Jeremy Dower
Recently, in an article about some of my favourite Australian music of 2025, I wrote down the phrase, “focus is a prerequisite for pleasure.”
The point I was making was that, while it’s often gratifying to listen to music as we go about our various daily tasks, the defining musical moments of our lives – times when songs alter our chemical composition, when they excite, uplift, disturb or outrage us – occur when music has our full attention.
I felt pretty good about this phrase: it looked good, sounded good, and seemed to support my argument. So, I published it. But on reflection, what I was really thinking of when I wrote “focus is a prerequisite for pleasure” was sex. And by focus, I meant presence as opposed to distraction. Perhaps what I was actually gesturing towards was flow – a state of being so absorbed in what you’re doing that focus, as synonymous with concentration, becomes somewhat irrelevant.
Either way, I didn’t interrogate whether mindful listening was in fact to credit with the many hundreds of songs that have entered my bloodstream over the last few decades. Thinking about it now, it seems like an idealised listening demand, and one that overlooks the myriad ways that music moves us.
Not long after writing “focus is a prerequisite for pleasure”, I asked Jeremy Dower whether he thought there was anything wrong with playing music in the background while I walked up Smith Street or added data to a spreadsheet. “I don’t think you should worry about that,” he said.
Jeremy is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic. The Bendigo-based musician has been releasing music since the late 1990s. He started out creating ambient techno and lo-fi loops under the unpronounceable name Tetrphnm. Then, in the early 2000s, he released a couple of albums of electronic faux jazz under his own name.
It could be argued that Jeremy’s music is perfect background music. It rewards attention, certainly, and his productions occasionally gather enough momentum to lubricate the movement of limbs. But his work is peaceful, agreeable, unobtrusive. It will accompany you through tedium, send light where previously there was only shade.
But there’s another reason I felt Jeremy would have a curious perspective on this subject: a few years ago he completed a PhD at RMIT. One of the central inquiries of his dissertation was, “What is music?” To address this inquiry, Jeremy’s research drew on philosophy, aesthetics, neurology and ethnomusicology.
“In some ways, music is more affective when the listener’s attention is focused elsewhere,” Jeremy said to me, “because this leaves the imagination to wander beyond the physical and quantitative, to be transported to other worlds of internal aesthetic experience, beyond the limitations of the quotidian and the physical.”
Chapter Music, connoisseurs of the heartfelt weirdo underground, recently reissued Jeremy’s two solo albums: 2000’s Sentimental Dance Music For Couples and its long-lost follow-up, 2004’s Music for the Young and the Restless.
Jeremy also worked with the label to compile a new record of previously unreleased recordings titled Personal Computer Music, 1997-2022. One side of the LP is dedicated late-90s Tetrphnm minimalism. The other side is composed of what Boomkat called “cheeky exotica gear”. “It’s doggedly goofy in the best way,” said the site’s reviewer. It is also, to my perception, sincerely joyful and completely unpretentious.
I spoke to Jeremy about the pros and cons of background music, the subjective relativism of good and bad taste, and the aesthetic principles that underpin his creative practice. It’s a long read, but I guarantee you’ll be rewarded for your persistence. But if you simply can’t be fucked, head here and buy yourself a copy of Personal Computer Music, 1997-2022.
Check Check: How much do conceptual ideas or philosophical insights inform your creative practice? Are you conscious of themes or ideas you want to explore in your compositions and productions?
Jeremy Dower: My primary guide in the creative process is aesthetic feeling. Prior to starting post-graduate research, I usually worked alone, so there was never any need to discuss what I was doing during the creative process. It occurred instinctively, through an aesthetic mode of thinking, in images – in a way that is pre-linguistic and pre-conceptual.
However, this was always problematic when I was asked to talk about the work outside the studio, in conversation, or press, or for arts grant applications. In those situations, I was hopelessly inept. Essentially, I was expected to provide a narrative, communicating what the music was “about”, in the way that people often use lyrics as a convenient proxy for meaning.
One of my motivations for doing post-graduate research was to find a solution to this problem. I didn’t go into it looking for theories or concepts to guide my practice. It was the other way around. I used the research to describe my practice – to articulate what I was doing and explain how I was doing it – as accurately as possible.
