Anti Ogilvy: Addendum

The beautiful and raw music of Terekke

Yesterday I went on a long rant of sorts about taking a stance against picture-perfect writing.

My basic take is that anyone can produce polished sounding advertising writing now. Even before AI, we all had so much access to well composed writing online.

There’s even whole websites dedicated to swipe files. Imitating what has worked before has never been easier.

And so I made a case for real writing. From an individual with their own unique perspective and in their own style.

I picked a big, fat target in David Ogilvy to rail against.

I said he was writing for mass consumption. It was super clean and easy to digest. And that now the mass consumption era is over.

But…

I didn’t actually spend much time in the article talking about Ogilvy at all. Most of it was a little history lesson on club music, vinyl records and the introduction of computers into the making of club music.

Told from my memory with no research.

By analogy I was trying to show how music makers had gone through this perfection vs imperfection phase in the mid 2000s. They realised that the noise and drift that hardware music machines likes synths and drum machines introduced to music was actually more satisfying for the listener. That music only made on a computer tended to lose this quality.

And so many producers then made an about turn and went back to having machines make up a decent chunk of what they used to make their tracks.

But I didn’t give any examples of what I was talking about.

This morning I was zoning out listening to spacey, synthy, no beat music. It’s one of my favourite things to do. Other people meditate, this works for me.

I started with a playlist I have on Spotify. At some one point a track by an artist called Terekke came on. I didn’t recognise it at first but had to get up to check what was playing. It just grabbed me.

And I wasn’t at all surprised when I saw Terekke’s name on the player. He’s an artist I’ve liked for years. And I think he is a good example of the point I was trying to make.

See, Terekke’s music is not at all well produced by conventional standards.

I remember years ago reading an interview with Ron Morelli the head of the L.I.E.S. label on which Terekke released a lot of his music. To paraphrase, Ron said that he wished that Terekke handed in better mixes and final products of his work, but he released them anyway because the music was so good.

I’m not totally sure if Ron was being truthful or not in what he said. I can understand how it may have been easier, from a technical standpoint, to press the music to vinyl with a better mix.

But for me, I always loved the rawness of Terekke’s sound.

In the world of club music that almost by definition is formulaic, he always stood out.

As a funny side note, I’ve never seen Terekke play live. I did have a ticket to a show he was playing in Sydney and I was even in the room before he started. But this was back in the days when I drank and partied and did naughty things. I’d been at a friends house before the show and while drunk ate too much weed cake. I basically freaked out in the venue and had to leave. I walked out of the club and straight to KFC and ate an obscene amount of popcorn chicken. By myself.

The above photo is from this video that you can watch of Terekke being interviewed and talking about how he makes music.

I think something that should stand out to anyone in this photo, whether you know anything about club music or not, is that he is not in a ‘proper’ studio. It’s just his living room. He’s sitting on the couch.

If you watch the video you’ll see he has no computer involved at all. Just a bunch of machines. He records onto a reel to reel tape mixer.

And the music is unplanned and spontaneous. When he is ready to go he just hits record and does a take.

Some are good and some are bad.

For me, all of this is very apparent in his output and creates a lovely aesthetic to his sound. Relaxed and laid back and casual. And very real and unique.