The Decentralization of Moonside

{==This ongoing experimental music project which started about the same time that I adopted the particular pseudonym I am posting under, here. I say about because while I only began producing music under this name and at the time of that name’s inception, it is unclear to me whether the concept behind what I soon named, Moonside, began before that music or merely after and upon its christening as such. Suffice to say, the project has stuck with me for well over a decade and nestled all of my musically oriented exploits whensoever I’ve gotten the itch.

I bring it up here and now because, like all of my creative endeavors, it’s grown into and out of and alongside of the evolution of my particular interests and the vision of what I consider to be my philosophical motif as that has developed likewise. And of course, this includes my interest in decentralization. How decentralization specifically fits into the vision of Moonside, however, requires a bit of background.==}{>>This needs a lot of work to re-contextualize for the blog, having originally been drafted for Akasha.<<}

A Brief History of Moonside

Moonside has, since its induction and for its long but sporadic history, outpaced itself with its ambitious yet enigmatic vision, dragging along a strange and disparate creative output through its conceptual wake. The result of this has been a steadily but slowly stabilizing oscillation between naive and creative amateurism. Underneath it all, however, was the idea of exploring a heavily bootstrapped approach to music and potentially some modest set of best practices, all the while leveraging the bootstrapped nature of the music as a means of creative distinction, favoring improvisation largely at the expense of expedience and efficiency of production.

The Tribes of Moonside

At some point early in its history, Moonside became as a much an experience and a tradition of sorts as it was a creative outlet. It became clear that it needed a freer and more improvisational format, distinct from its increasingly premeditated sort of improvisation (most notably by way of our then nascent use of four-track recording). Out of this was born the Tribes of Moonside and the beginnings of a more open and somewhat more public-facing format, distinguished by the then prominent musical tones associated with effects-heavy, drum-laden, multi-instrumental, psychedelic drone shifting between wild and boisterous, into violent and sinister, into blissed out and ethereal, and into ominous and foreboding. And while the performers in Moonside had always fluxuated and featured a wide range of talent from reasonably practiced and accomplished musicians to those who had never picked up an instrument in their life, that flux was always purely circumstantial, whereas in Tribes, this became a prominent feature.

The Tribes of Moonside very quickly and apparently became the way in which the most active and central mode of Moonside’s creative production could hypothetically be brought before a live audience, yet already was it most natural for Tribes to organically incorporate the audience as performers. Already too was there the seed of not only opening up these performance sessions to an audience and an audience’s participation, but opening it up to more remote participation. The Tribes at the time included two distinct sounds and methodologies: that of EARTHDATA:CRUSHSTROYER, our particular approach to psychedelic drone and noise, as well as the amalgamation of that project and my solo affair (RMBLRX), EARTHRMBL:RXSTROYER, which centers EARTHDATA’s particular drone stylings around RMBLRX’s lo-bit approach to synth loops and sometimes noise-oriented digital drones to produce what we refer to also as RXSTROYER (if you’re into the whole brevity thing).

The Tribes in the Tribes of Moonside

RXSTROYER and EARTHDATA both draw fluidly from the same membership pool and are thus only at all distinct in some element of their sound and methodology, but by their hypothetical inclusion into the Tribes (hypothetical in that RXSTROYER has not yet come into a Tribes session) stand as indication of a refrain from declaring the Tribes as in any way a monolithic entity (i.e., a band unto itself). This means that perhaps with a simple set of guidelines or perhaps even something like a manifesto and with the overall tone already quite well represented and rapidly developed over nineteen sessions in its span of only two years, it should be possible to accept submissions and, let’s say, new tribes into the Tribes of Moonside, effectively making Tribes into a network of similarly fluid performance groups, rather than a merely idiosyncratic musical project.

How this would work in practical terms is less clear. Would such a thing be governed merely by a single curator? Could it be organized in a more-or-less open and democratic sense? What impact would that have on Moonside Productions? The answers to the first two questions has become almost obvious to me, yet far from trivial: It should be governed by the length and degree of its members’ stake in the project, which weights most heavily but not solely in its founders’ stake, and it should be organized in some manner alike to that of a DAO. The answer to the third question is far less obvious, but should perhaps first be inverted to grasp the potential ramifications.

