Evolving Portals 🌀
an evolving series...
"Evolving Portals" are live recorded one take sessions capturing the entire process of making music in real time. Pushing the limits of experimentation and embracing imperfection, breaking things on purpose just to try and solve the puzzles. Riding the great unknown, lost in the process, the pinnacle of improvisation through embracing flow state by leaning into ADHD as a superpower. Nothing is Finalized, all mistakes have a purpose, all fumbles build to evolving ideas. The Patient Ear is rewarded. 🌀🧎‍♂️
"I Should Have Saved This Hours Ago" (Evolving Portals)
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How did we get here?
I've created multiple albums worth of songs from 2017-Present. Yet I haven't released an official album since I dropped "Traversal" on Cassette shortly after my mother passed late 2016 while I was living in Los Angles. After a lifetime of living in apartments, getting evicted nearly each time for noise complaints, after couch surfing while traveling and Traversing across the country bouncing from Los Angeles to New York non stop. I moved back to Tampa and finally rented my first house in April of 2017.
No more noise complaints, No Relationships to distract me. No room mates or family. Just solo and super isolated alone in a 2 bedroom house a half a mile away from the ocean (Gulf of Mexico). Living alone, So close to nature in walking distance with no one around that I could bother or that would question what or how long I was creating. (if you ever lived with a producer, you probably understand the pain of listening to us audition 600 snares in a row before finally choosing one, and that's just choose one drum haha) I was able to experiment and create endlessly. I'd black out for 16 hrs at time with extreme creative tunnel vision and come to, realizing I was on my 40th version of flipping the same sample. I would have so many different variations I liked, I could never choose or settle on which version I would choose to make a final beat.
There was something about finality that I wanted to defy with every fiber in my being. I just couldn't find the desire to complete or polish tracks. I put so so so much love into my official albums. A lot of emotion, time & energy go into making long elaborate journeys that flow like a story. So in an age where albums maybe have about 10 to 12 one minute tracks, and algorithms that make it near impossible to reach the fans we've spent all these years building up. I found myself needing to slowdown and re-evaluate how to navigate in this brave new music industry. I put a pause on releasing new albums. However I never stopped creating. Truth is, I've made more music from 2017 to present, then I made from 1995-2016 combined. All while having the most fun I've ever had experimenting while no one was focused on me. So many long sessions of inspiration and I wasn't capturing any of it. I began thinking about music in a different way. Thinking about our favorite albums. The collection of songs that only last a few minutes each. Knowing that to get to those refined final versions. Hours or days of creating went into shaping them into the tracks we end up with. I thought about albums like Miles Davis "Bitches Brew" and Arthur Verocai's 1972 self titled album and thought to myself, how crazy would it be if we had access to the entire creative process for those albums, or any of your favorite artists albums. The jam sessions and sketches before they turned into the truncated and finalized versions we ended up with.. Magic tends to happen during the experimental phase of music production, a lot of which is never heard on refined and released songs.
Think about it like this, you ever noticed how people do their best work when the pressure of being recorded isn't there. Ever did something so inspired and just couldn't replicate it once you remembered to press record. I became obsessed with wanted to document those possible moments of magic, mistakes and all but unfortunately, I wasn't able to pull this off in Ableton alone, Id capture long takes, but the moment I pressed the stop button, it would stop the recording (resample) which led to hundreds of recorded files and killed my hard drive space very quickly. I needed an external source to capture everything I was doing on my computer. So I decided to stream on twitch.
I would stream my sessions for hours, and forget I was streaming, completely neglecting chat because I so tunnel in the creative zone. I would start to read back the chat after I ended the stream and realized people where trying to interact and ask me questions and felt neglected. I felt bad because I wasn't purposely ignoring anyone, I just have severe ADHD and I get lost in the creative process, constantly moving from idea to idea which is why I wanted to begin capturing the entire process in the first place so I could try and understand how I work while in this meditative state. People started making a big deal about me not interacting with chat when I was live so I had to disclaimer my streams with intent and label them as a Portal opening inside my home that allows you to just see and hear what I'm doing but I'm lost in the portal and can't see you. This went over well and people would sit and watch me for hours at time just to see where I was going to take things.
