From Steve Lawson: Ta-daaaaa! I’ve got a new album out on Aug 3rd. It’s called Manifesto, and it’s lovely. I’m really, really happy with it and I hope you enjoy it too when you get to hear it. Below are the sleeve notes to the album, which tell something of the story of its coming into being, but also how the manifesto for music making that I’ve stuck to since my very first solo gig acts as an AI-resistant model of creative practice that values process, meaning, community and exploration over things that can be cloned by a predictive algorithm.

Read on…

40 years of playing bass. I got my first bass for my 14th birthday, but got it a few months early. So October or November 1986. I don’t remember because I didn’t realise that this particular birthday gift was the thing that would dominate my professional, social, creative and academic life over the next 40 years. I didn’t know that only 13 years after that I’d be playing solo at the Troubadour in London, and having built a bit of a name for myself as a session player and journalist, I’d become known primarily as a solo bassist. Not just a solo bassist, but a looping solo bassist; a self-recording, self-releasing, Internet-dwelling, creativity-documenting, university-speaking, CD-selling, Royal Albert Hall-playing solo bassist of some international notoriety.

It still feels faintly ridiculous. Not the playing solo bit – I always saw the bass guitar as bigger than its role, ever since I broke my arm, got kicked out of my first band, and spent a few months trying to play Pixies and Jesus & Mary Chain songs with a bass and a distortion pedal and not really caring which line I was playing. Some were bass parts, some were guitar parts, some were melodies. I just saw the instrument as a gateway to music, in a way that violin and trumpet had never been in my ill-fated dalliances with both…

No, the ridiculous bit is how it took over everything else. I still really like playing in bands. I love session work, I love writing songs, I enjoy touring and locking in with a drummer and the stuff I thought I’d be doing for my career as I graduated through the session ranks in the 90s. But I guess I was pretty good at the solo thing, and perhaps even better at telling people about it. The perfect storm of creative experimentation at a time when very few people in the UK were even thinking about play solo bass (with a few notable exceptions, take a bow Jennifer Moore, Fred Baker and Mo Foster!)and the emergence of communities online within which I could tell the story of what I was trying to do…

What I find fascinating from this vantage point is that that story, that basic idea behind my solo recording and performing is still the same.Everything is still recorded live in a single take, no edits and no overdubs. The recordings are mixed and mastered, but as you can see from the videos, it’s just me playing and looping and layering. That places constraints on what’s possible, it shapes the arrangements, the choices that shape the music. And it’s not that I think there’s anything fundamentally better or more righteous or more ‘pure’ about making music this way. It’s just that, pragmatically, it gives me a framework for making music that is distinctly mine, and has given me a focus for my creative development over the last 30 years that has resulted in a singular and particular skillset of which I’m deeply proud.

The role of improv in the music has evolved over time – on my very earliest gigs I didn’t have compositions as such but I did have chord progressions that were the start points for improv. After I’d recorded versions of those early improv excursions and decided to put them on And Nothing But The Bass, they became the definitive versions and I learned them to play them again. I did that for about 10 years before realising that in a solo context I’m actually a better improvisor than I am a composer and that not re-playing simplified versions of things from previous albums resulted in much better gigs and also an absolutely vast quantity of release quality music. Thankfully, this all coincided with my being in regular contact with the then-CEO of Bandcamp and I got to have some input into their subscription platform that is still the host space for the subscriber community into which I release all this music.

But perhaps more than anything, having a manifesto for making music as something other than ‘trying to match and measure myself against whatever everyone else in my field is doing’ has given me an inadvertently future-proof approach, keeping my solo work out of the AI-conundrum that is currently befalling the world of music, alongside all the other creative arts. There’s no AI prompt for a music practice built on a sense of purpose, adventure and in-the-moment creative exploration. I mean, you could train a predictive algorithm on my entire catalogue and get Steve-sounding stuff out of it, but it would lack the essential part of the manifesto that it is music in and for a moment, with an audience firmly in the centre of the field of vision, that the story of why and how is as much a part of the art as the what. And the what is the only bit that AI can do.

What’s more, my work is certainly not going to help strengthen anyone else’s data set in its attempt to consensus-farm a song factory. Weirdly, it’s actually a thing that humans have been doing in songwriting workshops for decades – trying with varying degrees of desperation and cynicism to produce something that sounds like the zeitgeist without actually defining it, without having the human impetus that is essential to zeitgeisty-ness. Just making art where the metric is commercial success, not creative satisfaction, or a sense that this art represents you well in the world. I don’t think that writing like that is ‘wrong’, I don’t even think that cynicism is an innately bad perspective from which to write – I’m sure there is a ton of music I love that comes from an emotional state that I would find deeply disquieting. But at least in all of that there’s a human being feeling something. Throwing the work of all those humans into a Vitamix, churning out song-smoothies based on a popularity/frequency detecting algorithm feels deeply, fundamentally anti-human, whatever the results (and however you want to dress up the language, an AI decides nothing, feels nothing, enjoys nothing, it just responds to prompts in the way it has been programmed to respond. Like a Calculator telling you that 2 and 2 is 4, it has no idea what 2 is or what 4 is, it’s just a bunch of zeros and ones that produce a 4 in response to the input ‘2+2=‘ )

‘Make a record that sounds like Steve feels right now’

‘How does Steve feel right now?’

‘Not sure, that’s why he’s making music, to find out.’

‘Can you give me a clue?’

‘He smiles a lot, if that helps’

‘Perhaps you’d be better asking him to make the music rather than this AI’

‘bingo’.

Here it is. All that I can’t leave behind. My response to Nye Bevan’s request ‘this is my truth, tell me yours.’ There is much to discover in the music here. For me, as much as (if not more than) anyone else. I’ve listened to this music in various mix-states over the last week or so and the way my emotional state shapes what I hear in it is remarkable. It’s far less tangible than Amsterdam, from last year. That told a pretty clear story. I know how I felt.

Here I don’t. 40 years of bass. 27 years of solo bass. 4 years since I was in hospital with cancer. A decade of upheaval, of personal growth and change, of fuck-ups and mistakes and become ever more a temple of accumulated error, marked this month by my PhD graduation ceremony. I finished it last year, but now I get to wear a floppy hat and mark it ceremonially. That means something, that feels good, and it feels like a chapter closing.

So music from there and about that. The soundtrack to the day you wish you’d had, but also the soundtrack to 40 years of mucking about with a bass trying to make art that I’m happy to have represent me in the world. I feel beyond blessed that this is album 160 (I think!), if we’re counting the things that I’ve made and produced – solo and collaborative – and I’m deeply proud of every one of them. The joy of self-releasing is that nothing needs to come out to fulfil a contract, nothing is interfered with by unwelcome A&R, nothing is shaped by a quest for someone else’s notion of success. Just ‘what sounds like me, now?’

Enjoy. I’m really really proud of this, proud of all that the last 40 years of bass has pointed to, proud of the journey, proud of where it has taken me.