the cauldron
on recipes, reference tracks, unpredictable alchemy
Lately, I’ve been spending more time making dance music. Some of it in collaboration with DJs, some of it for myself—getting a few things ready for summer release. It’s been a shift in both tone and intention. The last project I released, mudchute tape, leaned heavily on collage, texture, and conceptual framing—something between a sonic diary and a field recording experiment. These new tracks are simpler in ambition: I just want to make music people enjoy. No context required.
I’m still finding my footing in this space, but one thing that’s become clear to me so far is that working “to spec” is harder than it looks.
I figured, if I could understand all the elements and how they connect, a formula would emerge and I’d be able to nail the sound. Dance music is often formulaic because it is meant to serve a very specific purpose (to make people dance). Once you have the right samples and a solid reference track, and you’ve defined the process, the rest is just a matter of execution. There’s no shortage of resources: tutorials, preset packs, even full project files. But the truth is, even with all that in place, something elusive remains. You can get the mix clean, the groove tight, the synth patch just right—and still miss the thing that gives a track its emotional charge.
You start to realize that what you thought was driving the energy might be something else entirely. The impact of a moment might not come from the the kick sample you selected, but from the shape of a silence, or the timing of a drop. Sometimes, the message arrives in the absence.
Recently, I found myself producing a section with lush chords in the buildup, followed by a drop that stripped everything down to a single-note bassline over a funky house beat. This is a common technique, but not something I would ever think to do in my own music. I thought of this approach as a kind of blunt force, inelegant party trick for those who don’t understand how harmony works. It may still be all that, but when done well, it’s an extremely effective statement. In dance music the sudden removal of harmony, and revelation of a naked bassline and a thumping kick drum feels simultaneously like the opening of space and the sharpening of intention. In these moments, the absence of chromatic movement becomes the musical message.
Recipes, Not Rules
When I’m producing for others—or collaborating on a song—one of the most helpful things I can ask is: “What do you want this to feel like?”
The answer I’m hoping for is rarely technical. In fact, it’s often more useful when it isn’t. If someone says, “I want this to feel angelic and ethereal,” that gives us a direction. If they say, “Increase the reverb time,” we’re already narrowing the field in a way that might be misleading. Because the feeling of “angelic” might not come from the reverb at all—it could be an EQ shape, or the softness of a synth attack, or even a shift in chord voicing.
This is why I tend to approach production as a kind of alchemy. I'm not interested in stacking technical solutions until something sounds correct. Rather, I try to sense where something wants to go, and create space for the unexpected to surface. The more you chase a feeling directly, the more surprising your tools become. You might get closer to “angelic” by reducing information rather than adding it. You might get closer to “sad” by shortening a release tail. That’s one of the stranger truths of creative work: the solution is almost never what you think it is at first.
When you focus too much on the specific affordances of your tools—what this plugin can do, what that effect might add—you risk solving problems that don’t exist. You move knobs instead of moving your listener. You get a good sound, but not a felt one.
But when you work from within a felt orientation—when you begin with mood, intention, affect—you start to access a different kind of intelligence. You’re less concerned with “fixing” and more curious about shaping. You start listening for what the track wants to become.
Every artist I work with has a different blend of inputs, values, tendencies, and tastes—what I think of as their creative recipe. Some work in layers, others in gestures. Some are meticulous about structure; others feel their way forward from one moment to the next. But most people don’t know what their recipe is until they start naming it.
The process of articulation—naming what matters, what moves you, what you return to—turns the intuitive into the intentional.
Sonic Genealogy
One of the original inspirations for Open Studio was a newsletter called Sound + Creativity by Hermes, a producer and educator who blends systems thinking with intuitive process design. His work is thoughtful, structured, and unusually grounded in lived experience—less about gear, more about clarity. If you’re not already reading him, I highly recommend subscribing: soundandcreativity.substack.com.
In a recent letter, Hermes proposed a deceptively simple exercise: trace your Sonic Genealogy. List five artists who’ve shaped your musical instincts, then get specific about what you learned from each—textures, phrasing, mixing choices, emotional impact.
I’ve returned to this exercise a few times over the past few weeks, and each time the list shifts slightly. But here’s where it’s landed lately:
Burial — using reverb and noise as narrative space
Leon Vynehall — percussion as melodic material
James Blake — disorientation through harmonic movement
Jamie xx — maximal emotion through minimal means; contrast as drama
AYYBO — control of groove architecture; clean, confident movement across a single note
Even a simple list like this helps me understand how I hear. It clarifies my instincts—not just the ideas I gravitate toward, but the types of decisions I trust. It also shows me what I tend to avoid, what I’m still trying to figure out, and where I might want to grow.
