Transformation Design

Developing electronic music through generative processes alone places the composer at a distance from sonic events and their final forms, often resulting in works of serene and highly nuanced beauty.

Transformation designs are the result of direct and indirect involvement on the composer's part; the object is to create conditions in which sound structures evolve while directing that development in such ways as enhance the total aesthetic effect of the work.

Echos, Reflections, Waves

Learn, perceive, think, and contemplate.  Action emerges.

In painting with sound, as it were, tones are mixed and set in motion.  Among innumerable things, they blend, spread, coalesce, dissipate, develop patterns, move in and out of focus, fade, become darker or lighter, and take on the ultimate form composed with the artist throughout the dynamic processes.

Art as Sound as Art: The King Krill

As discussed here in variable contexts, diverse sound elements may be presented in asymmetrical manner, designed in ways that defy anticipation.  The King Krill is a recording by Diode and Rick Holland that synthesizes unique elements of poetry, vocals, percussion and electronica to create an experience of rare aesthetic beauty.  This is a work that draws the future into the moment now.

The King Krill, featuring I am Fya, Beth Rowley, Chris James, Onallee, and Andrew Plummer, as brought into being by producer Old Man Diode and poet Rick Holland

Listeners familiar with Drums Between The Bells and Panic Of Looking, Rick Holland's 2011 collaborations with Brian Eno, will note the distinctive qualities shared by those works and The King Krill in combining musical and poetic elements. Each approaches and explores sound settings for voices from various artistic perspectives that bring to life diverse atmospheres and moods, and all three reflect creative interaction and experimentation seasoned over the past decade. As a poet of critical imagination and integrity, Holland proves at ease with both the ethereal atmospherics of Eno's arrangements and the elastic sonic power Diode wields with energetic bravura.

Read more of my review of The King Krill at The Quietus.com:  http://thequietus.com/

MP3 Album of Old Man Diode and Rick Holland: The King Krill at Amazon.com:  The King Krill

Sounds of Shadows

Sensory perceptions conceal as well as reveal.

For the artist to render honestly, a degree of subjectivity may palliate or exaggerate the reality fixed as a representation of objective experience.  This individuality suggests personal and demonstrative perspectives brought into being in any medium.

The inner ear of the composer must have the free reign of the eye of the visual artist, and the balance of lucid imagination.  Clarity of style and execution reflects coherence of concept, most peculiarly in emphasis of the more subtle elements of sound.

Auditory Imagination

The sounds of experience may evoke the broad vistas or small corners of the world.

The aural events and atmospheres of these settings may be expressed by the composer in all manner of ways.  Microcosm and macrocosm may be still and serene, or seething with activity.

But there is an essence of vision that the listener and composer must share, one difficult to define yet glaring in its absence, that of integrity of expression.

Emergence, Depth, Presence

There are sounds that can be heard only within the inner ear.

Such sounds form the narratives of mystery and epiphany, of insight and the unknown.

Past the Future

There are distant sounds, given no thought today, unheard and as yet unimagined.

Some are present even now, crossing the gulf, yet going unnoticed in the passing of events.