caring more than reasonable
On Ruskin, sushi, AI, and why records made by people who cared too much sound different.
I saw a door handle once, years ago, and I think about it almost every day. It has become fundamental to how I work and generated a theory I think of as “sacred craft”.
It was Victorian I think, handmade and gorgeous. What has stuck with me was the faceplate, which is (the bit of the mechanism that on the inside of the door that sits against the inside of the the frame, and therefore) seldom seen. This particular faceplate was patterned with a beautiful, scroll pattern, engraved in the metal. It was clear that someone who knew what they were doing had spent a good bit of time to get it like that, despite that it would be seldom noticed, much less admired. It was utterly sumptuous and utterly excessive.
As I say, I think about it all the time. This mismatch: a humble bit of functional hardware, made to be screwed into a doorframe and forgotten about, treated by a long dead craftsperson as though it deserved elaborate decoration, expensive material and hours of exquisite work. Why?
After all, no one would have complained about a simple, functional faceplate without the beautiful pattern. I’m pretty sure no one asked or paid for the beautiful bit hidden in the doorframe. And yet. Someone chose to make it beautiful in a way that feels serious, not whimsical. Like there is a point being made and it is way different from someone flexing their engraving chops.
So: this excess, this deliberate choice to invest far more than utility demanded in something really kind of boring has stayed with me and worked on me, dissolving ideas that I had taken for granted about work, beauty and why people do things.
The society that raised me is all about optimising, efficiency, automation, AI, and the late-capitalist mantra that “time is money.” This old door handle was a quiet but irresistible challenge to these ideas. I have spent ages thinking about this and trying to work out what it all means. I think some of what I came upon might be useful to others:
Ruskin’s sacrifice
In 1849, John Ruskin published The Seven Lamps of Architecture. The “lamps” are the demands or principles of good architecture, the first of which was “Sacrifice.”
The argument goes roughly: the value of a building is not exhausted by whether it works. There is a category of decision that consists of giving more than the job requires, spending labour and material beyond the point of necessity, purely as an offering. Ruskin thought this was not decoration but morality. He thought you could see it. He thought a building made by people who were only doing what was needed felt different to stand in from a building made by people who gave it more than that, and that everybody could feel the difference whether or not they could account for it.
His summary of the whole idea is ten words long:
“It is not the church we want, but the sacrifice.”
The modernist reply to Ruskin, the one that won and that we live in, is that form should follow function, and that ornament beyond function is dishonest. I understand the argument and I think it misses something fundamental. It treats a made thing as a solution to a problem. But almost nothing we love is loved as a solution to a problem. We love things that carry evidence of a person having been there.
Jiro’s octopus
A very similar idea turns up in the Japanese figure of the shokunin: the craftsperson whose skill is inseparable from an obligation to the work itself.
The Japanese apprentice is taught that shokunin means not only having technical skills, but also implies an attitude and social consciousness. The shokunin has a social obligation to work his or her best for the general welfare of the people. This obligation is both spiritual and material, in that no matter what it is, the shokunin’s responsibility is to fulfil the requirement.” – Toshio Orate in “Japanese Woodworking Tools: Their Tradition, Spirit and Use”.
There’s a film I love: “Jiro Dreams Of Sushi” about sushi chef Jiro Ono. Jiro is a Hero. At the time of filming he was 89 and still waking up early every day (and I mean every) to go to his restaurant and do the absolute most. He’s widely regarded as the sushi GOAT, has had three michelin stars and the rest of it and in his own words:
“All I want to do is make better sushi.“
There is attention and decision and effort at every level: the type of rice, the precise temperature of the fish. An apprentice spent four months trying to whip the eggs the right way. Then there’s the octopus. Octopus is tough. It needs to be tenderised. So it is massaged. Jiro talks about how they used to massage the octopus for 30 minutes but now do 45. My suspicion is that nobody could identify the extra minutes and that the marginal gain in tenderness is way below the level of most people’s conscious perception. (I’d also guess that a machine can tenderise octopus pretty well in five minutes or so.) But Jiro insists on 45 minutes and everyone ultimately agrees it’s worth it.
It’s a fact that people who have eaten Jiro’s sushi find it absolutely transcendent and life-affirming and significant. And tho I know little of sushi, there is a part of me that is ignited by how this angel of a man makes sushi.
There is a version of this in every discipline, and everyone reading this who makes anything knows what theirs is. In my game its the take you did nineteen times. The part nobody will consciously hear. The thing you took out at four in the morning that nobody, including you, could point to in the finished record. Using this hi-hat not that one. Myriad tiny acts of caring decision, which on their own, are possibly imperceptible but when combined make all the difference in the world.