The twitch culture was changing and I started to notice more and more new people come in and lose interest when I didn't answer their questions. So on January 4th 2019. I promoted my first live stream in which I would be periodically popping out of my creative zone to make sure I could interact with chat. I began the stream in the morning playing ambient, improv keys and practiced looking at chat, I then began to go thru some sessions, allowing chat to look thru the file names and choose which session I would open. It was dope, like I was hanging out with people in my house, but I'm still me, so I'd go long periods where I'd get lost in a project and forget about chat haha. As someone who loves a challenge, I decided to let chat send me samples to flip. The stream ended up being 10 hours, and because I was unable to hyper focus in my zone and felt the pressure of knowing chat was watching and craving interaction, I had this voice in the back of head to constantly keep changing up the sample. Which worked out because it forever altered how I approach sessions.
This session would end up fundamentally changing how I approach music and ended up becoming the first #EvolvingPortal A project file I would revisit over and over for the next 3 years. Constantly resampling what I did the previous session and evolving it into something new. I perfected this method by 2020 and went absolutely bonkers evolving multiple portals until I eventually forgot how to create a normal, short song haha.
But it all began with this Project file titled:
"I should have saved this hours ago" or "ishstha" for short.
1/1 [Catalog Works]
Reserve Price: 1 ETH
"I should have saved this hours ago" (Evolving Portals)
Produced By: Dutchyyy
Runtime: 28 minutes
Back Story:
This session started on 1-6-2019 during my 1st 10 hour live stream on twitch, where my chat provided the sample for me to flip.
Probably one of my favorite beats of all time and I still haven't exported a final or normal version of it, because I made way too many change ups and have revisited and evolved/devolved the session countless times since then. (see album cover)
The last saved version in Ableton was 8.6.21 but this specific version was created at the end of January 2022 as I revisited the project file one last time and Evolved a new Portal in real time on i.g. live.
So this audio only exists because I was capturing the audio via Re-sample on the SP-404, and I didn't even start recording from the beginning.
Reserve Price: 1 ETH
"I should have saved this hours ago" (Evolving Portals)
Produced By: Dutchyyy
Runtime: 28 minutes
Back Story:
This session started on 1-6-2019 during my 1st 10 hour live stream on twitch, where my chat provided the sample for me to flip.
Probably one of my favorite beats of all time and I still haven't exported a final or normal version of it, because I made way too many change ups and have revisited and evolved/devolved the session countless times since then. (see album cover)
The last saved version in Ableton was 8.6.21 but this specific version was created at the end of January 2022 as I revisited the project file one last time and Evolved a new Portal in real time on i.g. live.
So this audio only exists because I was capturing the audio via Re-sample on the SP-404, and I didn't even start recording from the beginning.
1/1 [Catalog Works]
Reserve Price: 1.111 ETH
ASMR.WAV (Evolving Portals)
Produced by Dutchyyy
Runtime: 32 minutes
Backstory:
This isn't the most technical or intricate piece of audio I've ever shaped, However is by far one of the most important and pivotal tracks for me personally, out of everything I've ever made since I began creating music in back in 1995. But Why?
This was very first long form Portal I captured on my SP404, but to understand the significance of this recording.
Capturing my sessions on twitch was nice. But converting twitch streams to audio files would result in super degraded audio quality. So I first attempted to capture my audio coming out of my audio interface and into my portable Tascam-DR05 but all the recordings would come out thin and didn't sound anything like they did in Ableton. I sold my OG SP404 a few years prior, but remembered I could resample for an extended amount of time when I had it even though I never used it in that manner.
I copped a SP404SX from the homie, even though I wanted the OG404 again, I wanted to test this method out as quick as possible so I paid to have SX shipped overnight and went to make sure I bought any cable I would need to execute pulling this simple task off.
The SP arrived the following evening after the sun went down.
