This is a companion piece to an overview of the Water & Music Wavelengths conference we published last week. To read that story click here.

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In 2020, during the early days of the pandemic, I interviewed the experimental guitarist Elliott Sharp. Most of our conversation was spent commiserating the loss of live music, discussing our general need to share spaces, and the ineffable pull that we feel toward certain people and ideas. Indelibly, he named that pull “pheromonal handshaking.” 

“I’ve always believed that creative forces involve a certain amount of chemical mixing,” he said. “How many bands were made because you got along with someone? Someone you just resonated with? It’s a very important part of why people get together to make music, to make art, to build families, to build communities…resonance is really what it’s all about.”

As life moved online and communities exchanged parks and concerts for Discord threads and livestreams, it’s an idea that’s never quite left my mind.

Two weekends ago it turned up again during a roundtable at Water & Music’s inaugural Wavelengths summit in New York. About 250 people gathered at 99 Scott Studio – a nearly 5,000-square foot event space on the industrial border of Brooklyn and Queens – to tackle the myriad issues and innovations at the intersection of music and tech.

After Water & Music founder Cherie Hu delivered her state of the union address on the main stage, about 40 of us headed to the intimate Currents room, where Austin Robey (Metalabel), Mark Redito (Songcamp), Nicole d’Avis (previously Seed Club) and Kevin Duquette (Topshelf Records) explored community-building and decentralization through the lens of history, tracing precedence through the hearts of grassroots movements, co-ops and artist-focused independent labels.  

Left to right: Redito, Robey, d'Avis, Duquette, Davies photo - cxy

The space buzzed with caffeinated minds and – indeed – resonance, cultivated the night before at the summit’s launch party at the neighboring club Elsewhere. Twelve hours later, the morning sun beamed through skylights and broad windows, casting warm light across the brick- and cement-walled room. Plants were peppered around the perimeter, and a disco ball hung between black iron ceiling beams. 

There were no mics, so we had to lean in to catch the conversation – moderated by Kaitlyn Davies, who leads membership at Friends with Benefits (FWB) and curatorial partnerships at Refraction – as the roundtable sought to distill the ever important through line of community.

“We all are very protective of the creative act and of that way of being, but you have to eat,” Davies said. “The through line is that you're all trying to protect these creative acts but also trying to get people paid for those acts. Can you talk about that tension?”

d’Avis, who launched several projects at the culture-web3 intersection at Seed Club, said, “I'm a glutton for punishment in terms of the through line of working and making communities work from URL to IRL.” She continued, “what got me interested in web3 is [when] the lines become blurred between artists and technologists and I'm surrounded by proof of that. But how do you have artists building the systems while also having time to make art? It’s always a problem in DIY scenes. It's hard.”

Metalabel’s Robey chimed in. “The creative hierarchy of needs starts with money. The critique of socialism is that it takes too many nights and weekends,” he said to laughs, “but it's a necessary step to achieve those baseline creative needs."

Projects like Metalabel and Songcamp are about both individuals and the collective community, Davies said. “In not centering one artist, do you feel that’s shifted balances?” she asked.

Songcamp’s Redito said, “the concept of music and artistry have always been interdependent.” He described Songcamp as a “pop-up production agency with a single vision” where “the goal was to obscure individual artistry but work together. We were creating a space for scenes to emerge, even for a moment.”

Davies noted that there’s a big difference between the PR apparatus at a major label and a grassroots community. “When you think about the machine that powers Beyoncé, they're not a scene – they're people who work for Universal,” she said. “Just because you worked on the project doesn't mean that you're part of the community. It's the suspension of those things, it’s the space between. I don't know if any of the scenes we talked about paid anyone's bills – they created a space for people to be humans.”

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It’s an intriguing exploration – the true constituents of a community. Where does the threshold lie between entreé and guest? Between employee and comrade? 

“The people building the infrastructure also have an opinion of how things should be,” Redito said. “What is a community in the context of Metalabel or Topshelf or Songcamp? The community? The artists? The workers?”

“Collective creation we've got. Collective decision-making – that slowed us down,” he continued. “With the operations, it becomes more muddled and takes more time to get to the first step.”

Along the way, even that first step can become muddled. Is it solidifying the mission? Is there agreement about the governance structure best suited to achieve the mission? Or is it all simply a vehicle for the culture that emerges in the space between? 

