Most productive musician of all
Dear All! Friends. Your humble servant Greg Zeroin is here again. Tonight, I will talk with another mind-blowing character in music, Teave Perdock. Teave, you told me that there is one aspect of creating music in which you are most likely ahead of anyone ever made music. Is that correct?
T Greg, you know, I do not like to brag about this, but yes, I do work a lot. And what is perhaps more, I do finish things. A lot of things.
G Yeah, a lot. When did you realize that you might be better in this aspect of creation than most everyone else?
T Well, I started out like everyone else, you know. Struggling with finishing up my ideas into completed pieces. At some point in time, I realized that for every project that I was able to finish I had about a hundred unfinished ones laying around. And I said to myself, see, this will not fly. And I started to study how to finish things and how to finish them efficiently.
G And you’ve learned a lot.
T I have learned and I am still learning.
G Whom did you consider as a role model in speeding up production?
T A bunch of people, you know, Frank Zappa, John Zorn, Buckethead.
T You know, in 2015, he released 31 albums in October alone. A full album every day. It was unbelievable for me back then, but at the same time it opened up my eyes to new horizons.
G You wanted to be able to do that.
T I did want to do something like that.
G And by now, you’ve outdone Buckethead.
T I am afraid I did (laughs).
G How many albums have you released so far?
T I cannot tell you the exact count because it’s changing fast, but I have over two million released studio albums.
G What? I expected hundreds, maybe a thousand! I am speechless. How? Have you made as many albums as everyone else combined?
T No, I released about half as many albums as there are. But at the current rate I will overtake everyone else combined in about a couple of months.
G Unbelievable. How is that even possible to produce this much? What got into you, Teave?
T I got this bug (laughs). As I said, I started out like any other artist struggling to finish things and struggling to get noticed. I thought if only I could finish and release my debut albums things were going to change. I wanted to demonstrate that and once I released my first five albums, I thought I am on track now. I poured all my creativity in them, or at least, that’s how I felt about them.
G And were those recordings successful?
T Well, it depends on your definition of success, but the short answer is no, they weren’t particularly successful, my demonstration was a complete failure. People hardly recognized that I exist.
G So you wanted to let them know by producing more?
T Correct. I got this idea, that the more content you produce the higher are the chances that people find you.
G Teave, were you aware that some people get famous with one song?
T Painfully. And some people deserve it, because they wrote wonderful songs. But at the same time, you know, these days, as long as you have big money for promotion, you can basically fart into a microphone, add some canned beats and it will be as successful as much you spend. You might even get it into being fruitful financially, if you have a thick enough wallet for promoting it into a snowball. But my songs weren’t even songs. I mostly make instrumentals. And I did not have any money for promotion. All I had was ideas, devotion and a growing skill set for productivity. I wanted to demonstrate that with this one can bypass financial limitations and still break through.
T Not really. When my 30th album came out and it was celebrated around the globe by the exact same handful of people my first three albums got all their appreciation from - I knew again, my demonstration was a complete failure.
G So you jumped into producing more?
T No, not immediately. It was a rough time for me. I was getting these giving up vibes already.
G How about your friends and family? What did they say to you not getting much recognition after 30 albums out?
T My family and my friends always supported me and I am eternally grateful for them. But with all that production load on our lives they were also caving in for the idea that I might need to take a break, maybe retreat for good. My son was particularly heartbroken and he wanted to help. “What if, Dad” he said one day, “what if we won the lottery? Then, you will have enough money to promote your music and get the attention it deserves, right?”.
T Absolutely. But being the bum I am, I wanted to demonstrate to him that buying lottery tickets is useless. So, we bought a ticket.
T Yeah one. And my demonstration was a complete failure, once again.
T We won. And we won a lot.
G So, did you take your son’s advice and start pumping in big money into promotion?
T To be honest, the need for getting a viable business aspect of making music evaporated. So no, I have not spent a dime on promotion ever since. I still despise that game. I think it kills the soul of music. As I was thinking more calmly, I started to feel that what I wanted more than anything was some kind of tender, caring type of revenge. Revenge by productivity. Revenge by a flood of sounds and I mean a flood of biblical magnitude.
G So how did financial stability affect your productivity?
T I bought up a small but extremely talented computer-science company and founded my own research into computer aided composition and production tools.
G Oh, for people who wanted to compose and produce more efficiently.
T Right, except these tools were never made commercially available.
G They’re developed only for you to use?
T Correct. And it has been a little over ten years we've been doing this. And my life is rather normal, I spend about forty hours at work in either these labs with engineers or alone in my studio.
G And the rate of album release has been going up ever since?
T Steadily. The first year I released one or two records every month. The third year we settled at the rate of one album per week. By the fifth year we reached the coveted 2015 Buckethead’s Halloween Limit. Releasing every day.
G Yeah but, that’s still only about 365 albums a year. And while I mean Jesus, it’s a crazy amount but still pretty far from those millions you mentioned before.