I opened up the project file
"I should have saved this hours ago" created a new version, added a few new samples into the project for some new creative energy. Hooked up the SP404, Pressed Record and thus was born the first, long form, in the moment live captured Portal as one long file.
ASMR.WAV
I've gotten way more advanced in my methods evolving portals
since, While this may not be my favorite Portal. It is the most pivotal and special one since it was the first time,
I realized I would be able to pull of my vision.
Since then, I've recorded thousands of hours worth of Portals.
32 minutes is now a short "song" to me. Most ranging from 1hr to a few hours each. Due to live, real time nature of Portals, if you don't have patience or faith in where I'm going take things, I recommend approaching long Portals like you would putting on a new record you found to dig for samples, and maybe skip around at first, because most portals are albums inside albums with the dopest music I've ever made tucked in between the weirdest experimental pockets.
In a world obsessed with short form content,
Portals have no chance of surviving in terms of marketing or monetary value.
Reserve Price: 1.111 ETH
ASMR.WAV (Evolving Portals)
Produced by Dutchyyy
Runtime: 32 minutes
Backstory:
This isn't the most technical or intricate piece of audio I've ever shaped, However is by far one of the most important and pivotal tracks for me personally, out of everything I've ever made since I began creating music in back in 1995. But Why?
This was very first long form Portal I captured on my SP404, but to understand the significance of this recording.
Capturing my sessions on twitch was nice. But converting twitch streams to audio files would result in super degraded audio quality. So I first attempted to capture my audio coming out of my audio interface and into my portable Tascam-DR05 but all the recordings would come out thin and didn't sound anything like they did in Ableton. I sold my OG SP404 a few years prior, but remembered I could resample for an extended amount of time when I had it even though I never used it in that manner.
I copped a SP404SX from the homie, even though I wanted the OG404 again, I wanted to test this method out as quick as possible so I paid to have SX shipped overnight and went to make sure I bought any cable I would need to execute pulling this simple task off.
The SP arrived the following evening after the sun went down.
I opened up the project file
"I should have saved this hours ago" created a new version, added a few new samples into the project for some new creative energy. Hooked up the SP404, Pressed Record and thus was born the first, long form, in the moment live captured Portal as one long file.
ASMR.WAV
I've gotten way more advanced in my methods evolving portals
since, While this may not be my favorite Portal. It is the most pivotal and special one since it was the first time,
I realized I would be able to pull of my vision.
Since then, I've recorded thousands of hours worth of Portals.
32 minutes is now a short "song" to me. Most ranging from 1hr to a few hours each. Due to live, real time nature of Portals, if you don't have patience or faith in where I'm going take things, I recommend approaching long Portals like you would putting on a new record you found to dig for samples, and maybe skip around at first, because most portals are albums inside albums with the dopest music I've ever made tucked in between the weirdest experimental pockets.
In a world obsessed with short form content,
Portals have no chance of surviving in terms of marketing or monetary value.
"23" (Evolving Portals)
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23" (Evolving Portals) - Produced by Dutchyyy
Runtime: 8 minutes
1/1 owned by Alez.eth
Listen Here:
https://legacy.catalog.works/dutchyyy/-23-evolving-portals-
"23" (Evolving Portals) - Produced by Dutchyyy
Originally created October 2023, 1/1 Minted on Catalog Works at the right before the stroke of midnight on New Years Eve of 2023.
Due to last minute rush of trying to secure the final 1/1 of 2023 on Catalog, I wasn't able to attached a backstory to that 1/1, So I instead created a video version for social media and attached the backstory in the description of the post on my I.G. @peacepeacegawd on new years day.
The below backstory is basically copy & pasted from that post.
