Free Hand

The listener should be engaged without being subjected to sounds.

In real-world conditions, listening is selective, and the listener engaged by interesting environmental events by choice.  Composition of atmospheres with attention to the ways sounds rise and fall in the locations and settings of everyday perceptual experiences creates musical pieces that do not imprint themselves upon consciousness, but rather enhance awareness. 

That, then, is the goal of these works. Their relationship to minimalism, "ambient music", classical music, popular music, or even music in general is slight, if, in fact, it exists at all.

Obscure Terrain  by Black Mountain School

Delmarva (Excerpt)  by Black Mountain School

The Voice of Time in Gold  by Ghost Radio Orchestra

Art, Music, and Purpose

These works are produced as imitations of natural atmospheres and human reality within them.

Rather than force sounds into predetermined patterns, I compose by combining sounds and allowing the combinations to determine direction, pattern, effect, and arrangement with minimal interference.

With this understanding, the listener may compare and contrast these works to other concepts and forms of music, with which they have very little in common.

Identity (Excerpt)  by Black Mountain School

Prescience (Excerpt)  by Black Mountain School

Ancestral Shadows  by Ghost Radio Orchestra

Take This Moment

Thank you.

Lead, Or Be Led

I don't presume to speak for artists. They can speak for themselves, as I do on behalf of my work.

I believe reality is far more than that revealed by the senses, and that it can be perceived, by degrees, in the light of reason and free will, the spiritual faculties. Insights and understanding gained in such a way may be artistically expressed, and thus refute the debased assertions of the narrow-minded, the materialistic, and the totalitarian who would dictate the terms of human experience.

Popularity Chasm

Few things impede artistic communication more than ignorance, nihilism, and complacency.

Increasingly apparent are voices of those who parrot absurdities and stridently demand that reality conform to worthless propositions. Art is dead in such collective mentalities, fit only to serve as the vehicle for broadcasting propaganda.

Free expression, rejected out of hand, can never be supported by those who cannot tolerate the world of ideas. The infantile cannot withstand it, as it illuminates things as they are in devastating clarity.

One does not waste time with those who would insist that human nature and moral reason have no real existence, or that there is no such thing as history. They must simply be left behind, as it is only among the utterly benighted that such abominable "ideas" gain currency.

Temporal Movement

Trace the arc of mediocrity and cultural stagnation as it leads to failed perspectives.

Passionate, self-obsessed assertions in the arts do not replace superior ones by virtue of novelty.

Pressure, Manipulation, Clarity, Possibilities

Things perceived in dim light appear distorted and unclear.

Even so, consciousness retains fundamental understanding of objective reality. Perhaps this sense of balance holds in the face of media-generated demands upon human attention, but that may be rather too optimistic a perspective.

 Artistic endeavor in every form has the potential to express this balance, but this can only be so as far as it reflects the honesty and integrity of the individual artist.