Channel Update: The Plan for Completion of the Marble Machine X and Transition to Music

Wilson and myself says "Hi and welcome" to everyone for this channel update,

for the Wintergatan youtube channel.

I have some upcoming changes, that I'm really excited about, that I want to

communicate very carefully with you about in this video.

So that's why we're here today, sitting on this beautiful desk, but first:

Have you seen the MMXS by Love Hultén?

This is an amazing miniature Marble Machine X and Love Hultén is an amazing Swedish artist

who built these different arcade machines and a lot of amazing amazing art.

If you haven't seen the video, I just encourage you to go watch it because it's really, really, really cool!

I just want to give a huge shout-out to Love Hultén.

I get very inspired from seeing something designed so cleanly and so pragmatic.

Since I came back to France from Sweden in the end of January

I've been working six days out of seven without break on the Marble Machine X.

I've been really upping my efficiency. I've been...

searching and trying in every little corner of my...

of myself and of my life, for how to become an efficient worker and stop procrastination.

And I... I've kind of nailed it.
[laughs]

I've been...

really really doing great work for, like, seven months

and if you look at the Marble Machine X,

from January to today,

it's not a huge difference.

And I'm really working efficiently, so

I feel that I have to lift on some other stones to see

If I can unleash another set of resources to finish this project.

And when I look back at this six months, I'm thinking about what I've done,

the glaring elephant in the room is that I spend all my best energy

and my highest attention and focus onto making these videos. [laughs]

The chunk of my time is invested in making the documentation about the art piece.

That is problematic and since the release of the first Marble Machine video

the amount of attention and appreciation and understanding my creations have received on youtube

has been so rewarding and just an amazing journey for me personally, but...

But, but, but, but, but... as I said, the chunk of my time and attention,

maybe 70 percent

of my thought process goes into the youtube videos.

And it's too much.

We tried to...

lower my involvement in the video making and I tried to step away...

And the thing is that I feel so personally

for whatever I put out on the internet with my name on it,

so I don't really have that... option. [laughs]

So let's go back to the master plan map with Sisyphus going up the mountain.

I am still on the same mountain and...

I have to take the responsibility

to not stay on this mountain...

eh... forever.

The ultimate goal with this machine is to make music.

If I just have a functioning machine, it's like a shell without a soul.

It's like an AI life-size robot that can't have a conversation with you. [laughs]

As it works today, I'm sculpting my artistic process to fit in to the weekly upload schedule.

I chapter everything I do on the machine

into some kind of thematic lumps

that we can turn into videos.

The process is built from the ground up

by the intention of making a video.

This means that my processes are not designed to be as efficient as possible for the completion of the machine.

If you remember a couple of weeks ago when I was thinking about the marble divider redesign,

when I took the decision to not release a video;

that Wednesday when I dropped the thought of video and started to think about mechanical designs instead,

like, 100 percent for that day, was one of the best days

I've had for a long time in my studio...

Because I felt I had like these oceans of time

and my creativity has always been like highly dependent on this free amount of time,

where I'm just, like, in a... in an ocean of time, and there's nothing else;

and I know that if I can just find a seed of a good idea,

I can craft it into something beautiful.

I don't find the place for this kind of creative process within the weekly upload schedule.

My therapist said something great about formal and informal contracts,

and this might sound very dull, but I love the concept:

I feel I have built up an informal contract with everyone who are watching this series;

that I'm gonna bring you in to see me finish this process, and I will!

So the word "contract" makes this feel, like, super binding and negative.

That's absolutely not at all what I mean here.

What I mean here is that this is actually really inspiring for me.

I feel a responsibility to show you what this machine can do,

and I need to do whatever I need to do to make that happen.

And when we come to the situation that the weekly videos are obstructing the path

for the Marble Machine X to become reality,

the weekly videos has to give way for the Marble Machine X completion.

What I'm going to do is that I'm going to skip the weekly upload schedule.

And I'm going to keep making videos; more epic, more relevant videos.

Videos that I feel 100 percent great about.

Videos that I really think are worthy of your time.

So whenever something worth covering has happened in the process, I will make a video about that,

and, hopefully, it will be more exciting and better than ever.

And... I've been trying hard to make the Wednesdays exciting but...

The artistic process that I'm going through is not always really exciting.

It's mostly like a monumental grind.

I remember a comment a viewer made when I made a similar statement some years ago.

I've been talking about this non-stop.

The viewer said, like basically, "You do you. We support you!" and

"It's only a shame for us because the window through which we look into your beautiful world gets smaller."

And that comment stayed with me and I kind of...

I kind of agree...

But we are now choosing between panoramic window looking into

nothing being finished, nothing being created, no music being done;

or a little peephole into the future where we're gonna explode the walls

and actually go on a world tour

with music that makes the hair on my arm stand up, okay?

I want to propel the project to that phase as quickly and as beautifully as possible,

I think one of the largest qualities that I can show you

is the power of delayed gratification

and the power of, like, latent potential when you

give your best into a project for a long time and you don't give up.

I've no clue how often a video will come out,

which leads me to addressing especially

all the youtube members and all the patrons.

