MAKING MUSIC WITH CHARLES BUKOWSKI
I've published my first piece of original music under my MachinesMachines moniker. It's a short, plunderphonic-inspired track called Ancient, Modern. It's part of an EP I'm working on separate to all the games stuff which is inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin's unrivalled fantasy series, Earthsea.
This track, however, isn't so much about wizards and dragons and the Old Speech, rather, it's a meditation on making art for an asynchronous and disparate audience. I saw a webcomic the other day which compared the feeling of '20 views' on a piece of art to 20 people being in a room and enjoying it together. And while these aren't exactly comparable (especially on an internet that has devolved into a velodrome for data-scraping bots), the idea of setting expectations for work outside of the online creator economy really resonated with me.
Twenty people
— Xiaoyi (@cleefouti.bsky.social) 9 May 2026 at 00:15
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The kind of music I want to make is the kind of music that will not find a wide audience. I like that about it. It's a product of my amateur approach to music production. It's noisy because I use cheap cables. I feel really strongly about making music that a GenAI system couldn't even attempt to replicate. How would it catch the lack of a clear time signature, the choice of sampled language, the lofi-ness from my noisy distortion pedals?
As an archivist, I'm also compelled to document my process of making the track. Inspired loosely by the idea of performative 'posting' online and even the act of producing 'content' as a performance, I turned to Charles Bukowski who is many things (a writer, poet, asshole), he is a performer. The interview I used for the track has him explaining how much he loathes being a 'known' writer and his techniques for performing a more unhinged affect than is true to himself. This interview is later in his career when he'd curbed the substance abuse.
Now although his words are prescient and keen and speak to a sort of unease I feel about making things and putting them out for no one to read or listen to, part of his inclusion in this track is that his voice is great. It oscillates between clarity and mumbles, hiding meanings in throwaway jokes. It's the voice I needed to express that making things is hard and sharing them with people is harder but harder than that is sharing it and no one seeing it at all. What's the point in performing if no one is there to see it? That's the question I wanted to answer for myself.