The more I listen to artist interviews or production podcasts, the more I’m reminded how strange and surprising influence can be. Alex Scally from Beach House once talked about everything he learned from listening to Bob Marley. Bon Iver has credited the Indigo Girls as a formative emotional influence. These connections aren’t always visible on the surface—but that’s what makes them meaningful. The emotional landscape of music is deeply subjective, and yet somehow, it moves us in shared directions. Everyone hears differently, but the transmission is collective.
Genealogy, in this sense, is less about lineage and more about listening. It’s about tracking where your instincts come from—not to replicate, but to recognize. To hear your own taste with more dimension. And to understand that every musical choice you make is part of a longer conversation, whether you know it or not.
A Working Recipe
Once you’ve sketched your sonic genealogy—those five artists whose music shaped your instincts—the next step is to work with those ingredients. Not just admiring them, but combining them intentionally across different layers of the track.
Because the truth is, your sound isn’t a single aesthetic—it’s a stack. Rhythm, harmony, tone, structure, emotion, mix: each of these planes is its own dimension. And each can be traced to a different part of your lineage.
One mistake I see often—especially when working “to spec”—is leaning too hard on a single reference. It seems like it should simplify things, but in practice, it narrows the field. You start reacting to what the reference doesn’t do. The result is often flatter than intended.
By contrast, reference stacking—assigning different reference points to different aspects of a track—can bring you closer to your own creative center. You’re no longer copying; you’re triangulating. You’re saying: “I love the drums in this track, the mood of that one, and the structure of this third one.”
That’s not imitation—it’s synthesis.
Here’s a recipe-building exercise I often suggest to collaborators (and sometimes to myself):
List 5 musical influences that shaped your taste (not the ones you think you should like—be honest).
Break down what you borrow from each—drum patterns, harmonic language, sonic tone, spatial sense, emotional register.
Assign references across planes:
Groove / rhythm
Harmonic language
Texture / sound design
Structure / pacing
Emotional impact
Choose one emotional target for the track: what you want someone to feel when they hear it.
Bonus: Add one element you've historically avoided but are now curious about. Think of it as a wildcard—something to throw into the cauldron and see what it does (maybe a corny tech house drop with a single note bassline??)
This won’t lock you into a formula. But it will give you a working recipe—a flexible, multidimensional frame to compose from. And it might also surprise you. Because once you separate out the layers, you start to notice how your instincts behave across them. Where you're conservative. Where you're bold. Where you overcompensate.
More importantly, you start to trust the process of combining things. That’s where the sound becomes yours.
Collective Cauldrons
As I continue to shape the creative advising side of Open Studio, I’ve been feeling drawn to a few platforms that seem designed for more open-ended, creative knowledge management. Specifically, Cosmos and Are.na—two web-native systems for organizing references, thoughts, and creative breadcrumbs.
They’re curatorial by design, but not precious. They reward coherence but don’t require it. What makes them exciting to me is how naturally they support experimental pedagogy. Instead of locking knowledge into polished courses or sealed portfolios, they leave it open—unfinished, associative, process-forward. They invite participation without prescribing outcomes.
That’s very much in line with how I’ve been thinking about creative practice lately—not just as a solitary ritual, but as something shareable, remixable, even semi-public.
It made me wonder: what would a song brief look like on one of these platforms? Not a moodboard or a playlist, but a kind of open recipe—something that invites collaboration or continuation, rather than completion. These resources have made me more curious about oblique, collaborative solutions to creative problems.
Could a cluster of references become a score?
Could a set of personal heuristics—“rules of thumb”—become a format someone else could pick up and run with?
This kind of modular ‘cauldron’ thinking is part of what I hope to explore more through Open Studio: making the tacit shareable, making the process public without polishing it away. Not by creating more tools, but by showing how we already use the ones we have.
If nothing else, it’s a reminder that our creative practices don’t have to be private rituals. They can be shared systems—recipes, spells, cauldrons in common.
None of this is about codifying your taste or locking your process into a fixed system. It’s about naming what’s already at play—your instincts, your lineage, your preferences—and turning that awareness into something you can work with. Whether you sketch it in a notebook, build a cluster on Are.na, or just keep a private list of references, the goal is the same: to move with more intention, and maybe a little more wonder.
If you try the recipe exercise, or end up making a cluster of your own, I’d love to see it. And if you want help naming your ingredients or shaping your next direction, I offer one-on-one creative advising sessions for exactly that purpose. You can book one here.
Thank you so much.
Amazing work, and loved seeing your personal Sonic Genealogy!