"My personality is probably not in the notes themselves but in the spaces between," says Kolin Zein. "Notes are what I know. In between is who I am."
There is a working method hiding in that. Six artists here describe composition as something closer to reception than construction - and several of them have built deliberate constraints to keep their own intentions out of the way.
Kolin Zein
Kolin Zein works in ambient, drone, noise and free jazz, and describes his process as "forgetting I'm here to 'create music' and becoming a huge antenna in the form of a human with a 6-stringed piece of wood." His latest was an exercise in removing his ego from the piece entirely so it could write itself - he had to follow rather than initiate. He learned guitar originally because it was a shortcut to being popular at his public school, which he says worked wonders. The classical Russian composers his parents played him to sleep did the longer-term damage.
Time. Space. Repeat.
"In a word, improvisation." Time. Space. Repeat. often finds the final takes are improvised noodling that took shape halfway through. His new album Consequence came out of a 31-day writing challenge, which he does not recommend: "It was manic. Trying to write and record an album in 31 days is not something I'd recommend unless you want to seriously provoke your family members." He started at three or four years old by ripping off the Doctor Who theme, and is candid about the rest of the job - he is awful at promotion and will sing the praises of everyone else's music before his own.
Veln
Veln, from Galway, is blunt about how little order there is. "There's no order to it, truly. The closest thing to order is making a deliberate effort to sit down and write! But even still, I trash most of the riffs." The first track on the latest release was written for his other band, Neamh-mharbh, and repurposed because it was too good to let slip away. His promotion advice is the most concrete anyone offers: make good music first, then send it to a PR company before you release it.
Okayden
Okayden alternates between the two modes rather than picking one. "Sometimes I don't have any ideas when I start creating, and the song comes to me as I start improvising. Other times I come in with a full idea or melody already imagined." The music carries elements from jazz bands, musical theatre, and growing up in the country - he makes a point of including at least one in each track. He came to releasing music having wanted to for years, too nervous to perform in front of strangers.
immortal ebt
Danila Kozyrev is a writer, painter and musician of Belarusian descent, and describes music as arriving "more similar to breathing than something I had to think about." Albums accumulate rather than get planned: he writes what comes and over time it adds up. The constraint on the last one was money - he paid violinists and cellists to play sheet music he had written, could only afford one piece recorded properly, and used VSTs for the rest.
Arcane Synthetic
Arcane Synthetic is in Auckland with his fiancée and five-month-old son, acting and making music. "I'm neurodivergent so never suffer creative block. I love trying new things endeavouring to create music like I've never heard." The project began during COVID boredom, from imagining a time traveller. His most recent album is all collaborations, which he says changed him - mentally, emotionally, physically.
Following, not initiating
The constraints differ - a 31-day deadline, a budget that covers one real cellist, a decision to follow the piece rather than steer it - but they do the same job. They make it harder to impose a plan and easier to notice what the material is doing.
Zein's antenna is the clearest statement of it, and Veln's trash pile is the honest companion. Most of the riffs do not survive. The method is not that everything arrives perfect; it is that you stay out of the way long enough to tell which ones did.