Tutorial Music by Andrew Tham

As someone who eschews absolutely any role of authority when given the chance, I am often drawn to the seeming reassurance of a tutorial. I find security and immense pleasure in a format where someone has the knowledge and confidence to literally just tell me what to do, and succinctly lays out a plan for how to do it. The subjectivity of art making combined with my general indecisiveness often leaves me anxious, overwhelmed, and creatively immobile. Where do I start? What am I trying to express? Am I expressing anything? Do I even need to express anything? These questions circle relentlessly, often surrounding me in a fog of indeterminacy that leaves me with nothing to show for a day’s work, or a week’s, or a month’s…

If only there was a tutorial that told me how to make the art that I want to make. It’s a gross thought, I admit; one that appeals to my linear/binary thinking, one that erases the identity of an inherently messy creative process, one that instead emphasizes productivity or accomplishment. But... It just sounds so good.

You know what else sounds good? The soundtrack to the hit video game The Sims from 2000. Every aspect of the game has its own little utopian musical score to it; purchasing a plot of land, building a home, buying furniture, learning a skill, starting a family, climbing the corporate ladder at work, etc. The Sims lets you “play life,” and accompanies your simplistic roleplaying journey with the perfect feel-good jams.

Anyway, I made the album because we’re all gonna’ die. I just wanted to stop fretting so much and record something. But even a recording can feel like a tutorial: one purporting to demonstrate what sounds good. So I tried to lean into that. For someone frightened by the prospect of teaching just about anything, what would I teach if I had to? I thought it’d be fun to play the expert on topics that were way too subjective or absurd to actually make for a genuine tutorial. And I wanted a soundtrack that was simple, smooth, and kind of innocuous. I also threw some quotations in there; they were my lil’ carrots for this scared bunny of a solo album. The result was something between a parody and a shadow of an actual tutorial; a series of tracks that feign knowledge while stumbling into personal truth. Tutorial Music is light and whimsical, crossfading into pensive and dark. It’s barely an authority on itself, and it’s trying to be okay with that.

-Andrew

Parlour Tapes+ is Chicago's first contemporary art music tape label.

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