Going through the post-graduate system, there was intense pressure to generate conceptual narratives before even commencing practical work. The system itself was configured in such a way that it could only value what was written or said. There really was no mechanism to assess aesthetics, or to judge the practical work on its own merits, only the story about the work. I found that the pressure to place concepts before aesthetics and practice had a negative effect on my creative processes, although I didn’t properly recognise this in the beginning.
How much thought goes into how your music will be received, or the various ways it might be understood and experienced, and how these might differ from your own perception and feelings towards it?
Honestly, I try as much as possible to be wholly immersed in my own aesthetic experience in the creative process. I have some confidence, based on prior experience, that the products of this process will be sufficiently compelling for other people to have their own meaningful aesthetic experience in response to the material. However, since this is so deeply subjective, there really is no way to know what other people experience – how their imagination is activated, and the nuance of feeling – outside of linguistic descriptors.
I used the expression “facilitator of aesthetic experience” to avoid the term “experience designer”, since designer implies that the listener is a passive receiver, and that the designer can predict precisely what the listener will feel in a way that is universal and absolute.
I believe that the listener is an active participant in the experience, consciously or unconsciously. They modulate the aesthetic experience from the physical recording into a virtual register within their own aesthetic imagination.
For me, the creative process is really about collecting aesthetically resonant materials, manipulating those materials, and assembling them in a way that enhances their aesthetic potency. In my understanding, the recording is a kind of schematic residue of the aesthetic experience of creative practice, which is then presented to the listener as a facility that they can use to generate their own personal response.
There really is no way to know what other people experience – how their imagination is activated, and the nuance of feeling – outside of linguistic descriptors.
Jeremy Dower
I am interested in your thoughts on taste, either good or bad, as a quality that someone can be in possession of. Do you think a listener can have “bad” taste in music? Or that a producer can have “good” taste in drum sounds, for example?
There is definitely “good” and “bad”, but that is relative to each individual. I am so used to assuming that my tastes are alien to most other people I encounter, outside my circle of friends, that I would never assume to be the arbiter of good taste for anyone else. I just know what I like.
Taste has amorphous boundaries. Mine has a tendency to configure itself when I am not looking. I am instinctively inclined to like things that transgress the boundaries, and I like to explore those liminal territories, trawling for fresh or forgotten sensations. However, I wouldn’t say that is my main mission. I do also frequently just follow an aesthetic direction simply because I enjoy it, or am feeling it in that moment, without critical self-reflection, which does also cause me to stray into some strange territories.
During the PhD I studied vaporwave. I was attracted to the way the vaporwave artists seemed to plunder the lowest cultural detritus. From that research, one interesting thing I did observe is a kind of gentrification of taste. Certain creative individuals are attracted to stylistic no-go zones; cultural wastelands, beyond the pale of fashionability. Maybe it’s the disconcerting strangeness that attracts them. Maybe it’s freshness, or novelty. Maybe they are repulsed by the banality or normality on the safe side of the boundary. Or maybe they are just looking for a place that feels right to them.
Whatever the case, I think there is a process where pioneers uncover – or recover – stylistic territories and find fertile creative ground in adapting that material for a contemporary context. However, these territories become more accessible over time. As others pile-in, in their wake, the territory eventually becomes depleted, sanitised, and passé.
I am instinctively inclined to like things that transgress the boundaries, and I like to explore those liminal territories, trawling for fresh or forgotten sensations.
Jeremy Dower
When you’re making music, do you notice, in yourself, judgements of the value or merit of particular sounds or melodic or harmonic ideas? And how much do you trust your instinctive or reflex judgements and inclinations?
In the studio, I work very instinctively. That part of my process doesn’t involve self-critical reflection. It’s really just about being swept away by the aesthetics, and shaping the materials in a way that enhances that experience. However, I do catch myself, from time to time, retrospectively considering the choices I have made in the studio.
Listening back to recordings in a critical frame of mind, I might have thoughts like: is that melody too much like X or Y? Is it too daggy? Is this Y2K? What even is Y2K, really? Does this sax feel too much like Stan Getz or Kenny G? Is that even a bad thing?
In those moments, when I am not immersed in the creative daydreams of aesthetic imagination, I admit that I do think about taste, though not with the goal of being on-trend. When that happens, it’s really only by coincidence. This critical reflection does feed back into the studio, and inevitably, it shapes certain kinds of creative choices, particularly when setting up a new session in the studio.