Backstory:
📖 The Final #EvolvingPortals of 2023 happened on accident a few months ago, live during a private one on one discord video call teaching an “Ableton Live, The Dutchyyy Way” lesson w/ the homie Alez (Spores lead dev, Catalog Works Engineer) where shortly after teaching my warp, stretch, signature chop method, I got distracted, went silent… and fell thru a portal instead of teaching haha. That pretty much sums up 2020-2023…. Felt symbolic to end the year off with 91st 1/1 💽 on @catalogworks being some accidental improv real time documentation. I’m at a very pivotal & critical place in time where my life is in the progress of drastically changing. A mixture of the greatest blessings & greatest hardships at all once. 2024 will not start off fresh. The next few months will be arduous but there is finally a light at the end of the tunnel. Hold tight while Pivot, Battle, Traverse, Re-settle & Recalibrate for the next ARC/Chapter. Thank you to everyone who has shown grace, patience, love and compassion during the most unbearably challenging period of my life. As Always, I will pay it forward 10fold once I stabilize. Peace 2023. Peace Peace 2024. 🌀🧎🏻 - Dutch 📖
"A Peach Mint Bopper" (Evolving Portals)
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The 28:53 minute audio snippet of me working on my
#ImpeachThePresident (Sample Challenge)
submission live on twitch [September 11th, 2020] for this Historic Challenge
Produced by Dutchyyy
House Shoes presents:
Flipsessions6 #ImpeachThePresident (Sample Challenge)
hosted by STREETCORNERMUSIC.
The Challenge Rules were to only use the provided sample, no outside elements (Drums, Bass, VST's, Samples, etc.) So every single element of my Submission was super micro-chopped, mangled and manipulated using only the "Impeach The President" record.
*****If / When this 1/1 is collected, I will add both the IRL Video version of this Evolving Portals and the much longer full Twitch VOD which shows in detail my whole process from start to finish.******
"Cook Off 008: Dutchyyy" (Evolving Portals)
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Produced by Dutchyyy
Runtime: 31 minutes, 31 seconds
The full audio version of "Cook Off 008: Dutchyyy" (Evolving Portals)
"Cook Off 008 kicks off today, with samples provided by the one and only @Dutchyyy" - Athena [02/03/2023 12:15 PM]
The full audio version of "Cook Off 008: Dutchyyy" (Evolving Portals)
Where I flipped my own samples from the 5.26GB [110 files] folder I submitted for others to choose and flip from. While I didn't submit officially for my own challenge, Â I always planned to flip my own samples live on stream after listening to everyones submissions during the Catalog Works Discord Playback Live Stream which happened March 2rd, 2023. So as soon as we all said goodnight & ended that super inspirational playback stream in the Catalog Works Discord. Â A Portal was opened live @ twitch.tv/peacepeacegawd
Cook Off 008 Submissions from:
lordtstxn + Chucknessa + thxk_u + Es-K + Devin Burgess + Hammered Gold + Laotree + whale.cx + Harris Cole + YoshiroMare + KSG + ali wan kenobi + Stonewax + AshTreJinkins + tvkii + matt.e.j + whknws + AjaxX + indacouch + Tired Eyes + Appa (Jzs) + gozu the DJ + adamschmadam + Devon Who + b l o o p r + Athena Yasaman
"Massive love and appreciation to you all for tapping in for Cook Off 008 ft. @Dutchyyy! This was one for the history books thanks to everyone coming together around these portals. of multi-hour" - Athena [03/02/2023 10:47 PM]
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Backstory:
On January 26th 2023, while trying to test out if my new PC could handle playing music, while gaming using my virtual avatar a critical user error was made.
New PC, new methods. Â For this test all I needed was a playlist of my own music in the windows default media player but I wasn't familiar with the one that came installed w/ my pc "Groove Music". Â It wouldn't let me drag and drop music into playlists, songs had to be imported and by mistake I chose to import my entire F drive (which was the main External SSD that held all my Ableton Live Project Files, Drums, Samples, Album Masters, Unreleased. Â Basically my master vault.
