Thea Gilmore vs The Algorithm
I’ve loved Thea Gilmore’s music for decades. Now she wants people to pay close attention by making it harder to find, temporary. She composites people’s voicenotes into a song, posts it for a while, removes it. This one’s about power hiding. It’s here: www.theagilmore.net/echo
This is fantastic. She’s done a few of these, under the grouping of The Echoline, and I should listen to more of them
I wasn’t sure about artists crowdsourcing ideas. Isn’t the whole point (without getting too disgracefully pretentious) that artistic types burn with urgent ideas that simply must come bursting from them? Isn’t the voice, in the sense of their point of view, their take, their framing, all an artist has? The rest of it is just technique, and can be taught.
The Echoline could be just a way to garner ideas and apply twenty years of craftsmanship, and nothing wrong with that. Their voice is in how they craft. I think it’s more than that though: the point isn’t the source, it’s the transience. If something isn’t online, the algorithm can’t slurp it into its raddled gut like an Mr Creosote, and compost it down in the bubbling digestive juices. (I’ll make my excuses and leave before we get to the next part of that metabolic process).
Then there’s scarcity value. By removing it, the song stops being another entry on the ‘to listen’ streaming playlist. When something’s scarce, we focus on it more, and value it more. It’s a far more authentic way of getting to your audience than TikTok flummery.
