Infinite Games

I have new music out! I'm pretty stoked with it, for a lot of reasons. Namely, I think the music's good, that's probably the most important thing. A secondary reason, and one I'd rather spend time on on a blog, is that I think this represents a healthy personal development.

This EP has been complete since mid-last year. Ever since then, it's been in a limbo of not really existing. I didn't know when to release it, because I didn't know how to release it. I was enjoying not really existing anywhere online, and I knew I didn't want to compromise on this. However, how else does one functionally release music in 2026? I guess they dysfunctionally release it.

I alluded to this in my previous blog about my time in Mumbai, but something I'm very serious about going forward is considering myself a Hobby Songwriter. I may be a professional musician, but that doesn't mean that every aspect of my musicianship needs to be professional. I don't need to treat making and distributing my art as a commercial endeavour; it hurts every part of the process. Pre-commoditising my creative work when I should be making things just for me is harmful. It's not the point. Good music doesn't have to make money, and I don't want to bog myself down with attempts to use it to make money. I don't want to make T shirts. I don't want to play small, empty venues. I have lots of friends in bands who fill out those venues and make a killing on merch, and all power to them of course, but I'm aware that's not me. For as long as I'm denying myself access to the largest promotion platforms available, I shouldn't kid myself. However, I still want to make and distribute music, so I'm going to. Even if that's just for me. Even if that's just my hobby. For a year or so after we completed the master, I was trying to muster up the courage to actually be the hobby songwriter I imagined myself as; the fact that it took me a year to get around to this suggested there was something still niggling somewhere about what I wanted out of this project. Of course I wouldn't be saying this if there were listeners and radio stations and promoters clamouring to get involved with this music, so maybe this mindset is simply cope. And if that is the case, it's working tremendously, because I have music out, and I'm happy with it. I've sent it to my friends, and they dig it. If anyone else happens upon it and also digs it, that's a bonus point for me. Not only that, but the downswing of looking at the metrics and being filled with the mixture of dread and disappointment that normally accompanies the few weeks after a big release has not happened this time. That isn't a coincidence. However, I don't want to make this another social-media-bad piece. Onwards with what I think was good about this EP, which is the music itself.

1. E4

Infinite Games is all about chess, so of course I had to name the first song 1. E4, the most commonly played opening move. There are four songs on this thing, two of which are about actual chess concepts, and two of them are about how chess makes me feel, and this is one of the latter. This song and the title track at the end are two sides of the same coin, which is thinking about longevity. When I was properly learning the game, I was interested about certain positions and moves being named after people (more on that in the following song). There's a great quote from Olivie Blake's novel Alone With You In The Ether: "Art was a language of both limitless vocabulary and limited syntax." This sounds like chess! Ostensibly very little material to work with, but practically no ceiling on what can be done with that material. By the same token, playing guitar is similar. There's not a lot of real estate on the fretboard, but countless individuals have staked their claim on certain parts of it, or their particular method of traversal. The chessboard is the same. There's tangible history and legacy attached to moves coined decades of not hundreds of years ago, each one with its' own story and person and, well, life attached to it. It's a romantic idea. There's also a precariousness in this. If the legacy you lay claim to is one in rating, it'll only be a legacy as long as your rating is the highest. After that, either if you're usurped or never quite make it, you're still an important part of the tapestry of the game, but you're not immortalised like you may have hoped. Anyway, that's what this song's about.

2. Captain Evans

After talking about the vagueries of moves getting named after people, here's a specific one, namely the Evans Gambit. According to history (and now summed up by an article on chess.com I'm paraphrasing), it was introduced in the 1820s by a Welsh sea captain, William Davies Evans, at a match in London. The version of this story I heard (and can't find any actual backup for this) is that the move was discovered while he was out at sea, playing a ton of chess. He honed the theory while he was in transit between continents, and then returned with a secret weapon. I find it funny that I can't actually find any proof of the story I'm telling in this song, but maybe further perpetuating a long game of Telephone is part of the fun.