“Cultural spaces are governed,” said Robey, who through his writing, teaching and projects like Ampled and Unnamed Fund has played an important role in shaping new (and contemporizing familiar) decision-making models. The rules that govern communities, he said, are often rooted in real-life interactions and semiotic signals. “In the digital world it's harder to translate those subtle physical rules,” he said. 

“Up until now, have any of these digital tools made your decision-making easier?” asked Davies.

“Quadratic voting has – measuring the intensity of conviction,” Robey said. “Is voting in Snapshot” – a platform often used by decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) like FWB that enables on-chain decision-making – “performative democracy?”

FWB

At this stage, at least, there’s still a lot of legwork that has to go into DAO decision making. “There's a social layer to governance,” Redito said. “I'm talking about a more legible way, getting to a quorum. It fucking sucks. I have to reach out to people to vote. ‘Please vote.’ These are artists – do they want this? Some do, but others not so much. Is ownership governance rights or economic rights? Governance requires a lot of accountability and work.”

Music isn’t homogenous, Davies pointed out. “You have to meet people where they're at,” she said. “The tech and music worlds are very different spaces. There are music scenes that will never have a Twitter page and there are tech platforms that should never co-opt artists.” 

And then there are the artist technologists that blur those identities, because “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house,” as Audre Lord once said, and who else besides artists will safeguard that delicate balance between the sanctity of the creative act and its remuneration. 

Bitcoin, for instance, introduced a new tool that could functionally displace the master’s house, challenging the centralized banking system and the roles of rent-seeking intermediaries. But the coin’s inherent financialization has incited egregious wealth grabs, obscuring its potential with hype and greed. Is the blockchain a solution that deftly marries governance and economic rights or, ironically, another blocker of the community through line?

“I think the built-in financial systems of web3 might be incompatible with [community],” said Robey. “I don't see web3 enabling things like that at scale.”

Topshelf Records’s Duquette echoed Davies’s point about the diversity within the music world. “Community doesn't scale – these are niche things,” he said. “There are so many niches, some artists we work with don't give a fuck about the other niches we're working with. A lot of the time we’re bringing in an artist and Topshelf itself isn't part of that community. We work with artists all over the world – there are micro-scenes all over the world. We put our whole roster in one Airbnb at SXSW. The only through line is they all share the same label – it's the intentional curation of [Topshelf].” 

d’Avis noted the “really interesting tension” of why some groups form and others don’t. “The right people are the people in the room,” she said. “They decide what success looks like. Whatever comes out of that is success, because that's what the people in the room decided.” 

“We're here because of all the authentic human connections made by Cherie and the rest of Water & Music,” she added. “The difference is these things can start digitally and web3 can support that, but it's not going to take the place of that. You have to do the hard human work regardless.”

Davies summed it up with a quip, “maybe web3 music is about the friends we made along the way.” Then she added, “that started as a joke but I'm not sure it is.”

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On my flight back to London the next day, while lost somewhere in the shuffle of my saved Spotify songs, Nico Muhly’s 19-minute composition “Throughline” started playing. What a coincidence, I thought. And I listened intently to the whole thing. 

Animated bells and strings open the piece, playing discrete snippets of melody. The tone is fervent but unrefined, like the innocence of youth. Suddenly the individual strings tilt into solemn harmony, shared gestures of strung thought. And then in the deep, the timpani resound, sending the symphony back to chatter – this time led by the winds. New harmony emerges, then dissipates once more. 

Over and over again, this pattern repeats, as human voices, marimbas and a piano join the fray. There’s tension and growth, but no clear theme. New rhythms and motifs are tested and then cast aside in a consistent evolution of moments that oscillate between detached thought and collective deliberation. 

At 35,000 feet, somewhere over the Atlantic, I asked myself, “what is the through line?” It can only be the people in the room, the symphony united by Muhly’s composition, the 250 strong that showed up to Wavelengths to form a scene, even for a moment. 

If Elliot Sharp had been at Wavelengths he might have recognized the public spaces themselves that enable the interplay, as he put it, of “social acoustics.” It’s the chance conversation at a record store, the sweaty camaraderie of a punk show mosh pit, the whispered lineage of ‘my god, have you heard this yet?’ 

It really is about the friends we made along the way – the people and ideas that can span mere moments or entire lifetimes. The outcomes are always uncertain, but there are some resonances strong enough to lure people across oceans for a summit dedicated to protecting the creative act in all ways – spiritually, financially, emotionally.

The through line is the sense that we made more progress doing it together than we would have alone. It’s the reason we show up to shake someone’s hand.