First of all, I'm amazed what you have done for me

and that you put me in a position

where I am free to think about art 24/7.

I want to take your generous gift to me.

You have given me time.

I want to take your gift

and take care of it.

And I want to make the best possible use that I can of my time that you have given me.

So, depending on how you feel about your support and what the support is for,

you might reconsider your support at this moment and I fully, fully understand that.

If you feel you want to support

the music part of what I'm doing and the machine,

then I hope you understand I'm doing this for the music and for the machine.

I am not working less, I'm going to work smarter.

Okay, so I think there is now, like, maybe 300 000 people thinking this thought:

"But Martin, what if you just make simpler videos?" [laughs]

I've been having the same question mark in my head for two years,

I've been trying a lot of different ways, I didn't find a single way that worked.

Me being satisfied about what I put out in front of... of...

every one of you is not something I can compromise with.

It's... it's a fact that we can't change.

So to illustrate the situation,

I made a preparation here on the table.

Are you ready for this?

So every Wednesday you've been eating at the Wintergatan restaurant,

where Martin Molin is the head chef in the kitchen,

calling the shots. Okay.

There is one dish on the menu, pasta with tomato sauce.

And you order it and you tell the cook:

"Make it simple, so it doesn't take too much of your time,

so you can also build the Marble Machine X."

"We don't want you to cook the tomato sauce all week."

So what you basically think that I should do then is this:

I'm taking the pasta...

Yummy!

[laughs]

There you go! So I come out to your table, I slid this plate in front of you,

and I'm, like, "Bon appetit: pasta with tomato sauce!" [laughs]

I don't want to complain about video making,

but I want to explain,

and when you're not into producing videos,

this is basically how most people think that a video is being made:

You take the film,

you take it out of the package and you put it on youtube.

That's not how I make tomato sauce.

To make a tomato sauce you need some garlic, you need to slice it thin,

like in the Irishman, so it melts in the high quality olive oil.

Add a little bit of salt with piment d'espelette inside

and some nice shallots, and make the onion, like, soft.

Then you finely chop the tomatoes, you put them over

and you let them slow cook for, like, two hours.

Take all the water out of it.

Boil a lot of water with salt in,

put the pasta in, make sure it's al dente.

Pour the water out,

put the tomato sauce in the same pot you boiled the pasta in,

put the pasta back into it,

sprinkle some basil on top.

That's a tomato sauce with umami!

This is what I want to serve to you all, and...

To get a really, really nice tasty tomato sauce,

by the way, don't be shy on the olive oil.

Vegetarian food should be fat and salty and punchy.

Just because it's vegetarian it doesn't mean it has to has no taste.

Somehow people think sometimes that vegetarians don't like salt and sugar and fat.

Give it some punch! [laughs]

These kinds of aspects...

see the difference between this pasta and tomato sauce

and the finer aspects of the punch in an umami taste,

these kinds of aspects is what I love to think about.

So when I'm making a youtube video I'm thinking about the quality of the olive oil

and if the garlic is thinly sliced enough. [laughs]

And if you look at the Sisyphus mountain again, the music part...

I don't have any time to create music at all.

The building in itself has been a detour already,

an amazing detour, but still it's a detour that I just took like that.

And the youtube documentation process is a detour...

further away from the music, so I will continue to make videos whenever there's a great video to be made.

We're back in the restaurant and now there's maybe 300 000 people

whose question marks has turned into an exclamation mark, saying:

"I actually would like to try some of that raw Wintergatan pasta, maybe it doesn't taste so bad".

I'm humbled and thankful, but I'm not going to serve it, okay? [laughs]

I can't even make a channel update video without coming up with like...

angle or concept for the video, right? [laughs]

This is a perfect illustration of why you have to keep me working on the machine and not producing videos.

So, concretely, the plan for the Marble Machine X is to try to make a test song as soon as possible.

I might make a cover. I've been thinking about making "Give Life Back to Music" by Daft Punk.

I realized afterwards how prophetic that song title would be, so now maybe I have to do it.

I'm going to start with the process of arranging a piece of music on the machine, maybe... maybe that song

and I will cover that in detail on the Wintergatan youtube channel.

That process will leave up to a bookend finale

about the first chapter in the Marble Machine X life, where it plays its first song for you.

But what will happen right after that is that I...

will produce the next album for Wintergatan.

I will compose and produce.

I'm talking more and more with Marcus, David and Evelina

and they're all ready to play together.

They're just waiting for me.

I've been thinking about this so much and I have some notes.

I would like to talk a little bit now, when we're here together,

about this kind of decision.

I think...

We live in a fast food economy,

where delayed gratification...

the ability for us to employ delayed gratification and work towards a goal...

is decreasing rapidly.

Our public square, the internet,

is a place where everything goes in ultra speed.

I think a lot of you are tuning in to Wintergatan...

maybe just because it takes time, somehow...

That I'll allow it to take time. I don't know.

So let's put the pasta over here.

Wilson, you want to taste it? He loves it!

I hope the pasta analogy can help you understand my decision a little bit.

