Survival Strategies

Making Music When It Feels Like a Chore

Sometimes making music feels less like fun and more like a chore. The process should be satisfying—something that pulls you forward and leaves you lighter but instead, it can feel heavy, like effort without the reward.

I hate music. I hate making music. I’d rather sleep. I’d rather disappear into quiet, into rest, into the kind of peace that doesn’t ask me to be creative on command.

And yet I can’t stop.

It’s strange how the mind can complain loudly. I sit down, tell myself this is pointless—somewhere underneath the complaining—there’s a rhythm that won’t let me stop—press play. I open the project. I stare at the empty space where sound is supposed to be and then it happens. Maybe it isn’t enjoyment. Maybe it’s survival. Maybe it’s my oxygen—press play again.

Boundaries, Breath, and Survival Strategies

Art dissolves when you stop treating it like a category. Duchamp’s breath-as-practice idea fits audio perfectly: work that doesn’t need prestige, permission, or a fixed identity. Sound has already lived through its own “crisis of painting”—the moment when the medium had to justify itself again. Once you accept that recording can be a room, a loop, a memory, a file, a mistake, the boundary disappears and the practice becomes present tense. Digital tools and AI only amplify that openness: they speed up sketching, testing, transforming, but the human part—taste, intent, context—remains the anchor.

What matters now is survival. Creative projects turn into admin, admin turns into pressure, and suddenly the thing you built becomes the thing that drains you. That’s not failure, it’s a systems problem. Strategy should keep you alive: protect your sessions, automate the noise, finish small things, reduce unnecessary decisions, keep momentum without burning out. Let disciplines blend, let boundaries fall away, build a workflow you can actually live inside—so audio stays breath and not the collapse.

What I Want Music to Be

I want the process to be fulfilling again—less like dragging myself across the finish line and more like stepping into a flowing stream. Every session doesn't have to be beautiful, maybe just showing up until the weight lifts is good enough?

The image above is of a cassette release by situation Two and Zig Zag:  Gunfire and Pianos