Jojo Mayer

Starting off I don't have much to say about Jojo Mayer as I only really learned of him recently (like literally a day ago) but I really wanted to write something about him. I learned about Jojo through an Adam Neely video on "The Ethics of Fake Guitar", which is a video I totally recommend giving a watch. I feel some points in the beginning of the video were sort of shaky, but his main point which he got to around halfway through really brought everything together, Neely making a statement on what really makes a genre a genre. Jojo Mayer was mentioned in Neely's video as an example of people who, rather than being bogged down or vehemently against the digitization of music (fuck u rick beato), was inspired by it. Jojo was largely inspired by the Drum & Bass scene in the 90s with eccentric digitally programmed percussion, which is meant to be considered humanly impossible. Jojo made it his mission to take these impossible drum beats, and try and learn how to play them on a real acoustic drumset. He talks about all of this in his Ted Talk from 2011, "Exploring the distance between 0 and 1". Here he spoke about a ton of things, including the full story about he became inspired by and started to try and play these drum & bass parts. Something that really hooked me was how he spoke about how the changing medium through which music is created causes it to evolve around the characteristics of the medium. Digital drumming was unable to replicate the nuances of a human drum performance, so people eventually leaned into the entire digital sound and aesthetic that came with programmed drums. At the end of his presentation he goes onto the drumkit and improvises an actually insane drum and bass part, all played live, which just blew my mind. I've seen this done before on the internet, like Russell Holzman (better known as starpowerdrummer), Caroline Polachek's session drummer who also tries to replicate these "impossible" drum parts acoustically. But what I really enjoy about jojo, is first, how he's been around forever, and second, just his entire vibe. He's the kind of person who you want to listen to when they speak. I feel the same way about Jacob Collier actually, like just the way someone talks about music can be really enticing to me (depite me not liking any of his songs sorry jacob). Jojo has another Ted Talk from 2019, on the topic of improvisation (link), which also is just an amazing speech. I feel wary to call anything life-changing because I don't really know how I got here or what in my life truly has impacted me, but it certainly felt life-changing to listen to. Truly amazing that he, in a speech about improvisation, is on the drumkit improvising the entire time and speaking in time with his beat. After watching these two videos, I went and looked up what music Jojo had put out, and found an amazing album with the same name as the previously mentioned Ted Talk, The Distance Between Zero And One. I'm still in the process of listening through his discography but I have been loving every minute so far. He works with a group he helped form named Nerve, which he met in the late 90's (according to their bio on spotify probably just go read that lol). They make crazy drum and bass songs and he drums even crazier drum and bass beats over them it's great.



What Jojo Mayer really had me thinking about was new technologly forming these new genres through giving humans more ways to express themselves, whether through imitation of music made with these new technologies, or through human expression that uses these technologies as a medium. Decades ago, these new technologies were things like drum machines, VSTs, and DAWs, which we have seen amazing things done by humans with. Though now the only new technology I can think of entering the scene of music is AI. The question now is about whether or not AI will be the same as these other technologies, giving life to new forms of creativity and art. I may be entirely wrong, but AI feels different. While previous abstractions in music history did take away human elements from the music making process, AI completely strips humans out of the equation, at least in terms of generative AI. While DAWs and quantization did try and make things easier, ultimately people were still at the helm, and could choose to lean into these digital aspects and make something literally never heard before. There's definitely an entire conversation to be had about hyperpop and SOPHIE and literally the entire formation of this new culture. The only human element of AI, the only place where someone can differentiate themselves, is through prompting. The idea of AI prompting as a form of creative expression makes me sick though. You form a real idea, and instead of taking the time to fully think through the idea and really flesh out what you want from it, you put it into a slop generator to pump out slop. (to put it lightly) I'm not against LLM's as a whole, especially not when they have had realy positive impacts, like many fields of science. (See this video by Veritasium) AI is an important technology, but the usage of this technology in generative AI and AI chatbots, for the purpose of imitating different forms of art, brings us no value. As many people have begun to say, generative AI art is becoming the new aesthetic of fascism. Certain genuinely terrible people who don't have a single creative bone in their body have been given the power to express through this new medium. (Check this article out possibly maybe (link)) While as of today I am yet to see the usage of AI in a truly impressive creative work, I do truly hope that the better among us will somehow still find a way to inject true human creativity back into this soulless medium.



(5/3/2025)