Stream

Out today under my instrumental Sleeping Animal pseudonym is a composition entitled Stream. It’s a measured and minimal eleven minute miniature suite for electric piano and synthesizers. Look for Stream today, July 25, 2025 on all streaming services. I’m over half way through the release schedule of Sleeping Animal releases that took shape pretty quickly at the beginning of this year. My hope was that they might find an audience outside the niche I’ve cultivated with my penchant for field recording taking a co-equal, or maybe even primary role in my music. It seems like a fine time to reflect on how the Sleeping Animal experiment is going. If you’re interested in this, by all means read on. If it’s not what you signed up for, feel free to skip it. Neo-classical, Chilly Gonzales, Mood Music, and What Now? I’m thinking about an essay by Chilly Gonzales entitled Why I Regret Giving Birth to the Neoclassical Genre that opens with this paragraph: It’s usually a forest, or a mountainside, or a beach. Ideally, it’s an otherworldly volcanic terrain, maybe in Iceland. A piano sits conspicuously in the middle of this landscape, as a pianist with eyes closed exaggerates the effort required to present some familiar arpeggios on the white keys. This is Neoclassical music, a genre I may have birthed, and I hate myself for it. I had to laugh. This was accurately calling out Sleeping Animal before it even came to be. It’s usually a forest. Check. Familiar arpeggios on the white keys. Fair enough. I mean, I’m pretty comfortable on the black keys too, but I tend to follow familiar pathways when composing, so touché, and ouch! In this essay Gonzales reflects on his 2004 solo piano release, aptly entitled Solo Piano, offered up as a curveball to the “electro-hipster” fanbase he garnered in the preceding years. Back in 2004 my music business contacts saw my Solo Piano transformation as career suicide. Nobody thought of solitary piano music as a potential gravy train. But here we are, the algorithm has spoken and background music is now big business. Playlists like Peaceful Piano or Music for Studying have turbo-charged the monetisation of functional background music. These playlists pay, albeit badly. And when the playlists pay, the industry pays attention… The essay was published in September last year. While the Peaceful Piano playlist is still a gravy train for the premiere names of the genre, the chill playlist diaspora have been largely reprogrammed with “ghost artists”. (In a nutshell, ghost artists are fictional artist identities given to tracks created by for-hire studio musicians willing to crank out original songs to fit a mood, all in an obfuscated scheme to cut costs for the platform.) Today, the few high traffic playlist slots that remain for real artists might be the last of the low hanging fruit for the AI-generated music tidal wave that we are being warned about. I’m not ashamed to say that the invention of Sleeping Animal was in part an experiment to see if I could grow my streaming income by diversifying. I said that much from the get-go, calling it a spin off. Gonzales relayed an anecdote about the allure of chasing playlists: A musician friend of mine worked painstakingly for years on a complex and challenging album only to hear from his record label that “we love it but we feel we could invest more of our time, energy and money if you would add something for the fans of Ludovico Einaudi”. In other words, to become Zweinaudi or Dreinaudi. It’s difficult to resist this pressure. It wasn’t long before my friend went back to the studio and aimed a few more pieces squarely at the “peaceful piano” bullseye. And worst of all, my friend and the label were rewarded mightily for their capitulation. But really, worst of all? This seems a bit holier than thou, honestly. So, real artists only make complex, challenging music and never think about earning a living? I watched the 2019 documentary, Shut up and Play the Piano, profiling Gonzales several years ago. He exudes main character energy in the film in a way that’s almost hard to watch: complex, bedeviled, and willing to go to extremes to compensate for something—we’re not sure what. A sibling rivalry? Imposter syndrome from portraying himself as a musical genius, while struggling to read beginner level sheet music? For all the vulnerable sequences and observations in the film, there’s an equal number of clips cultivating a chameleonic chicanery. I am one of the many devotees to Gonzales’ solo piano works. These albums featured minimalist black and white drawings, evoking the trope of a serious, studied artiste. His cover for Solo Piano III went so far as to insinuate technical prowess: three disembodied hands dancing across the surface of a piano keyboard. I bought it. I thought he was a piano genius. In a way, both he and the movie pulled the rug out from under fans like me. I wasn’t sure how to feel about it. When I listen to Gonzales’ solo piano pieces, I hear sincerity, depth, melody, sophistication. They want for nothing, to my ear. Did that opening paragraph in his essay ring so true because it cuts close to home? A lot of ink has been spilled about the dumbing down of musical taste at the hands of tech overlords and opportunistic hacks in service of the playlist era, serving up mood music: frictionless, dull, generic background music to soundtrack one’s aspirational chill. It’s hard to shake the fear that my own catalogue isn’t also being dragged through the mud with this critique. A lot of hand-wringing and dislocation will certainly play out in the dawning era of AI in the music industry. The neo-classical, and lo-fi beats genres that populate so many chill and focus playlists will almost certainly be inundated. How are artists like myself to navigate the shifting sands? Ten to twenty years after they were released, Chilly Gonzales’ solo piano albums sound timeless. To me, they are classics. I hope to feel something similar for my own work after the passing of many years. That’s my aim. This is a public episode. 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