"WHAT IS FMT'S MUSIC?" An Essay by TI - Part II

For Part I please see the previous post.

You can read the whole series of this essay here (also linked in the list on the right).

And the second.

Our music is the ultimate Market-In (where the customers are ourselves, ie., the pursuit of the music we want to listen to).

Another unique thing is that "the listeners are ourselves".

You might think, "No, it is not necessarily unique because there are other musicians and artists who think like that."

Of course, artists, not just musicians, are basically egoistic when it comes to creative work. Most of them would say, "I'm going to do what I want to do, and I'm going to do it the way I want to do it."

However, I think such musicians are also 100% on stage when they perform live, and they probably write and perform while assuming that they are on stage when they record. At the time, they are probably imagining a packed house of listeners.

At the very least, when you're recording, few people should assume "I were pumping my fist up at my live performance and dancing along on the ride" or "I were listening to my music within the audience in a swoon".

(One might imagine the creators of Ambient and the like to be "myself at home in the comfort of my own home," though.)

In contrast, we also create music with an "audience" in mind, but that audience is us (only). We always say that we don't want to play live, but that's because we want to be in the audience and hear it live in the first place.

So, when I'm making music, I'm not an artist, but rather a listener. I create the sounds that I imagine I want to hear as a listener.

We're doing what we love, but that doesn't mean we're doing what we love as expressive people. We’re just listeners, creating the music we like and listening to it the way we like it.

And often the desires of the listener, the recipient of the expression, are more "twisted" and “grotesque” than those of the creator.

For example, don't you want to have "just three burger patties, triple the cheese, but skipping the tomatoes and lettuce, and a large serving of fries"? Or even "pull the patties out of the hamburger and make it vegetarian. Either of these might be possible at Burger King, perhaps.

But that's not possible in music. We have no choice but to create it ourselves. So we are creating our own.

However, such things sometimes turn out to be bizarre or grotesque. Maybe that's why people say that our music is "unique" (or weird).

But even if there is some weirdness around us, we are quite happy to listen to every track we have ever released.

Our music is not the Product-Out music of the artist, it is the ultimate Market-In music (for the sole largest users in our own market).

Our stance in presenting our music is to give everyone else "music that I can say with confidence that I want to listen to," and I'm happy if people like the music that I like too.

If our show were to take place, we would be sitting in the audience together, facing the same direction as the audience.