I am interested to know your opinion on background music, which surely there is more of than ever before. I love playing music all the time, but sometimes I think it is offensive to the music that I’m using it to supply vibes while I walk to the shop or fall asleep or make a spreadsheet, rather than giving it my full attention.
I don’t think you should worry about that. I also frequently listen to music in the same way. In my view, it is key to experiencing the most essential aspects of music. I also believe this defocused listening is a vital part of the process of making music, even though that might sound counter-intuitive. I have heard that Brian Eno, as part of his process, will play back a work-in-progress while he is pottering about, doing other tasks.
In my view, music has an aspect that exists outside of time. It is not tethered strictly to the duration of the recording or performance. It lingers in our imaginations, in our moods, and it augments our experience as we go about our lives. It resonates, even after the record has stopped playing.
In my opinion, this is the most essential aspect of music, the thing you see, or feel, in your mind’s eye. It’s a kind of de-focused, macro-aesthetic view that can be received through channels other than focused attention. It manifests in the mind like a daydream, in a way that is distinct from the physical material that gives rise to it.
Gabrielle Starr, in her book Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience, maps the neurology of aesthetic experience in connection with a neural pattern known as the Default Mode Network. She explains that when our attention is focused on a rational analysis of a subject, making objective measurements, for example, brain activity is focused on specific local regions. The brain seems to pool all its resources on that one task.
By contrast, when we are at rest, in an inattentive mental state, typified by meandering thoughts and daydreaming, neural activity is distributed generally, across the whole brain. Neurons fire in a network which includes regions associated with memory, visual processing, spatial and emotional centres, and more.
Interestingly this Default Mode Network is also a key feature of aesthetic experience. This goes some way to explaining why aesthetic experience is so complex and compelling, but also suggests that attentiveness is not an essential component of that state of mind.
In some ways, music is more affective when the listener’s attention is focused elsewhere, because this leaves the imagination to wander beyond the physical and quantitative, to be transported to other worlds of internal aesthetic experience, beyond the limitations of the quotidian and the physical.
Music has an aspect that exists outside of time. It is not tethered strictly to the duration of the recording or performance. It lingers in our imaginations, in our moods, and it augments our experience as we go about our lives.
Jeremy Dower
You wrote in your dissertation that doing the PhD was partly a tool to “aid in the reinvention of my personal creative identity.” I am curious about the outcome.
When I started post-graduate research around 2014, I was lost, and disillusioned. I’d had success with music in the past, but I had spent most of the previous decade focused on visual art. I had continued to record music during that period, but mostly only for my own personal entertainment.
By 2014, it felt like the music I’d released in the late 90s and early 2000s had had its time in the sun, but by that point, had been superseded, and buried in time. It was depressing to consider how much of my life I had invested in it. It was easier, emotionally, to just move on to something new.
I was attracted to vaporwave at that time, for a range of reasons; mostly I think it felt very fresh to me. However, five or six years later, when I was approaching the end of the research project, it was clear that vaporwave had run its course. The scene online had devolved into something different, and I was no longer interested. Maybe the PhD had drained a good portion of my enthusiasm too.
Around that time, completely out of the blue, I was contacted by Efficient Space, who were compiling 3AM Spares, a retrospective compilation of underground dance music in Australia from the 90s. They’d found an old Tetrphnm CD-R I’d left at Triple R 20 years ago, and they wanted to use a track from that demo. At that time, I was chained to a desk, writing the dissertation for my PhD, in some kind of perverse, self-imposed purgatory, and I was dreaming about what I would do after the PhD. That moment really turned everything around.
Then, a few years later, Chapter Music invited me to release a retrospective album with them, featuring unreleased material. That eventually became Personal Computer Music, 1997-2022.
The recognition from Chapter and Efficient Space, and the process of selecting material for posterity, helped me reassess my early recording in a new, positive light. It helped me to embrace the creative identity I started out with, once again, and it feels like such a natural fit. I am recording prolifically again, and it feels like I am doing what I was always supposed to be doing; what I was made to do.
Personal Computer Music, 1997-2022 by Jeremy Dower/Tetrphnm is out now via Chapter Music
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