What inspired the name of the band? What are your influences and are they the same as when you started out?
I wanted to create my own word for the project, and I came up with “obdurate” by combining the prefix “ob”, which roughly means “to bring an end to”, and “durate”, derived from “duration”. Thus “obdurate” is to “bring an end to the enduring”, or something like that. Then, when I was typing the name into the Bandcamp page, I misspelt “obdurate”, and then when I was proof reading it I noticed and so I corrected the spelling and when I did, I noticed that the red squiggly underline went away… so “obdurate” actually was a word and I didn’t realise that!
So, then I looked up the definition of “obdurate” and it essentially means “unmoving in opinion”, like when you try to argue with somebody but they’re “completely obdurate”. I thought about this word and realised it had a nice philosophical interpretation. The interesting question to me was “what if you are the obdurate one?” Personally, I can think of times in my life where it seems my own stubborn mind is what has caused the problem, especially problems involving anxiety, lack of certainty, acceptance of the “unknown” etc. It can be hard when your own mind is the obdurate one, and I am sure that the only escape is to accept it and work with yourself rather than against yourself, but I certainly haven’t mastered putting this into practice yet.
As per my influences, I have both abstract and concrete influences. Abstractly, I love the “invention/creation” aspect of music “what has not been done yet but which in theory could have been done decades ago”, especially when it comes to composition. I am also a mathematics PhD student and I draw a lot of influence for my music from conversations I’ve had with other mathematicians. More concretely, I adore Between the Buried and Me for their creativity and compositional control they showed in Colors through to the Parallax II. I also love Haken, Fair to Midland, Orbs, Unexpect, etc, however I turned at some point towards “heavier” influences, because I simply found them to be more creative than a lot of “prog” music. Examples who come to name are Portal, Liturgy, Krallice, Gorguts, Deathspell
Omega, and lesser-known bands like Cleric, Tulip, Hypno5e, Tenue, and others.
How do you decide what to write?
Creating music is a process of self-actualisation for me and so is very personal. It’s not so much a “decision” of what to write next but rather less tangible “pull” in some direction. I know “story telling” is an important concept to me. So is “world building”. So is musical invention, etc. I also pay a lot of attention to what I don’t want to write, and in fact this is in many ways more important, I think. I don’t want it to sound derivative, nor like a copy-cat band, I don’t want it to be dissatisfying, nor boring, I don’t want it to be a waste of time, I don’t want it to be shallow, etc. So, if I satisfy all of this and use some interesting chords, melodies, and harmonies along the way, I’m sure I’ll be happy with it…
I find it crucial to look for inspiration in other art-forms. Only looking to music for musical inspiration is highly insufficient. I’m sure this is true of other art forms as well. As I already said, I am a PhD student in mathematics and so I’m in a position where I can set the realistic goal to have at least one perspective shifting conversation per day with somebody interesting and well thought out. This obviously puts me in an incredibly privileged position and indeed I take full advantage of it. The point though is that good ideas generate more good ideas. So, I try to keep inspired by filling my mind with beautiful thoughts. I’ve also noticed that the happier I am the more inspired and musically creative I am, so I try to pay attention to my mental health too, indeed this is part of the lyrical content of the song “The Happiness Machine”.
How do you decide what to write?
Creating music is a process of self-actualisation for me and so is very personal. It’s not so much a “decision” of what to write next but rather less tangible “pull” in some direction. I know “story telling” is an important concept to me. So is “world building”. So is musical invention, etc. I also pay a lot of attention to what I don’t want to write, and in fact this is in many ways more important, I think. I don’t want it to sound derivative, nor like a copy-cat band, I don’t want it to be dissatisfying, nor boring, I don’t want it to be a waste of time, I don’t want it to be shallow, etc. So, if I satisfy all of this and use some interesting chords, melodies, and harmonies along the way, I’m sure I’ll be happy with it…
I find it crucial to look for inspiration in other art-forms. Only looking to music for musical inspiration is highly insufficient. I’m sure this is true of other art forms as well. As I already said, I am a PhD student in mathematics and so I’m in a position where I can set the realistic goal to have at least one perspective shifting conversation per day with somebody interesting and well thought out. This obviously puts me in an incredibly privileged position and indeed I take full advantage of it. The point though is that good ideas generate more good ideas. So, I try to keep inspired by filling my mind with beautiful thoughts. I’ve also noticed that the happier I am the more inspired and musically creative I am, so I try to pay attention to my mental health too, indeed this is part of the lyrical content of the song “The Happiness Machine”.
How do you decide what to play live?
This is a very easy question; I normally have 40–45-minute sets and I have released 35 minutes of material total. So, there is not much of a choice to be made! However, I do not play Legend of the Crocos live, the reason why is because I simply do not believe I can give a convincing performance of it. I have been thinking recently that I will remove some of the lyrics from being displayed by the projector and take a moment to read them or display them between songs whilst simple chordal movements take place. I am not sure though.
What plans have you got for the future?
Lots of plans! I am working on a new album; this one will feature live musicians too rather than just software ones (I did record guitar for my first album but the next one will have many more recordings). The new album is a continuous flow and has a unique emotional flow, I feel, so I’m very excited to release it.
Also, I have been thinking about how to combine my academic interests/skills with my musical ones, and I think the obvious choice is to incorporate elements of artificial intelligence into my music. I anticipate this to be relatively straight forward to do in a couple of years’ time and highly commonplace in ten years’ time, so I should get started on that quickly to be ahead! I’ll mention too that yes, I am aware people are already doing this, Holly Herndon for example who recently released Holly+, there is OpenAI’s Jukebox (although this is considered old code now), many Youtubers have made videos where they create music with the help from ChatGPT, there is also Never Before Heard Sounds, the software Max, I know Autechre are doing interesting things too plus undoubtably many other electronic musicians, etc.
What plans have you got for the future?
Lots of plans! I am working on a new album; this one will feature live musicians too rather than just software ones (I did record guitar for my first album but the next one will have many more recordings). The new album is a continuous flow and has a unique emotional flow, I feel, so I’m very excited to release it.
Also, I have been thinking about how to combine my academic interests/skills with my musical ones, and I think the obvious choice is to incorporate elements of artificial intelligence into my music. I anticipate this to be relatively straight forward to do in a couple of years’ time and highly commonplace in ten years’ time, so I should get started on that quickly to be ahead! I’ll mention too that yes, I am aware people are already doing this, Holly Herndon for example who recently released Holly+, there is OpenAI’s Jukebox (although this is considered old code now), many Youtubers have made videos where they create music with the help from ChatGPT, there is also Never Before Heard Sounds, the software Max, I know Autechre are doing interesting things too plus undoubtably many other electronic musicians, etc.