In the past year, particularly, I’ve come across several comments, both direct and indirect, from or about artists who have basically cut social media from their existence. I get it, and I’m almost there. But whatever its problems, I’ve connected with some wonderful musicians through social media, and Sugaar Pan is high on that list.
To the point: Sugaar Pan makes human music, and at some deep level this is the only kind of music there is. I wouldn’t push that point because I can imagine exceptions, but I’ll stand by it. We’re at a point in time where our machines have become sophisticated enough that they can appear to create things on their own. I’m not in a panic as an artist about AI, though its implications for the business of art don’t favor artists. I feel relatively sanguine about our situation because I’ve read many artists express what for me had been an intuition, that they had never come across an AI-generated anything that moved them. That’s my experience, so I imagine people will continue to seek out human art for the foreseeable future.
“Hug a Tree and Burn the Forest” is a six-song EP, though a long one, a bit under a half-hour if I do the math right — some people would release it and call it an album. Cosmetically, a person might name some musical antecedents but for me that misses the point. Some people talk about art generally and say that there’s nothing new under the sun, but I say the opposite: all art is new. I’m listening to this, right now as I write, and it’s something I haven’t heard before. I can’t give a higher compliment.
I’ve made a decision that on the rare occasions that I feel a need to make some point, I need to write up a blog post and do it as coherently as I can, rather than toss off a social media comment. My impulse to write about Sugaar Pan’s music is because when I hear it, there is very clearly a human being on the other end of it. I listen to all kinds of music, including entirely electronic stuff, but if I don’t feel that connection to a human being on the other end, the music leaves me cold. Sugaar Pan has that human quality in spades, and in particular it comes through wooden flutes. The music is instrumental, but truly, the flute here is a human voice. I imagine the mechanism for that feeling is the breath: the need for a person to breathe conditions the music itself. I know there’s a person there, in the most fundamental way.
More and more in my life, in many ways, I find myself saying “no” to what have become normal media. I’m reading more than I had for a while, and I consistently go to the movie theater. Indeed, I haven’t watched any movies or shows on my computer (I ditched my iPad a while ago) in months. I won’t say I’ll never do it, but internally something in me is seeking media that asks me to actively seek it. I don’t have a music streaming service. I hear more live music these days than I have since I was in grad school, and I buy more music from DIY musicians now than I have since I would buy stuff at the local record store in college, lovingly stocked with cassette-only releases from the good old days of tape labels. Sugaar Pan fits very well into this approach.