Access is not permission

I use a lot of technology when I make music.

Probably too much, if you ask my bank account.

Microphones, field recorders, samplers, Ableton, synths, weird plugins, and small boxes that do one tiny thing very well. A lot of my work depends on taking a sound and seeing what happens when it is recorded, stretched, cut, filtered, pitched or placed somewhere new.

That is one of the reasons I love electronic music. A sound does not have to stay where it started.

One of the clearest examples in my own work is Áhčis.

The track is built around an old joik my father gave me when I was younger. The recording was not made for a record. It was old, noisy and fragile, and I could easily have left it alone on a hard drive somewhere.

Instead, I wanted to see if it could live inside a new piece of music.

That took cleaning, processing, active listening. I had to build something around the recording without flattening the thing that made it personal in the first place.

For me, that is an important use of technology. It can help an old sound breathe again. It can help a recording move into a new form. It can make something private, damaged or nearly forgotten possible to hear in a different way.

The key word here is trust.

That joik came from my father. It came from a family relation. It came with a context I know from the inside.

That changes how I work with it.

I do not treat a synth preset, a field recording from a walk, a joik, and a voice recording as the same kind of material. They can all become part of electronic music, but they do not enter the studio with the same weight.

Technology in music also makes me think about the use of AI.

Much of the AI music discussion is about copyright, which is already serious enough. Artists have spent years learning their craft, releasing music and building a sound. Then companies scrape huge amounts of material and use it to train systems that can compete with the same artists. I have written about that before.

But there's more to the debate around scraping. This week I read a new and interesting article named “Seeking Indigenous Data Sovereignty in the Age of Data Scraping” by Ellen Cushman (Northeastern University in Boston).

The article looks at the Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence, DAILP. Cushman writes about Indigenous language archives, audio files, transcription, translation and the work needed to make language material useful for communities, teachers, speakers and learners.

The archive becomes useful because people have done careful work with the material. They have transcribed it, translated it, structured it and prepared it for language practice. That same work can also make it attractive to scraping bots.

In Cushman’s article, this had already become practical. Between March and November 2025, the DAILP site was routinely hit by scraping bots. People trying to use the archive received denial-of-service messages.

So the machine arrives after the human work has made the material valuable. Then it can also make the archive harder to use for the people it was built for.

A lot of tech culture seems to treat reachable material as available material. If a system can find it, copy it and process it, then apparently that is enough.

I do not think that is enough.

Especially when the material involves Indigenous language, voice, joik, archives or cultural sound.

I want sound to move. I want joik, language, field recordings and older material to have space in club music, ambient music and live performance. That is part of why I make electronic music. I am not interested in placing cultural sound behind glass.

Still, the movement has to happen with some kind of relation around it. A person who knows the material. A reason for using it. Permission where permission is needed. Enough care to understand where the recording comes from and why it matters.

For Indigenous language and cultural sound, that is too thin.

It pulls material away from the situation it came from. Who used the language, why it was shared, who it was meant for, and what kind of relation existed around it.

Then it turns access into a technical question. Can the system reach the material? Can it copy it? Can it turn it into training data?

For Indigenous language and cultural sound, that is far too thin.

A file can be online and still belong to a specific context. A voice can be reachable and still deserve care. A recording can be available and still carry a relation that should not be ignored.

Access is not permission.