As soon as I clicked on that drive it began importing every single media file on that SSD (over 16k files to be exact) including drum one shots, everything.... Â Not ideal for what I was attempting to quickly test out, Â which was just create a mini playlist of my curated music to stream to. Â I wasn't trying to sort through 16k files so I just [shift] selected all and deleted everything that was just imported so I could just import a specific folder instead. Â When I went to create a specific folder in my External SSD, I noticed all the audio files were gone. Â I panicked, and quickly checked my trash and saw everything I deleted from the playlist in groove music was removed from my SSD and placed into the trash, Â so I quickly restored the files but realized almost everything was still missing. Â Then I saw the recycling bin had a storage limit, one that greatly exceeded and after research learned that the largest files that couldn't fit were permanently deleted.
I'm now in full blown meltdown mode. Â I consider myself somewhat computer savvy but hours and hours of research on how I could possibly recover my life's work were a bust. Â Every page, video, forum all pointed to paid recovery software and I couldn't tell what was legit or not so I took to twitter and sent out an S.O.S. Flare...
The homie Alez reached out and offered to pay for the recovery software, Â and I spent the next 12 hrs, watching this software slowly move its progress bar. Â The problem was, there was no way to recover files lost from the External SSD back on to the same SSD drive, so I had to set the recovery path to D: drive which is my 10TB disc hard drive. Â The SSD was only 1TB, but when the software finally finished it said it recovered 2.7 TB worth of data... Â I still don't understand this.....
While I was able to recover a majority of the audio files, Â most were recovered with different, incoherent file names. Â So all of those Ableton Live Project Files had no way of finding where any of the samples or drums were located. Â This absolutely decimated my spirit since there were like 7 project files I never even exported a rough version of and they were all the music I was most excited and proud of, now forever lost.
Within the same 24 hrs as this happened, on my 52nd hour of not sleeping, I got an email from Catalog asking If I wanted to be the next artist to submit samples for the upcoming Cook Off 008... Â Â Â Â Crazy timing huh? Â Â Â Â
I accepted, but explained the situation that just happened and said I would do my best. Â I just lost access to all my Ableton Project Files, 2019-2022 so all the new stuff I would have loved to submit, so I ended up using my laptop and hooked up on old drive and dug into every project file I didn't recognize... Â Â and began exporting chops, loops, drums of stuff I barely remembered making.
By the time I was finished I had a 5.26GB Folder with 110 files in it... Â Â The Largest amount of samples submitted for a Cook Off Challenge.
My biggest pet peeve w/ sample challenges is when the artist submits like 3 files, and there is hardly any Harmonic or Melodic diversity to work with, so I made sure I provided enough variation in that folder for people to choose from to make submitting a flip as stress free as possible while in the most stressed state possible at that time haha. Â Â
I'm still feeling the loss from that day, Â It messed up a lot of planned things in motion that were near completion and I've barely made new music this year because of that. Â I'm very grateful to Alez for reaching out and lending support, I'm very grateful to Catalog for being a Platform that values music and not only holds these creative fun challenges but also participates in nearly all of them. Lastly, I'm thankful to everyone who showed up for my challenge. Â It was super inspiring hearing so many talented producers putting their own spin on my samples. To this date, Cook Off 008 was the largest turn out in terms of submissions. That definitely makes me smile but I would love to see that record get shattered by more people joining in on future cook offs =)
and thus, "Cook Off 008: Dutchyyy" (Evolving Portals) was born.
"Music Nerd" (Evolving Portals) f/ cxy
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"Music Nerd" (Evolving Portals) f/ cxy
Produced by: Dutchyyy
10 Min snippet of the 130 minute long “Music Nerd” (Evolving Portals)
Backstory:
I originally asked cxy what his favorite songs were last year so I could flip them.. but instead of just making easily digestible normal beats I went further and further down the rabbit hole and rode the flow state express into the most obscure, break sh*t on purpose, experimental Jazz spirit and Evolved Portals every time I opened up the session….
I later asked C.Y. If he had any recordings of him having convos because the way he thinks and speaks about music resonates so hard with my “The Process itself is way cooler than the shiny finish product” and he sent me a podcast. What a gold mine of cherished words. I almost feel bad attaching them to me just nerding out and getting weird with music and recording the entire process live.
