In 2018, legendary experimental composer Jon Hassell released Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One). The album centers the painting concept “pentimento,” in which earlier images, forms and strokes reappear as different elements in the final composition.

Various scenes from Hassell’s life appear in both the music and on the record’s cover art – a woman from a pulp magazine cover in India, a superimposed Landsat image of the Nile, the venetian blinds in Hassell’s room and the plants outside his bedroom window. “You could call it collage, but I call it a demonstration, a psychological pentimento,” Hassell told me in an interview for Vice. “It says what I want to say.” 

Over the past few months, Jamie Reddington – who makes music as Sound of Fractures – has been rolling out his project Scenes, where the UK-based electronic artist and producer invites listeners to contribute their favorite memories and pictures in response to his music. It’s reminiscent of Listening, tapping into music’s capacity to conjure pieces of the self – to act as contextual trace and memory cue. But Reddington goes one step further, inviting others to help build his psychological pentimento.

“Music isn't just about sound; it's about the memories and emotions they evoke. Scenes is an effort to give a tangible form to this abstract connection and capture it in something we can recognize,” he said. “Each song and its accompanying Scene will populate a digital gallery – an archive that's a living testament to how music interacts with life moments in today's social media-dominated era."

At the end of the experiment, Reddington will choose one submission to be each track’s primary artwork, encapsulating it as a digital collectable that forever links artist and listener.

When creating a Scene of my own, I was prompted to think of a “carefree” memory while listening to the Sound of Fractures song “Bubbles” – an effervescent track “about letting ourselves feel like we are 2 years old chasing bubbles.” The buoyant moments of my life – lying latent in my mind – burst into view and I found myself, once again, listening to pictures.

At some midpoint between artist and listener, Scenes resurrects the emotional connection that’s been buried in our passive stream-and-scroll environment. I sat down with Reddington to discuss how – through Scenes – he’s able to connect with people more meaningfully. The project offers an opportunity to “change the language” around success, he said, and to create new rails for experimentation so that artists can, indeed, say what they want to say.

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Reddington was born and raised in London. Both of his parents worked in music – his dad was a radio plugger and, before quitting to raise him, his mom was the Head of International at Island Records. “[My parents] said ‘don't trust the music industry – it's not a stable place,’” Reddington said. He dove in anyways.

As a boy he learned recorder and saxophone, and played bass in a band before finding his home in a sampler. His friend’s brother was a drum n bass producer and he used to sit in the living room and play Playstation while he made beats.

Inspired, Reddington and his friend started making indie music with drum machines and a four track recorder, eventually compiling a production demo called “First Man” (named after the Albert Camus book of the same name). 

Influenced by his father’s love for soul, Reddington leaned toward U.S. Hip Hip and UK artists like Tricky and Massive Attack. “I'd found my real home where I could take all these different sounds and mash them together into something new,” he told me. “It was such an exciting time with the DnB, Trip Hop and Garage scenes all bringing something that felt very UK, very us.”

The duo started releasing vinyl with various artists under the name First Man Productions while making their own beats. When some of their work appeared on a record by Talking Loud artist Skinnyman, they secured a publishing deal, quit their jobs and started making records every day.

Read more: Exploring the Fundamentals and Nuance of Community in On-Chain Music at Water & Music’s Wavelengths Conference

That sounds like the dream, but it’s not the end of the story – and it rarely ever is. For years Reddington bounced around various labels and teams. He’s been burned more than once, and to make ends meet he’s worked gigs across seemingly every corner of the industry. He’s taught at universities, written albums for production music libraries, composed for TV and film, penned soundtracks for fashion shows, developed artists and managed creative workspaces. And he was signed at different points as a writer, producer and as an artist. 

It’s been a turbulent path, driven by hope but mired in constant, demanding work. “I was quite emotionally involved in the process and the output, and then just started to feel very disconnected from it,” he told me. “You write 300 songs a year – maybe a couple of them come out and that's ‘successful,’ right? It's very draining.”

About seven years ago, overwork led to a nerve condition that forced him to make a change. “I was lucky to have made some records and some stuff for TV that were helping my life tick over, so I just canceled everything and started doing mash-ups under the name Sound of Fractures,” he said. “That was the beginning of the next chapter for me.”

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The first Sound of Fractures releases arrived in 2019. Since then, he’s earned various editorial features, playlist placements and spotlights on shows like BBC Radio 1. In 2021 I started seeing the Sound of Fractures pseudonym in all of the usual web3 music spaces: Water & Music, FWB and various Telegram chats. He released music on non-fungible token (NFT) platforms and built followings on web3 social networks. Last year, with Maarten Walraven, he also launched the on-chain “scene building experiment” Wild Awake.

The project is a “vehicle to experiment with many things,” he told me last July on the Big Brother podcast. It’s “a digital home for people who share a love of alternative electronic music” – the world that Sound of Fractures inhabits.

Projects like Wild Awake are responses to an abject dissatisfaction with centralized platforms that dictate the rules of engagement and curtail experimentation to the confines of their products – and to the benefit of their bottom lines. Success metrics are nearly always volume-based, so algorithms prioritize content – and interactive mechanisms – that appeal broadly and have potential to scale. 