T Correct. But that was five years ago. And in those five years we first broke through PMB, the so-called Productivity Mach Boundary.
T Well, it simply means that one produces more than one could take in one day. In terms of musical albums with about an hour running time that comes to twenty something albums per day. And that was only the beginning.
G Ammazing. Tell us something about the ways of producing more than one can consume. Doesn't that entail working faster than the playing time of the music?
T Absolutely. You know, it sounds harder than it is actually. You remember, I told you that way before all this, I had trouble finishing up things that I started. But starting things, I never saw difficulty in that! Not for a moment. Give me a little time and I can start working on a bunch of different things. Like many others, I saw this as a flaw earlier in my life, you know, a million times I told myself “Why would you start anything else before you finish the thing in your hands? Don’t put it down for a shiny new idea that will turn out to be less interesting as well, as soon as you rough it out!”
G We all heard this somewhere.
T Absolutely. So basically, what we did with my extremely talented engineers, we turned this character flaw into gold.
T All those computational tools got better and better at helping to finish what I started. And one day we’ve reached the point where, no matter how fast and how many things I have started they still got completed, faster than I could jam the pipelines with new ideas. And since the finishing procedure was modeled after all my previous works and solutions, it was satisfying to me.
G It must have felt deliberating.
T Greg, it was fantastic. I cried that day. And while I was crying, I started a piece by punching in ideas on the piano and the system made not one, not two but twelve completed versions of my sobbing little idea. All twelve of them sounded different and at the same time deeply familiar, because the cadences, the progressions, the solos and everything was modeled after my ways of forty years in composing. We released this as an album the same day. Turning Point is the title of that album, still one of the closest to my heart.
G So your system completes and multiplies your ideas on the spot?
T Yeah, it does, but there’s no obligation to call off the procedure right after one run. When we see potential in a tune, I re-enter the loop and add new arrangements or solos. And then it runs again. We have tunes that still produce after many months and thousands of iterations.
G No offence, but doesn’t it turn into a kind of mass production of pretty much the same thing that way?
T Haha, none taken. You know, in the system, there is a set of criteria that gives us a red flag if any of the iterations started to sound like previous ones. And then it gets changed.
G You’re doing this seriously, Teave. So, is that where you are at right now?
T There’s one more thing that gave us a chance to ramp up creation. At some point we started to look into the neuroscience of my out of line idea creation. We worked hard to get to the level that we can actually model the ways my creative juices flow, so to speak. Long story short, I can create new ideas now just by thinking or dreaming.
G Oh my God, you work while you sleep?
T Well my brain is part of a bigger system but yes, I participate in the production of new ideas while thinking, playing an instrument, eating, sleeping, yes.
G What if, I mean, I went to your studio and my brain was connected to this system?
T Why don’t we try in one day?
G Sweet Jesus, are you serious?
T Sure why not. We already scheduled a research project with an emerging artist. I really like his music; I feel like there’s a lot that we have in common. I invited him to play around with the system to see what comes out. A couple of days ago he told me about the time he was playing with some computer game and while he was talking about it, I asked him to stop and think about being immersed in that game. We linked him up to the system and.. Follow this link to hear the piece that came out.
T Palatinus. Check out his..
G Oh alright, we know him already.
T Great. So anyway, once we’re done with the recording sessions, I give you a call.
G I don’t know what to say, please do so. I am very excited.
T I know. I am excited all the time (laughs).
G So where are you at now in the rate of production?
T About a full album every minute or so. By the end of the year, we plan to speed that up.
G I have no words of astonishment left to react to these improvements. So, do you release these albums on the major streaming services?
T Oh no, that’s too old school for me (laughs). And they neither have the bandwidth nor storage capacity to deal with me anymore.
G So where do you release all those thousands of albums every day?
T We had a secret internet radio for a while. It was available only for those people who stood by me from the beginning. But recently we came up with a really genuine idea. With some clever nano engineering we can upload an album onto a water molecule. As long as you have the decoder, which we are still working on you will be able to play it back. If interested, we will send you the molecule trapped in a small cube that can hold all my 2 million plus albums and an immense amount of empty storage for you in one small drop of water.
G Mind. Just. Totally. Blown.
T Then cover your ears, Greg. Because we also own a water treatment plant and lately, we begin to pump out these droplets into the cleaned-up water streams. Eventually they will get into the circulation of water and get to every corner of the world. We estimate that in less than twenty years, it will be very likely that your body or anyone else's body will have a copy of my music catalogue.
G And how many albums will it contain?
T That depends on the day it was released into the wild. One thing is sure though. It will contain far more albums than you have time to listen to even if you never stop playing the list. That’s my tender, caring revenge for all those years of people not paying attention to me (laughs in a chaotic good way).
G I need time to recover from this. Friends, music lovers, Teave Perduck! See you soon, Teave, talk to you soon everyone. Bye for now. Jesus Christ!
