick referring to himself as being a class apart from his contemporaries. The need to unpack all of this is testament to the power of context, and therefore story. Enter AI... As if to highlight the key role of story further, Drake has now posted his latest response to Kendrick's disparaging comments. "Taylor Made Freestyle", sees Drake using apparently AI-generated emulations of the vocal stylings of West Coast Rap legends Snoop and Tupac to deliver lyrics that he and his team have put together to lay counter-claim to the top spot in what is surely music's most competitive genre. Despite AI's sophistication, none of the above would arguably carry as much weight in the absence of the backstories that the named individuals come with in relation to their fellow West Coaster, Kendrick. Even the title-referenced artist, Taylor Swift has relevance in Drake's chosen angle of attack. Without story, diss tracks thrown back and forth would exist in a vacuum – all technical merit with no narrative attached. Far less compelling. Back to OUR story... Even if we are not personally trying to charge up our after-burners and roast any detractors of our own endeavours, as creatives we can still use AI to assist us. Sticking with the analogy, perhaps AI can be seen as a rocket capable of blasting us towards whatever destination we feel holds enough merit to be a stopping off point on our own creative journey. It’s up to us to see and use AI as this rocket ship, where once we had a dingy. The ship is taking off whether we like it or not – having a ticket to ride, or even be the pilot when we choose is a bonus. You can of course cross whole oceans using nothing but a small, self-powered boat. But…If you are productive enough right now to make a music track as one person... then with AI assistance you could be productive enough to make a whole feature film. Again, the key thing that makes either compelling is... say it with me... STORY! AI's role as a simulator of experiences that it has not personally lived through perhaps helps us to understand the nature of reality differently. Ultimately Humans are a filter for experience, AI is another. All stories that could ever be told, as opposed to those attached to actual lived experiences, are now, more arguably than ever, out there in the ether. It's Everything Everywhere All At Once, or whatever other multiverse themed movie concept you'd prefer I illustrate my point with. AI uses Large Language Models we've laid the groundwork for to access configurations of ideas and remix them, potentially even creating it's 'own' in a more 'real' way at a point. But where do ideas themselves come from? Hmm. Anyway, before we get too philosophical, my point is this.. It's paramount that you imbue YOUR stories with the rich uniqueness of YOUR own personal vantage point. It may now be the only real separator for making creative work truly compelling. Looking at things this way, creativity is a distillation process, filtering away all unnecessary information. Counter-intuitive perhaps, but similar to the way some branches of meditation talk about the emptying of mind rather than the filling up of it being the only path to true enlightenment. Back here on Earth... Whether you're trying to carve an Elephant (whatever that is) or diss the living daylights out of your next-door neighbour (he is pretty annoying) – perhaps the best art, that resonates with most authenticity – lies in cutting away everything that doesn't look like a true representation of our own experiences. Being open to NEW experiences and staying authentic to our own interpretation of them could be the key ingredient to making stories that make others want to listen.
How Dark Mode is not the default UX on all platforms I'll never know. The alternative is like sitting in your living room at night with the big light on. 😆
A track I made that really helped me connect with people a few years back was "Stuck In A Groove". It was about pushing past the things in life that aren't important, those things that can make you lose focus. Reminding yourself that the blue sky exists above the clouds at all times can help you shift perspective and 'un-stuck' yourself. Might mint the full original on here when I get to grips with things.
This time feels different.
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