I think some discrepancy in understanding the situation will come from the fact that

it is hard to understand how much extra work goes into...

making a video, a video that I want to sign off on.

I come to terms with the fact that it's a personality trait I have

that I cannot do that much about.

The cool thing... the really cool thing is...

What I really want to do... align perfectly with what I really should do. [laughs]

My ultimate...

My ultimate responsibility towards myself

is to make music with a machine I've built.

The machine is only a tool otherwise, it's a soulless body.

Once you get down to the core of the fact why you are watching,

it's because once upon a time I closed myself into a dark room...

and performed some magic trick, and a year later I came out with the Marble Machine video, or...

some years before that I closed myself in a dark room

and I came out with a Wintergatan's debut album.

It's really difficult to step off a successful train, like the Wintergatan youtube channel,

but I think this is also a sickness of our times that...

once you find something that kind of works,

you just stick to it for too long.

And I think pivoting a youtube channel is...

something that is really, really important

for the long life of a channel.

Otherwise, if you just do the same thing over and over, you're gonna have a huge popular spike

and then you're gonna go over the mountain and down on the other side.

You can see that in all youtube statistics.

So, by doing what I'm doing now, reassessing the situation, it's...

It kind of consolidates the future of the channel as well.

And talking about that I want to end...

with a story from my life that is...

really valuable to me. I once knew a bass player.

I think I was 16 and the bass player was 14 and we were playing like...

a lot of jazz together and we were playing jazz on bars for payment.

It's starting to go better and better, we had more and more gigs.

So I almost worked like a guitar player when I was 16-17,

getting some cash in the pockets from the bar owners, that kind of thing...

It was awesome and I was loving it.

Like, "can I make money playing music?!"

Like, "I play guitar and someone gives me 20 euros?"

Like, it was maybe not so much money.

But then the money started to become more and more, because we became better and better at playing jazz.

And this bass player... The culmination was when this bass player was offered

300 dollars to play one song, "Autumn Leaves", on the...

on an opening ceremony on a university.

And I was, like...

"Wooow, you really made it! Like, 300 dollars to play one song!"

"Autumn Leaves, such an easy song as well!"

The bass player... declined the gig because that week he had started a hardcore band

with his three friends. And I was like:

"But... you can play in the hardcore band, and play Autumn Leaves, and keep the 300 dollars."

And he was like: "No, we want to focus!"

And I was like: "Okay..."

I didn't understand the decision at all. I thought like:

"Why? You can do both..."

And this hardcore band went into their rehearsal place

and five times per week they played their whole set list of ten songs, two times per rehearsal.

One year later I had moved to Gothenburg, Sweden's second city,

and they were coming to Gothenburg to play. And they were playing on this kind of youth place,

on the floor, no stage, like no real PA system, just two speakers for the vocals and...

one microphone on the kick drum to give some bass, you know.

And it was like distorted guitar and all the other sounds comes directly from the amplifiers.

So, no stage, everyone's standing on the floor,

and...

it's the tightest concert,

the most impressive performance I've seen in my whole life to this very date.

And I've been on a lot of large festivals,

seeing bands performing in front of 50 000 people.

And they, just standing on the floor there, just rolled over me...

like a machine; they steamrolled over me!
[imitates crushing sound]

It was such an impactful experience! They had honed...

their edge to perfection, right?

They cut through all the bullshit... there is.

And I went out of there and I was, like... because I was a music producer at the time, producing other bands,

I was like: "I have to start my own band!"

So I went out of there, I took my phone up and called the drummer

that I've been working with in the studio and I was, like:

"Hey, we have to start a band!" [laughs]
"When can you rehearse?"

I was like Cartman in the South Park episode when he goes to Butters:

"We have to make a platinum album! Get your drums up and meet me at my place now!" [laughs]

I was like that enthusiastic: "We start tomorrow, right?"

And we started to play around a little bit.

That band, through some iterations, later became my first band Detektivbyrån.

So Detektivbyrån was the band who propelled me from being a music producer

into transitioning into being artist myself, where I'm actually fronting my own music.

That later led to me starting Wintergatan.

So... that little decision...

of saying no to "Autumn Leaves" for the fast buck, right?

Nothing against Autumn Leaves, I think it's a great song.

To focus on rehearsing with your hardcore band that no one knows about - yet...

That decision, in hindsight, I thought it was so impressive.

There is something very similar about the situation now,

and I hope that you can actually share my excitement in

grabbing control of my situation and...

taking 70 percent of my time and resources

and putting it back on my table for creating art and see what I can do with it.

Yeah, so that's it. So for some weeks now, I think we will have videos every week.

Last three weeks in September I'm taking a vacation to meet my parents.

When I come back from that, from first October...

that's probably when you're gonna start to see

how often we upload videos. We'll just see what happens.

I'm really grateful for having such an intelligent

and patient audience.

And I'm looking forward to taking what I'm doing as seriously as I need to take it

to really reach the goal I'm striving for.

Thank you so much. See you on the next Wintergatan Wednesday.

Wilson, you have to finish the video.

[shooop]

Bye!