Name: Sphente
Nationality: American
Occupation: Composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist
Current release: NTHNL and Sphente's new album Awareness of the Wind Within is out via Protomaterial.

[Read our NTHNL interview]

If you enjoyed this Sphente interview and would like to know more about his music, visit him on Instagram, and bandcamp.  

For a deeper dive, read our earlier Sphente interview.



How important is sound for our overall well-being and in how far do you feel the "acoustic health" of a society or environment is reflective of its overall health?

We are in a dark place right now and in part because the acoustic health of our society is very poor. There is a war on music taking place and it is waged by the greed of capitalism and big tech. They are trying to control us by depriving us of the real thing and subbing in fodder.

A lot of people just listen to AI generated music on the war machine streaming platform, through laptop speakers or earphones. Everything is heavily compressed both data-wise and dynamically. What happens is you grow up listening to this and you think this is what music is supposed to be, what audio is supposed to be.

It is not.

I don’t come at it from a audiophile perspective because of course there is an accessibility aspect to this, most people can’t afford to have a nice hifi in their home, own records, or have access to a world class sound system.

But a big part of the problem is that music is disappearing from the physical reality and our entirety of our perception of this fundamental element of the human experience is being shaped by junk playback systems playing artificial nonsense crafted to make us dopamine addicts and numb us to the atrocities taking place all around us.

It’s why I’m committed to not just being a performer but also an engineer and an organizer. A lot of people go their whole lives and don’t have many proper musical experiences because the industry is so tainted. It dulls your curiosity to look for something more because maybe you thought that’s all music is.

We have this other connected problem that people are less inclined to be instrumentalists because you can just be a DJ or electronic artist. People can’t sing like they used to because of assisting technology.

We need to pay attention to what’s happening because if people forget what real music is supposed to sound like and we are not strong enough on instruments to out-class AI, the musical tradition going back to the beginning of humanity will be forever broken.