It was a crisp early autumn evening in upstate New York. Smoke wafted from fog machines and light bounced around the trees, filling the woods with an eerie ambience tempered by the enduring optimism of Bergsonist’s vocals-heavy house set. 

Thus began this year’s Sustain-Release, an electronic music festival that’s known for its open-minded ethos, deep sense of community, and superlative DJ lineups. 

The alter ego of Selwa Abd, Bergonist’s appearance came at the end of two and a half years of nearly unrivaled creative output. In the first nine months of the pandemic the Moroccan-born, Brooklyn-based artist released 22 EPs, and she kept rolling from there. All told, on Bandcamp alone she’s released 78 distinct works.

Somehow she still had unreleased tracks to spare, some of which have ended up on web3 platforms like the non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace Foundation, as well as the Nina Protocol, a new platform for buying, selling, and streaming music.

Her prolific production is in many ways a reflection of her moniker’s namesake: the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who gained renown by preaching intuition over rationale. Trusting her gut has given Abd a pioneer’s mentality – enabling her to experiment swiftly, release loads, and take up the mantle of web3 earlier than most.

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Abd was born in Casablanca, where many types of music filtered into her everyday life. Arab music permeated the air, from a traditional Moroccan and West African Islamic music called Gnawa to eminent Egyptian vocalists like Umm Kulthum. Pop icons were beamed through her TV from the US and France alike: Janet Jackson and Sisqo cavorted and crooned alongside francophone contemporaries like Alizée and Corneille. Abd’s father – who taught her the value of trusting something outside the intellect even before Bergson – acquainted her with the cool grooves of Motown. A rich tapestry of music drifted around her as naturally as the warm arid air – a persistent reminder of the present moment.

“I remember when I was in Morocco, some days we would have issues – like problems and there was no way to figure out a solution,” Abd told me recently. “And [my father] would tell me to just do nothing. Just enjoy the present moment… sometimes I feel like the more I think about something, the more it doesn't come.”

Allowing space for intuition would become a connective thread in her own music-making journey – one that started in Casablanca. In 2010, she started a music blog called Bizaarbazaar to chronicle the music she was discovering. She taught herself simple piano melodies by watching YouTube videos, and tooled around with GarageBand but found it too regimented for the music she wanted to make. That frustration reflected a vexing sense of constraint in her home country. 

Bergonist at Sustain-Release photo: MacEagon Voyce

Abd had dreamed of going to the U.S. since her family took a trip to New York when she was eight. Through her teenage years, New York came to symbolize the kind of freedom and independence she sought. When she was 17 she got the opportunity to pursue that dream, enrolling as a graphic and communications design student at The New School. 

It was there she first encountered Gilles Deleuze’s 1966 book on Bergson, Le bergsonisme. “The idea Deleuze is defending is that intuition is the best method to legitimate any creative act,” Abd said for a feature in Resident Advisor. Via Bergson, Deleuze gave her a framework for her music.

During her first years in New York, feeling uninspired by her studies, music became a more active outlet. In 2014 she bought a Korg ER1 synthesizer off of Craigslist and began making music. But even armed with this new Bergsonist language, she was still nervous about releasing it into the broader world, so she instead shared her creations with friends. Some of them started playing her music in their sets.

“I was so happy,” she said. “But then they would tell me, ‘I'm going to produce your music.’ And then they would take years and they would never do it. And I think that was the tipping point in my process of publishing music.”

Abd started recording music in one take, training her ears and her intuition. “Bergsonism is a lot about this – trying to capture the moment,” she said. “And then it is what it is. It can be imperfect.” 

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As she came to trust herself, she started releasing in droves. “I don't know if some people were following me back in 2015, but on my SoundCloud I would post tracks weekly,” she said. “Releasing is kind of like leaving. It's like brushing your teeth every day. It doesn't have to be precious.”

SoundCloud’s flexibility, which allows artists to upload virtually any audio file, proved to be the perfect tool for her early experimentation. But when it faced its own doom in 2017, Abd started archiving her music on Bandcamp, another platform that allows artists to publish music more easily than places like Spotify and Apple Music, which require a digital distributor. “I really love experimenting with publishing tools,” she said. 

Testing the web3 waters, teeming with inventive publishing opportunities, seemed only natural. “For me web3 right now is more like an experiment,” she said. “I take it kind of like SoundCloud when it first started.”

She was introduced to web3 through her friend Dev Moore from FELT Zine, an experimental internet art platform and artist collective that hosts events and examines digital activism, hip hop culture, race, gender, and class. Moore showed her Foundation, where FELT Zine has an extensive collection, and Abd used the platform to sell her first NFT – the visual artwork for her then-latest music release, virtualité. Moore bought it for 0.1 ETH (about $128 as of this writing).

Foundation was just her first foray into web3. Abd is exploring the idea of turning her online community Pick Up the Flow into a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) – a collective ownership model that reflects the artist-focused organization’s purpose of democratizing access to things like music gear, apartment listings and knowledge.

Bergonist throwing off some serious Blair Witch vibes photo: MacEagon Voyce

Recently her friend Jack Callahan introduced her to Nina, a new web3 music protocol he helped found that’s become one of the most equitable, artist-friendly platforms in the ecosystem. When artists sell their music on Nina, they retain full rights and only pay a one-time cost to cover transaction fees on the Solana blockchain and storage fees on Arweave, a protocol that enables permanent data storage.

Artists get to choose how many NFTs are in each release, as well as the price point and the percentage they take on secondary sales. The entirety of the initial sales go directly to the artist – for sake of comparison, artists only keep about 12 percent of the revenue they generate in a streaming-centric music industry.

“When you think about Nina and what they're doing, and their vision and all the people who are on Nina compared to other music platforms like Sound.xyz… it’s mostly independent musicians and experimental,” she told me. “It’s a niche that’s also part of the underground scene in New York, so it feels real.”

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Sustain-Release, in many ways, is the underground New York scene gone camping. It’s three days of beautiful, varicolored weirdos – as a fellow weirdo I say that endearingly – who form a  community through a shared love of electronic music. It’s like watching years’ worth of pheromonal resonance built in Brooklyn warehouses and sweaty clubs rematerialize in the woods. There’s mutual respect for each weirdo’s own brand of weird and a vision that it’s just fine to be whatever kind of weird you want. 

Bergson may have found meaning in such a place. Over his career the philosopher developed a concept of multiplicity in an attempt to unify two conventionally contradictory features: heterogeneity and continuity. Today it’s regarded as revolutionary because it paved the way for a reconception of community – one that was palpable from the very beginning of the weekend.

As people arrived and set up camp in the surrounding trees and open lawns, some began meandering into the woods to watch Bergsonist’s set. Traditional Moroccan music turned quickly into ebullient house. We danced – some by ourselves, some in pairs, some in small cadres of bouncing heads. Some were smiling, some nodded. Others sipped, eyes closed, caught up in some anthemic disco riff or uplifting soul vocal.

Darker shades periodically poked through, and then some grimmer, industrial techno. In time the set evolved to a dogged thump that mirrored the thickening night, where the characters who had been distinct just moments before became a thoughtless heaving mass, writhing amongst the trees. They breathed, we breathed. Sustain, then release. Discrete, then continuous.  

Correction: This story was corrected on Oct. 14, 2022 to fix the spelling of Bergsonist in the headline and photo caption and to correct the spelling of Bizaarbazaar