3. Tradesman

This is the other specific chess theory song. This is about victory by under-promoting. Accepting that the most tempting looking prize may not actually be the thing you need. Or, to quote the iconic Gia Gunn, what you want to do is not necessarily what you're gonna do. There are some really fun checkmates where promoting to a knight will result in a smothered mate, and I like the thematic idea of all this. The pawn knowing their place as a dutiful knight instead of selfishly becoming a queen. The stoic bishop sat in the corner ready to cover any escape squares there might have been (the entire subject of the second verse). The name itself comes from the book Simple Chess by Michael Stean. He describes a specific move (I can't remember which now) as a "tradesman's entrance". I asked my chess coach at the time if that was an actual move, and he explained that was just a strange authorial idiosyncrasy. There were, though, a few hours where I thought a tradesman's entrance was something many chess players knew about, and it was a fun little phrase I kept tucked away for a song.

4. Infinite Games

This is the other feels-song. I love how this came out as a piece of production. This is also what I feel is the thematic crux of the whole project- games with ranking systems. They've always been a real problem for me, and chess is no exception. League of Legend's ELO system, Super Smash Brothers' Elite Smash, countless games where the secondary loop is about directly measuring how good you are in comparison to others; these are games I have a problem with, and need to be played in serious moderation if at all. There's an old Amber Run song called 5AM, and about ten years ago I was playing League of Legends in the wee hours of the morning (probably losing a promotion match), and this song came on and I knew I was wasting my life on this game. But it didn't stop the pattern repeating. I just as quickly started measuring myself in Smash's "Global Smash Power", a useless metric for actual skill, but a great way of having a number you can grind up by repeating an action. Finally, I transposed onto the classic chess ELO. There were many nights during the pandemic where the number going up by 50-100 made me feel like king of the world for a minute, and the inverse making me feel almost dirty, useless. Inept. I'm actually very grateful for the people I've met in real life through all these games respectively, but this is a toxic part of these games that will always have a hook in my brain, in my ego. The cycle is predictable, and bad. I get a spur of beginners' advancement, and the subsequent ego boost. Then comes where I come up against an obstacle, players who have more skill and have done more practice/research than me. Then there's the plateu, where I settle into a place that accurately represents the amount of practice and research I was able to do in my regular life, before the illusion gets shattered and I move onto test my might against the next new ranking system. If playing guitar had any kind of formal ranking system, it would be all I ever did.

Those are the songs, those are the ideas behind them. I think this is some of my best writing, if only because it's also helped me move through my (for want of a less severe word) addiction to these kind of game mechanics, as well as the kind of grandiose self-placating about what being good at a game will afford me. These songs spend a lot of time meditating on legacy, on what it means to be great. I like to think that the releasing of this music is also the releasing of my inhibitions, feeling the rain on my skin. Telling myself I don't need to be the best at anything to be worth listening to or being around. It's enough to be an active part of a scene, even if you're not the ultimate victor in the scene, that's not where the inherent value is.

Something else I think I did on this EP better than most of (if not all of) my previous work is collaborating. I had a deliberate policy of Book The Homies for as many things as possible. Personnel that made irreplaceable contributions to this EP were:

• Rubén Vásquez Amos (production)

• Joe-Neil Solan (Drums)

• Jasper Osborn (Bass)

• Belle Antoinette (Keys Programming)

  
  

Working with Rubén on the mix of this record was a colossal quality of life change. I've always viewed mixing as the corrective part when all the cool stuff has been done. For him, mixing is the cool stuff. I gave him a set of stems that I already thought I'd done a mix/master of. Without changing any of the actual substance in the music, he produced something that was effectively an entirely different product. This was exciting, and it was therapeutic. Mixing session would involve turning off the computer monitor, listening to the whole song through and making our own notes, and reconvening after to share them. It was such a refreshing way to think about the way I make my music, directly opposed to the way I've been making it since the pandemic, which is insular and with a lack of fresh perspective. Speaking of fresh perspective, delegating bass playing was also something new. I can play bass, I've played bass seriously for a long while now, but I'm not a first-study bassist as the students would say. I could have very easily laid down basslines for all these songs, but having someone like Jasper who was this articulate and creative and into the specific act of bass playing in the way that Rubén was focused on the mixing process, elevated the quality and contributive power of the instrument across the board. Joe-Neil and Belle are trusted collaborators since forever, booking them for this was a no-brainer.

It's also imperative to plug the homies. You can keep up with these amazing musicians here:

• https://www.instagram.com/solan.joe/

• https://www.instagram.com/bladebaemusic/

• https://www.instagram.com/therealbelleantoinette/

  
  

That's all I have to say really. Give the EP a listen! Make your own art! Book the homies to make it better, you'll never regret it.