F**k The Radio, We've Got Apple Juice

But the gap between imagining something and realizing it is huge, sometimes irreconcilably so, and anyway I have no doubt that the next time I hear any of the new songs – played live, or on my laptop, as part of a fully-fledged album – they’ll sound at least a little different.

The lure of DIY, in its simplest form, is immediacy and independence; it simplifies the relationship between creator and listener, brings them closer together.

Labels, he said, need to shift from being record companies to being “services of value” for artists; we need to stop thinking about records as being the product, he proclaimed, and think instead in terms of “units of art”.

“Music is not a thing at all but an activity, something that people do. The apparent thing ‘music’ is a figment, an abstraction of the action, whose reality vanishes as soon as we examine it at all closely.” (Small, Christopher. Musicking:The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Wesleyan University Press, 1998, p2).

Because as soon as you have those, you have a responsibility to someone other than yourself to make music that is successful on their terms. And that undermines all the reasons why you’re doing it in the first place: you’re not making the music you want any more, you suddenly have to work with someone else’s expectations and the lifestyle you’ve created disappears.

If you constantly spend your time thinking, I should be making money, not fucking around, you quickly become creatively impotent.

Creative output takes a lot of time, energy, love, and support, not only from the creator, but also from his or her community. The problem is that many of us are saddled with a lot of extra baggage. We have bills to pay and debts to pay off. We have social and professional obligations that rigidly divide our days.

We’re playing with this idea of “sustainable creativity”. It’s about using communities and ideas to sustain yourself, so that you’re able to do what you love doing. It’s simple, on paper: if you’re a writer, you find a way to write. If you’re a musician, you find the support you need to play gigs and write songs.

Stagnancy is an ugly word, implying a kind of failure to kick-start or manage one’s own life – but so too is progress, as in, the myth of progress, the pursuit of a goal that is always just out of reach, no matter where you are, how far you’ve come. Sustainability seems to allow for the possibility of a life spent creating, not wishing.

“[W]orthy work,” he suggests, “carries with it the hope of pleasure in rest, the hope of the pleasure in our using what it makes, and the hope of pleasure in our daily creative skill. All other work but this is worthless; it is slaves’ work – mere toiling to live, that we may live to toil.”