(I was vacuuming the LostOsc live room before a session the other day thinking about Jiro. The artist I was working with that day would not notice or appreciate that the carpet was utterly spotless, but they might feel a tiny degree more at home when putting their art out there. And that mattered. So I hoovered like it was the most important thing in the world.)
a thing I cannot prove but believe anyway
Here is the claim: I think a great deal of aesthetic response is a recognition of sacrifice. Not appreciation of skill exactly, and not appreciation of expense. Something more specific: the sense that somebody cared about this more than they had to.
There are two ways that could be true. I think both are, and I want to separate them, because you might not and I would rather not smuggle the second in on the back of the first.
Lemon-herb version: Every one of those small decisions changes the object, tho not by much. Nobody can hear the hi-hat choice. But a record is thousands of those, and the difference between a record where they all went the caring way and one where most of them went the convenient way is not thousands of imperceptible differences, it is one large audible one. On this account you are not detecting devotion at all. You are detecting a record that is simply, measurably, better made, and the caring was only ever the means by which it got that way.
I find this hard to argue with and I would be content if it were the whole story.
BUT! I do not think it is the whole story. Now here’s the spicy version: I think we also register the “sacred craft” itself (that is to say the sacrifice, the surplus, “the inefficiency” and the loving decision) on some preconscious level, distinct from registering the results or function of the object. I think there is something special, some magic, that we are sensitive to and pick up on.
“Special” and “magic” are obviously not things that I can apply in my work. My efforts to work out what exactly it is that we are picking up on, or why I was so moved by the door handle or Jiro has yielded four rough things I can use and share. They are:
Visible devotion. The sense that attention was paid and care was taken beyond the point where attention or care were required.
Temporal investment. Evidence of time spent past the point of efficiency. Not time wasted. Time given. Time given willingly. Joyfully. Generously.
Skill in service of something. Technique that is clearly doing a job rather than being displayed. Again this is about a spirit of generosity, of community. Virtuosity for its own sake reads to me as showing off, and showing off is the opposite of sacrifice, because it is spending on yourself.
Transmission. Excellence provoking excellence. Watching somebody care that much makes you want to care that much, which is why the effect propagates and why a scene can be lifted by one band.
The reason I want both halves on the table is that the first is what makes the second respectable. I am at pains here not to be woo, or to claim that there is actual magic (though I personally think there could well be!) No one is claiming the devotion travels through the air. But I really believe that the devotion and the care and the generosity and the selflessness gets into the work created, in countless tiny places (many of them profoundly unsexy) and stays there. And we love it when we feel it.
Recognition is not a sixth sense. It is noticing an accumulation you cannot itemise.
Whether any of this would survive contact with a psychologist I do not know. And it doesn’t matter to me. What I am attempting to share here is the most useful working theory I have found for why some records do something to me and others, tho very competently made, do not. This theory has become fundamental to how I work.
What this looks like in the studio
Applied to record making “the sacred craft” stops being abstract very quickly. It also accounts for the fact that many of the decisions I take could look “irrational” (or like magical thinking) from the outside. For example:
I listen to what my clients have made before they come in (sometimes before I accept a booking). This is unbillable and it is inefficient and there is no version of the arithmetic where it makes sense. It is the sacrifice of time and convenience, but it makes a real difference to the session. The feeling that I know the artist when they walk in changes the air in the room. The fact that I know their work means that I can contribute to the session as a producer and collaborator appropriately from the jump.
If you have worked with me you have heard me say “sometimes the work is not the work.” Sometimes the best thing to do with a session is stop the session for a bit and listen to records, or chat about the death that inspired the song, or drink a coffee and listen to reference records. Very often this results in me not billing for time (I’d have blood in my mouth trying to charge you for my time when we are basically just hanging out chatting about Mingus or whatever).
On this, see also Dave Oscillation who spent five months in LostOsc remixing everything he could think of in Dolby Atmos out of love for the craft.
Again, from the “billable hours” pov, this is “bad business” (and potentially actual madness) except that we am in the magic business, or at least the business of making amazing music that we are proud of and that inspires. And if I may paraphrase Jimmie Lunceford: “business sure is swell”. I believe in temporal generosity as a component of craft so I allow the work the time it actually needs rather than the time sold.
And then the hardest one, which is the sacrifice of ego. Often (almost always) it is best that a producer’s contribution is invisible, or at least transparent. There is a playing version of this too; in my life as a bassist, there has been a real journey away from the teenage desire to show how clever you are and play intricate slap parts over everything and embrace the egoless generosity of playing the root-note on the one!)
The measure of success is not whether anybody can hear “Jack” or “LostOsc Studios” on the record. It is whether the record is “better” and whether it is enjoyed, regardless of whether anyone could say why. Killing your own favourite idea because it is serving you rather than the song is the most reliable indicator I know of somebody taking the work seriously.