The Disintermediation of Moonside Productions

Moonside was an early adopter of various services that, at least in the time of their inception, were crucial for the distribution and promotion of independent music. This adoption began with Myspace’s groundbreaking approach as a social music platform alongside an embrace of free music distribution through various streaming and cloud platforms at the time (most notably the practically defunct last.fm, the long defunct ex.fm, and ever-persistent mediafire–the last two of which were among the most choice means of finding music in a decidedly bootleg fashion), and then later turning to SoundCloud’s distilled approach to social music distribution around the same time as turning to Bandcamp’s revolutionary approach to music sale and distribution. And yet, none of these later approaches even begin to feel like a permanent home for Moonside, little more than their largely defunct predecessors. Then came the blockchain and the swarm: Web3.0, for lack of a better term.

The Rigmarole of Online Commerce

For all of Bandcamp’s merit, it still requires a great deal of trust and confidence in the platform, in the artists, and between collaborators, heaping the burden of that trust upon various self-managing and fallible entities. This is obviously nothing unique to Bandcamp, but this is still an intimidating state of affairs for an independent artist caught up in the rigmarole of online commerce. Furthermore is such a substantial chunk of what a band or musician’s patrons are willing to pay for their work channeled to various service providing intermediaries, even for mere payment processing.

Suffice to say, these are stuffy matters unbefitting such gnarly and raw sonic stylings as Moonside has brought to bear nor its lofty aspirations (as Nietzsche puts it, “… artists never stand alone; this runs contrary to their deepest instincts.”). What was needed, as would become clear in retrospect, was an automated yet brutalistic approach to exchange, distribution, and contractual obligation in music production and patronage. This concept is as of yet nascent but immanent in the rapid development of decentralized and largely disintermediated approaches to these problems.

Music on the Blockchain

Earlier this year, I wrote a short piece on the state of blockchain-based solutions to artists’ woes in the state of the music industry (arguably the state of music being so much an industry) and mentioned my own modest trial of one such solution, Ujo. Suffice to say, the idea is compelling on many levels: It can allow for the automated splitting of royalties between collaborators by essentially programming it into the licensing of that music while maximizing those royalties through near-total disintermediation (this is apart from mining fees and those necessary to incentivize perpetuity in development of the platform); it also redefines and clarifies the nature of patronage in music, in part by commodification of that patronage, itself, (or hypothetically other manners of licensing) in lieu of the conventional and decidedly frivolous approach of commodifying the audio as such, opting instead to issue a badge as a sort of proof of patronage, earmarked by its particular place in time, intrinsically so, having been issued on the blockchain–with the ready-access to DRM-free music files (or possibly some blockchain-based alternative to DRM, though it’s a sticky subject) as merely a perk of that patronage.

At the very least, the rotating and impermanent membership of Moonside makes the practical necessity of the first point self-evident. And how better to incentivize sincere engagement with the project or even just a single session than an equal share in its potential success? The implications for Tribes is even greater if we consider that openness to audience participation could amount to something of an audition, where although it would likely not be feasible to offer royalties to that audience, any member of the participating audience might be booked in future Tribes sessions and later in other productions under Moonside (every session an audition, I suppose).

Beyond this, if an album could be offered in an incomplete state, in the manner of a pre-order or a crowdfunding reward or otherwise published on the lean, a future and planned Tribes session could be used as a means of distributing a limited number of tickets to the session (the badges serving as those tickets) with the added bonus of being able to readily obtain a recording of that session after-the-fact. The location of such a session might also be privately shared with these badge-holders and not otherwise publicized, making it more prudent to be able to hold such a session at, say, the comfort of a private residence.

There’s also a few loftier notions which might be possible under this sort of platform, such as being able to permanently couple a badge with a physical release (a record or a cassette, for instance) by, say, having a QR code that, when scanned by its first owner, ties that badge to their wallet so that if they wished to trade or otherwise re-sell the physical album, that would ideally occur on the blockchain in some manner with perhaps even notes on the condition (maybe even other more personal notes?) of the album upon trade. None of this is in any way specific to the needs and ambitions of Moonside, but to the extent that such notions are possible or that their development is underway, this project’s most appropriate course is to involve itself in some way, whether by merely enjoying the fruits of or actively participating in those developments.

