Bido Lito June 2021 Issue 114

their own lanes and they’re not following a formula, not
just stylistically, but the way they navigate the industry,”
they add.
The diffuse pull of hybridity draws those attracted
to it into a protracted search for a life that expresses a
reality belonging only to you, unbound by location. “I
don’t identify with where I came from at all, maybe to
some extent my ethnicity. But my nationality, it seems
weird identifying with where you’re from ’cos you didn’t
have much control of it,” says Podge. “When you’ve got
the internet and you can pick and choose from so many
places in the world, it seems odd to make something you
have no control of your identity.”
With everything online, a purely localised sense
of self starts to feel like a relic of an obsolete past, like
internet dial-up. It’s hard not to find yourself immersed
in a bigger picture than your immediate environment. It’s
given Podge a certain overview. “It’s like nothing you’ve
ever done is just you, even you being born someone else’s
work’s gone into it,” they respond. “If anything, you’re the
smallest part in it. It feels like most things you do you are
flicking the domino and someone’s already set up all the
dominoes to fall and make a pattern. So, it’s weird to be
so attached to it. If it wasn’t for other people passing on
the information you wouldn’t be able to do it ever.”
Practicalities sometimes get in the way of this type
of common sense. Artists have always had to get past
some type of dragon, be it a patron or an industry.
They always have to live in the distance between their
dreams and mundane reality’s unalterable demands.
The reasoning of a money world that prizes victory and
possession infects everything – even what starts as
playtime, something frivolous and in-the-moment. Art
can start to feel like something you own in the same way
you might own a plot of land. “When you take a step in
the street you don’t look back on the path and think, ‘I
was that step’,” says Podge, “but if I make an EP it’s hard
not to think of it like a part of me. Like, obviously I’ve put
effort into it, but, in the end, I’m not the thing I made.”
There’s less ego at stake with every failure when
you look at it like that. It becomes less about coming up
with something that proves how great you are and more
about letting something pass into the world through
you. “Lots of people view it like they’re the person
driving the car down the road and pushing the pedals,
but it’s more like you’re the road,” they explain. “If the
car’s not going down the road right, it might just be ’cos
the car’s not as fast, but it could also be that the road is
all beat up and it’s hard for the car to go down it.” If the
artist is the road, then getting better at art is more about
bearing the weight of it patiently, pressing yourself flat
so it can go along you smoothly – rather than zooming
around all the time, all wheels and metal.
It’s a more relaxing perspective and, for Podge,
learning how to relax helped them get there. “When I
started doing meditation and stuff like that, it’s weird
how much it improved my art, not in the sense that it
made me a better technical person, but it allowed me
to tap into those less thought-about parts of yourself.”
Getting somewhere by turning away from it doesn’t
sound like it would work. “I used to think that meditation
doesn’t do anything because you’re not really doing
anything. I thought, ‘I’ll try this for two months’, but
those two months were just putting trust in it, and with
music it’s kind of that in the long-term scale.”
Enclosed within systems obsessed with zero-sum
games, where one person’s win is another person’s loss,
it feels like it makes sense to obsess about achievement
and self-flagellate when we don’t succeed in reaching
the top of the hill we’re desperately running at. But it’s
not the only way to go about things. “I’ve heard that
since I was a kid,” they reply, “not to think about the
results and the fruits of your labour will grow on their
own. But it’s so hard to see it that way until you’re
backed into a corner and you’ve got no other way of
looking at it.”
Podge’s journey, which started with a desire to
objectively succeed has revealed something unexpected,
something weird and paradoxical at play that only
reveals itself once you realise trying only gets you so far.
“Don’t try just wait for what’s next/Don’t stress you’re
probably next”, Podge tells us on Get_Up_Again.
A more casual approach makes for a more constant
flow and chill vibes. You can find Podge on Instagram
letting you in on the process: making beats live, posting
micro-tutorials and sampling bird noises in the forest
with their OP-1. When you’re focused on the material
outcome of the work, making mistakes feels like
evidence that nothing will ever come of it;
it’s helped Podge to realise that failure and
continuous graft is part of the process. “No
one ever said that making good art was
easy. It’s just unhealthy the way that
people portray artists a lot of the time,”
they say. “You could find hundreds of
hours of Jimi Hendrix playing guitar
really good, but I don’t think I could
find footage of Jimi Hendrix in the
studio trying to redo a take, like, 10
times in a row, which he obviously
did, everyone does that.” The internet
has helped to demystify the figure of
the artist, dissolving the untouchable
halo that creates a hierarchy of
creatives and non-creatives. “It seems
like everyone has the capability to make
art,” Podge tells me.
And by the same token, sometimes
artists struggle to make art, and that’s just
part of it. “I always viewed the enlightened
artist as someone who can make good music
whenever they want, but it’s
more like someone who
can understand
that they don’t
have any
control
over
whether they
make anything
good or not. That’s why I
really envied people who started
it out of a love for music, ’cos they’re doing it for fun.”
The future has a way of beckoning with strange hands
– Podge might have started with backwards ideas,
focused on the outward results, but that’s not where
they ended up.
It’s so hard to remember that life is supposed to
be fun, but music makes it easier, even if it’s pointless.
Without the self-imposed pressure of impressing other
people or reaching a certain summit, it’s hard for them
to even articulate the end goal. “I always think, ‘Would I
make music if I was stranded on a different planet, and
there was no chance of anyone else finding the stuff that
I made?’ I think maybe I would,” Podge explains. “I don’t
think I’ll ever properly know why I do it, but I think the
reason for it is probably because I can’t explain it.” !
Words: Niloo Sharifi
Photography: Robin Clewley / robinclewley.co.uk
Samuso is available now via NTS.
“I’m not the
thing I made”
FEATURE
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