I don't believe this is how great music usually comes about, not even Techno. It's missing the other essential piece. Being influenced by and completely immersed in a niche of other brilliant people. (The most extreme example of this would be the 90's Detroit-Berlin connection.)

Paired with an obsessive work ethic in the studio.

If it's only obsession in the studio, things come out dry, uninspired. If there's no surge of energy running through your bones when making the music, why would anyone else feel anything? Mixing and the music sounding "professional" is completely secondary. Even detrimental a lot of the time, to be honest.

Applies to many other things than music as well. I don't any great technology comes out and about without that loop, either.

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titanomachy an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Justin Vernon disappeared to a cabin in Wisconsin for months, where he wrote and recorded one of the greatest and most popular folk rock albums of all time.

	▲	helloplanets 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I actually thought about that while writing the original comment as well. For Emma, Forever Ago is one of my all time favorite albums, good example of raw emotion with no need for any bells or whistles. The big thing there is, that he already was a professional musician and completely inside a creative scene before leaving for the cabin. (DeYarmond Edison was the band he was in before Bon Iver.) But yes, things were going way sideways for him, liver issues with mono, so he went to process whatever was going on and had been going on in complete isolation. (Although for the next album, he actually set up a whole "creative commune", a new band around Bon Iver instead of it being just himself, and so on. And I think you can hear the colors he wanted back in the music from it directly.) A lot of examples of artists going into bouts of isolation, but almost always coming into it from an intense experience. So, the two don't have to be day to day intertwined, although for Techno specifically it's usually the case.

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cousin_it an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Could great works substitute for having a scene? After all, writers have been inspired by Dostoevsky without being part of the same scene as him, and often without being part of a scene at all.

	▲	bravura 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Close contact between exceptional individuals is one of the main values of having a scene.