Modest Beginnings: ENS and IPFS

In the meantime, there are far less ambitious but nonetheless revolutionary ways to work toward greater decentralization and disintermediation in Moonside. Most recently has the long-awaited dream of hosting IPFS content on a blockchain-resolved domain name become a reality, along with the already existent reality of IPNS resolved DNS names. The process I have used for the Moonside Productions blog (that links to the traditionally hosted site… more on that in the next subsection) is somewhat unnecessarily convoluted, but despite or perhaps because of that, it at least makes for a fun little proof of concept.

The Technicals…

Some time back, I began hosting Moonside Productions on Neocities, a take-off on Geocities from the early days of the web, having noticed their support and implementation of IPFS archiving. Neocities in itself is a neat little concept that gives sites a sort of a social media profile, but its IPFS implementation is yet experimental and often inexplicably nonfunctional. In any case, it gave me a taste and started me on the path to adapting and otherwise orienting my work on the Moonside Productions site toward IPFS.

My earlier work toward this end on other sites and the research around that work made clear to me the non-trivial nature of this task, particularly having come from Jekyll and its peculiarities in handling relative URLs. I had, however, developed a mild interest in Go language, and so given the decidedly better handling of relative URLs in the Go-based static site generator, Hugo, I figured it as the most obvious tool for the job.

And so I set to work on this but soon found that while decidedly better, Hugo was not perfect in handling relative URLs, particularly in regard to URL sources used for CSS which breaks between a bare URL and one with an IPFS base-URL (or any other non-conventional means of locating the root of the site). Fortunately, with IPFS, we have an excellent means of rectifying this situation by simply using the hash of the object we are attempting to link (in Moonside’s case, a background image), with the quick and dirty approach being to choose your gateway and use the full public URL, but the ideal approach would be to determine whether or not the site is being accessed through an IPFS gateway and then determine from that whether to look in the root for the IPFS hash or in the local directory of that resource.

What makes this approach especially compelling is that the unique hash of the object sticks with it whether accessed from its relative location under the site’s own hash or directly by its own hash. This is owed to IPFS’s usage of file fingerprinting, which means that no matter how I change the site, so long as I have that exact file within it (or elsewhere for that matter, though I have yet to test this extensively) and at least the newest version of the site pinned (note that I’d likely enough have more than the newest version pinned), that file will remain available at that hash. I find this to be a most refreshing vision of the future and lament that this isn’t being seized upon as ubiquitously as it perhaps should.

From here we have a handful of options for resolving whatever might be the most current version of the site through IPFS: through its IPNS hash; through its main domain name, which resolves to the same IPNS hash using dnslink but otherwise points to its traditionally hosted counterpart on Neocities; through its ENS-only domain, which resolves to the latest IPFS hash at the moment using Metamask and the Portal Network but must be updated manually in tandem with publishing to IPNS in order to remain current (this is due to an apparent lack of support on the part of Portal for IPNS hashes, which annoyingly means that a mining fee must be paid whensoever I wish to update the site); or through its hybrid ENS/DNS counterpart under .xyz, which although it does not currently resolve to IPFS through ENS, it does resolve to the same Ethereum wallet as the .eth domain and also resolves to the same IPNS hash as the .com domain via dnslink. Note that these are all fairly terrible approaches to this whole issue, but they certainly forbear a brighter future.

What’s Next?

Moonside will continue to chase these emerging technologies, but as it stands, the project’s been largely on hold pending somewhat of a re-launch, though steps have been taken to better represent the project in the meantime with the latest site design (linked for the sake of posterity), compilations for Moonside Productions and Tribes of Moonside respectively, reworking some of our album art with the help of PixaTool, and by putting our more impenetrable work behind a modest subscription. Beyond that, I’m uncertain of the future of our presence on Soundcloud, Ujo will have to wait until some later stage of its development (waiting first to be able to iterate releases in order to flesh out my presence on there, and then for co-licensing, I suppose, before the rest of Moonside follows), and I’m looking to break into modular synthesis in order to expand my repertoire as RMBLRX beyond Gameboy.

In any case, my next album is in planning, but I’m confident that by the time I’m ready to record or at least release it, these technologies will be in full-swing and perfectly suitable for its debut to occur within that ecosystem. Only then can I confidently herald the next phase of Moonside and its race to become worthy of the sort of lasting legacy such technologies may afford it.