None of these are efficient. That is not incidental to their value; that is their value. (Especially in a society which optimises everything for efficiency based on the owner-class concept that “time is money” to which I reply “nah mate, time is life.“)
The obvious objection
There is a failure mode here and it deserves more than a footnote, because the version of this essay without it is a hymn to overwork and I have seen what that does to people, including to me.
Sacrifice for the work and sacrifice for your own anxiety look identical from the outside. Both involve long hours. Both involve doing it again. Both can be described in the same noble language. They are completely different things.
The test I use is a question: does this serve the work, or does it serve my fear?
Reworking a vocal for the ninth time because the eighth was not carrying the line is craft. Reworking it for the ninth time because you cannot bear to find out what people think of it is not. The first has a destination. The second is a way of never arriving. Sometimes we need help in knowing which is which.
Perfectionism is not an excess of sacrifice, it is a substitution for it, because the object of devotion has quietly changed from the work to the worker. And it has a tell, which is that perfectionism never finishes anything. Finishing is itself a sacrifice, usually the hardest one, because it means giving up every potential better version that existed while the thing was still theoretical.
Sacred craft, whatever else it is, ships.
The question everybody is now asking
I cannot write this in late 2026 without addressing what is presumably already in your head:
If aesthetic response is partly a recognition of sacrifice, what happens when the thing was made instantly, at no cost, by a system that cannot sacrifice anything because it has nothing to give up?
Now, I want to be careful, because there is a lot of loose thinking in both directions on this and I am not interested in adding to it (nor am I an expert on AI). The output of these systems is not uniformly bad and pretending otherwise is facile. Equally, plenty of human made work is careless, and plenty of it is worse than that.
But lets take the two mechanisms proposed above:
Starting with the lemon & herb: those thousands of small caring decisions are not decisions the machine declined to make. They are decisions it was never in a position to face. Nobody stood in front of the choice between this hi-hat and that one at four in the morning, weighed it against what the song was for, and chose the worse sounding one because it was somehow nonetheless the right one.
I think one of the reasons that AI slop feels like it does is because it lacks the residue of acts of judgement, because there were no acts of judgement, and so whatever accumulation I described earlier simply is not in there to find. Of course the surface can be immaculate, it’s just that there is nothing underneath it. And that feels gross, weird and inconsequential.
And now the spicy one: if you accept that we do register the caring itself on some level, and that the machines are unfeeling and uncaring, then it follows that there there is an “absent register” in the work of the machines and that this absence is structural rather than a current limitation. Even as the machines get really good at imitating the magic in the human, there will be something missing.
To put it another way: it is my contention that beautiful things register to humans as beautiful partly because somebody gave something up (in a quiet, egoless, generous way) in order that the created-object is the way that it is. And therefore, where nothing was given up there is nothing to recognise.
Of course, I am not the first to be bothered by this. In 1935 Walter Benjamin was worrying about photography and film, and about what happens to a work when it can be reproduced perfectly and endlessly. He thought something was lost that had nothing to do with the quality of the copy. He called it “the aura”: the trace of a thing’s own history, of having been made, once, by someone, somewhere. A perfect reproduction has everything the original has except that. And we notice the lack.
In any case, you are free to decline my second argument. Plenty of reasonable people will. I think the first one is harder to dismiss, because it is not about perception at all, never mind auras. It is about what is or is not in the work. Beyond this, none of these ideas are normative or imply anything that anyone else should do or aspire to.
And the money
Which brings us to the least romantic part, and the one nobody writes about honestly.
All of this costs. Sacrifice is by definition uncompensated, or it would just be labour, and the market has no mechanism for pricing the minutes of octopus that nobody can taste. That is the artisan’s dilemma and there is no clean answer to it. Everybody making things to a standard higher than the market requires is subsidising the difference themselves, out of time or money or both.
The only durable solution I know is to find the people who can tell. They exist in every field and they are worth more than volume. This is why I publish my rates and my terms rather than quoting per project: the people who want the cheapest hour can see immediately that they are in the wrong place, and everybody’s time is saved.
The eternal choice
Every job contains the choice: do the thing sufficiently and efficiently, or pursue craft and excellence. The world may not recognise that a decision was made, the world may not care that the output is different, one will be better than the other for your bottom line and shareholder value, and there will likely be no record of the decision.
The whole argument is that people can tell anyway. Often not consciously. Not in a way they could defend. And it does not much matter whether they are hearing the care itself or only the ten thousand small consequences of it, because either way something arrives in the room with the work, and it is the thing everybody actually wants, and it is, on a certain level, what we are actually listening for.
Somebody cut that pattern into the inside of a door mechanism before my great grandfather was born, knowing perfectly well that almost nobody would ever look at it.
I aspire to make records like that.