It’s such a frustrating reality knowing we let technology re-program us so systematically to have the smallest attention spans and be self aware that only 2% (if that) will actually digest a 10 minute video fully…. 130 minutes hahah. I’m so bored with creating and consuming conventional, short form music & videos. Even if it’s objectively dope…. I’ve consumed so much dope music in my lifetime…. And made so much conventional music. That I need to hear and make stuff that draws outside of lines and catches me off guard to fire off those neurons or I get bored quickly…. Taking the concept of music nerd so far, kids will be on a space station in the future geeking out and sampling my madness. There’s quite literally no one else that does what I do at the level I do or in the excess I do…. There’s no market for it, no trophies, and no attention spans. I've done conventional for years. Art is boundless, Theory is human made. Music is an expression that's so subjective. Why did we allow so much time to pass all following these conventional rules? Intro, verse, chorus, verse, bridge outro. Mixing, Mastering, Track Length, Genre, Single, EP, Album. Sound is cosmic... There are no rules. Just express, transmute and document.
Trying to create a starter pack for a 3 decade career seems challenging. Overwhelming amount of history, context and a vast discography. Evolution.
So let's start closer to the present. The consistent artist bored w/ boxes, rebelling against the meta & nerding out having fun creating in the flow state and documenting that real time process, mistakes and all.
Love to cxy.eth for entering my life when he did and showing me I wasn't alone in valuing the process more than the final shiny, polished result.
If there is only one thing I can leave behind to define who Dutch is it's this.
"Peace Peace, My name is Dutch and I am a lifelong living example of a Music Nerd. Music is the healer. Tiny Ripples"
#EvolvingPortals
Produced by: Dutchyyy
10 Min snippet of the 130 minute long “Music Nerd” (Evolving Portals)
Backstory:
I originally asked cxy what his favorite songs were last year so I could flip them.. but instead of just making easily digestible normal beats I went further and further down the rabbit hole and rode the flow state express into the most obscure, break sh*t on purpose, experimental Jazz spirit and Evolved Portals every time I opened up the session….
I later asked C.Y. If he had any recordings of him having convos because the way he thinks and speaks about music resonates so hard with my “The Process itself is way cooler than the shiny finish product” and he sent me a podcast. What a gold mine of cherished words. I almost feel bad attaching them to me just nerding out and getting weird with music and recording the entire process live.
It’s such a frustrating reality knowing we let technology re-program us so systematically to have the smallest attention spans and be self aware that only 2% (if that) will actually digest a 10 minute video fully…. 130 minutes hahah. I’m so bored with creating and consuming conventional, short form music & videos. Even if it’s objectively dope…. I’ve consumed so much dope music in my lifetime…. And made so much conventional music. That I need to hear and make stuff that draws outside of lines and catches me off guard to fire off those neurons or I get bored quickly…. Taking the concept of music nerd so far, kids will be on a space station in the future geeking out and sampling my madness. There’s quite literally no one else that does what I do at the level I do or in the excess I do…. There’s no market for it, no trophies, and no attention spans. I've done conventional for years. Art is boundless, Theory is human made. Music is an expression that's so subjective. Why did we allow so much time to pass all following these conventional rules? Intro, verse, chorus, verse, bridge outro. Mixing, Mastering, Track Length, Genre, Single, EP, Album. Sound is cosmic... There are no rules. Just express, transmute and document.
Trying to create a starter pack for a 3 decade career seems challenging. Overwhelming amount of history, context and a vast discography. Evolution.
So let's start closer to the present. The consistent artist bored w/ boxes, rebelling against the meta & nerding out having fun creating in the flow state and documenting that real time process, mistakes and all.
Love to cxy.eth for entering my life when he did and showing me I wasn't alone in valuing the process more than the final shiny, polished result.
If there is only one thing I can leave behind to define who Dutch is it's this.
"Peace Peace, My name is Dutch and I am a lifelong living example of a Music Nerd. Music is the healer. Tiny Ripples"
#EvolvingPortals