Tweets and comments about Scenes

“The algorithm is designed to keep people on the platform, therefore it pushes you to make content that keeps people on the platform,” Reddington said. “It doesn’t push you to make connections with people who will go and tell someone else to buy your thing, or be a part of your community, or bring you into that world.” 

With Scenes, Reddington refused to truncate his connective vision so that it could fit neatly on “the platform.” So he brought the idea to prominent web3 organizations that regularly preach artist autonomy and worldbuilding, hoping to locate a partner that would find mutual benefit in supporting the project. Unfortunately, he got more of the same.

“Everyone loves the concept, but was like, ‘yeah, that doesn't hit what our metric is, which is mints or traffic or exposure,’” he said. “Their metric for success is volume. Their metric for success is driving their model. And that actually isn't new, right? That's just recreating an old thing on the blockchain.”

In both cases, Reddington – and artists generally – aren’t empowered with tools that can deliver their whole selves to an audience. Platforms necessarily curb agency to incentivize that which furthers their own narrative. But in doing so, some of an artist’s essence is lost. 

“That's really important in web2 and web3,” he told me. “You cannot fund [this vision] with platforms and social media because they have to put the money into funding their narrative. We're just going to end up in the same trap as before because there are no rails for people to actually experiment.”

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In July, 2023, frustrated by lack of options, Reddington launched his own token to fund Scenes. He drew inspiration from Black Dave, who launched his Black Dave Token as a signal of pure patronage – i.e. there’s no predetermined utility, no governance rights bestowed, etc. 

Similarly, SOFToken is primarily a support mechanism. It’s tier-based, and value is allocated to folks based on project-specific contribution targets. In the highest tier (purchasing 200+ tokens, which sell for .0025 ETH a piece), for instance, supporters earn a few perks and the title: ‘Executive Producer.’ As of this writing, three people hold that designation – C.Y. Lee, Nick Cam Smith and Walraven – and 1279 tokens have been sold.

With the 3.2 ETH (currently almost $10,000) he raised, Reddington worked with designer Ed Price and developer Tom Greenwell to build a complete version of Scenes – one he didn’t have to warp to fit inside another platform. (He’s also personally matching the spend with other NFT and streaming income for marketing).

Untethered, he envisaged beyond the standard profile picture model, imagining a way to use visuals to ascribe more connective value to his music.

“I was thinking about music and memories and nostalgia,” he told me. “We know [music’s] worth loads to us, right? We get married to it and we cry to it. It reminds us of all these pivotal moments in our lives, but we still haven't found a way in this system to put that value back into the music.”

Reddington created a mood board to develop emotional themes around each of Scenes’ songs. Alongside his Telegram community, he discovered that the songs evoked similar emotional worlds across various listeners, so he affixed a relevant prompt to each track and shared the project with the world.

Hundreds of listeners have since contributed Scenes to various album singles (there will be six in total). For each entry – which involves responding to a prompt, writing a caption and uploading a photo after listening to one of the songs – Reddington crafts the finished product by hand. He spends 10 minutes to half an hour making each Scene, which in aggregate has averaged about 15 hours a week since the project started. 

For the volume metric heads and platform marketers out there, that’s anathema. Scenes’ traditional cost-benefit analysis would turn stomachs. But that’s not the point – this is fucking art. It should be handled with care but without compromise. When it is, you end up with a community who celebrates it as a “journey through the rich tapestry of our inner worlds” – as one participant described Scenes. Or “collaborative performance art about how music touches us,” as another said.

“Every element of this project's different,” Reddington said. “It pushes against the norms of every space. It doesn't fit in the NFT space. It doesn't fit in the music space. It doesn't fit the way that we sell things on Twitter, or the way that we sell things through our projects. 

“It's asking for more.”

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In First Man – the unfinished autobiographical novel and namesake to Reddington’s first demo – Camus writes: “When I was young I asked more of people than they could give: everlasting friendship, endless feeling. Now I know to ask less of them than they can give: a straightforward companionship. And their feelings, their friendship, their generous actions seem in my eyes to be wholly miraculous: a consequence of grace alone.”

There’s a delicate push-and-pull in what artists can ask of their communities – and realistically expect in return. Each artist-community relationship is unique and dynamic, generated over time, inclusive of the foibles and idiosyncrasies that illustrate that uniqueness. En masse, through acts like Scenes, the interconnection can become a collective demonstration of voice.

Both Wild Awake and Scenes champion the idea that artists should be able to say what they want to say. And that when they do – and when art is permitted to flourish so that people feel – it seems less like we’re asking for something and more like we’re engaging in a mutual gift, connected by grace.

“We had a listening party three weeks ago for all the people in the group,” Reddington told me when we first chatted, describing an early Wild Awake gathering. “The artists talked about their journey and played their songs and talked about their music. It was genuinely emotional – I felt myself welling up at times, because it was people talking about the thing they love with other people in the room listening, excited about it. 

“We were talking to each other's faces, and it was before we even had [released] anything to collect,” he continued. “I was like, ‘that's it!’ That was it. That's the thing that we're trying to capture.”