Let's Make an Album

It's better if you don't know how to play any instruments.

I always thought it would be cool to release an album. I’m inspired by the DIY nature and story of artist h hunt’s 2016 album “Playing Piano for Dad,” which he originally recorded as a Christmas gift for his dad. It’s cozily underproduced, so you get to hear receipts of the artist making the song, like false starts and deep breaths. In all of its handmade and human imperfections, it is a perfect album.

I was in a band called Grandma’s Lost Beagle with my friends in college, but it was a performance art piece where we walked around town pretending to be a band and made surreal videos about it. I don’t know how to play any instruments and I don’t know much about music. But I like to hunch over the keyboard and poke it to see if I can make nice combinations of sounds. I’ve been making little songs for my mixed media videos for the past couple of years, like this one:

A couple of months ago I watched this video about outsider music, which is essentially music by self-taught or naïve musicians. Outsider art considers naïvety or lack of training a strength rather than a weakness, and this idea is very exciting to me.

The video reminded me that I had quite a few very naïve songs I'd made over the past year that were sitting around on my computer, and inspired me to compile them into an album. I called it Conquête Automatique. The name means “automatic conquest,” which symbolizes the joy of automatic creation without formal skills and structures. Conquête Automatique is also the model of the watch my partner inherited from his grandfather (pictured in the painting I made for the album cover). Everything sounds more official in French.

It’s a reflection on this moment in time, where artificial intelligence is rapidly conquering skilled creative professions like writing. The automatic conquest of AI has brought me to question what kind of work is valuable, like the kind of work that relies on intuition and soul rather than logic and structure. This project was about leaning into my lack of skills to create something unique and unformulaic.

The album isn’t good by any means, but that’s not really the point. I see projects like this as a practice of performance art and genuine curiosity. I’ve always wondered how music ends up on streaming platforms, and if anyone who makes a song can get it onto a platform as official-looking at Spotify. Now I know: it is possible.

How to make an album:

1. Make noises with an instrument, your body, or another object.

2. Record the noises with your phone or a recording device.

3. Edit using whatever software is available. I have edited songs in Adobe Premiere and Garage Band. Or don’t edit them.

4. Then you’ll want to find this thing called a “distributor.” I used a website called CD Baby and paid $15 for them to distribute my album. I uploaded the songs and artwork, entered a bunch of information about credits and stuff, and then waited a month for them to approve it. Then they did some magic and put it on Spotify and who knows where else. So cool!

5. Optional: Music videos for every song!

Oh yeah, here’s my album! You can stream it anywhere, I think? I don’t really understand how music publishing works. I just googled my artist name, A. Lumette, and found that it’s published on iHeart, where it’s compared to the likes of Pink Floyd and The Wiggles! Pretty accurate.