Vision and Sound

A perception of the atmosphere of an environment is the result of the setting, its contents and surroundings.

Certainly atmospheres are imprinted with the human touch, contributing to emotional states of being associated with various settings.    The imprint of Frank Lloyd Wright reflects the architect of the Fallingwater house in ways subtle as well as extravagant.  The flow, rush, and fall of the stream there generates rich and nuanced sounds, a kind of natural music.

Our own surroundings reflect attitude and mood as well, and our own choices in music form a part of the setting that has greater importance than we might think.  The touch of the creative musical artist goes far to enhance those atmospheres in which we may feel exhilarated or at ease.

Sketch Music

All environments resonate with the sounds of activity.

Indoors and outdoors, sounds may be perceived to accumulate into a whole comprised of gradual but constant changes in pattern, dynamics, tone and movement.  To "sketch" such events and their transformative elements by selecting representative sounds and combining tones, repetitions and progress over time creates a form of ambience that parallels the sounds of active environments. 

A walk in the woods or down winding streets, across a park or through a public mall, up stairways, down corridors, into subway stations or out in the weather, whatever it may be, fog, noonday sun, wind on the beach-- such things form the framework of the sketch music, and the transformation of sounds reflects movement through time. 

Thank you to Mitchel Harbin for suggesting the descriptive term "sketch music" as applying to these types of transformation ambient pieces.

Sensing Sounds

Popular music, in one form or another, fills so many public environments one takes little notice of it.

In the environments over which we have control, we listen to what we choose.  Much of what we listen to, even then, may be a result of cultural conditioning.  It is always possible to become more perceptive with our sense of sound, and more creative as well.

Vibrations and Consciousness

Music is more than sound patterns, narratives in song, inducement to dance or even artistic expression.

There are those who deny music produces effects on temperament and attitude and so forth, but one obviously hears, sees, and experiences these effects.  Various kinds of music, from the subtle to the bombastic, create impressions within environments, and may give the surroundings a particular emotional and aesthetic appeal.  Just as the listener desires to hear certain music, the musician desires to create it, and sound is associated with sensibility.

Permutations of Sound and Listening

Waterfall, highway, morning in distant foothills, avenues in Krakow, Shanghai, San Diego; fishing pier, railroad crossing, theater lobby, campus, grocery store, low country farmer's fields.

Combine these sounds, tones, and their associated patterns into events, aural metaphors, and reflections; they generate a dynamic and series of movements that coalesce, unfold, disperse and return. 

These represent nuances of human movements and perceptions of environments, a kind of musical journey within a psychic field. 

I think of Futurist music as a kind of "transformation ambient" or  "sketch" sound art, designed with these general fundamentals in mind, with the intent of reaching the listener's unconscious and natural awareness.  This is why the typical elements of beat, rhythm, melody and so forth are not apparent, or left undeveloped, in these long-form musical pieces.

Observer and Observed

So much forgotten in the next moment's breath.

Hold on to scraps of phrases, mental photographs, moving pictures of the imagination.  What do they say about you, about me?

Half-formed thoughts, held or let go in the passing of green fields, power lines, graveyards, accidents, laughter and radio talk.

What we have and know, and what we deny ourselves, rests with us alone.

Creation

What is magic?

Whatever begins in solitude.

The babble of the street and the rambling of mixed media recedes to silence and the doors of a wider world seem to be ajar. 

What did Plato know of shadows on cave walls in comparison to "virtual reality"?

Archetypes

The pace of life is often subjective.  The absence of what is called "excitement" need not mean "boredom".

Consciousness rooted deep in history is different from consciousness rooted in "the now". 

It is the difference between living in the universe and living only in a narrowly limited environment.

Patterns

Think of dreams, and the attendant sensory perceptions so far removed from reality.

Time and space, both distorted in such ways as to be meaningless, are inconsequential to the dreamer.

And what of music, of the sound of dreams? 

Absence of Light

With a decline in reason and free will, the spiritual faculties become hopelessly dull.  Conscience, and with it the soul, or the center of our being, becomes lost to our experience of life.

One cannot say it has died, this conscience or moral sense, or if, in some people, it ever exists at all.  Empirically, one might dispute its very reality, but, ineffable though it may be, one knows one's own.  It is a quality of character that can be recognized in others, as can its absence.

Still, when the senses are continually overstimulated by impressions both real and artificial, directly and indirectly, the end result is a kind of suspension of connectedness, a diminution of awareness.

Night Side of Nature

Ask if it is possible to believe in the existence of ghosts, even now, in the twenty-first century.

Ask, on the other hand, if the quality of our lives renders our awareness of such problematic things as wandering spirits possible.

If the natural world escapes our notice, the phases of the moon, the turning of the tides, the subtle dynamics of the progress of the seasons, such that most of our perceptions are attuned to artificial environments and representations of "reality", how likely is it that anything other than the mundane to which we are acclimated can even capture our attention?

Noise, blinding brightness and frenetic activity being the norm, who can see into the quiet, still shadows?

Shape-Shifting

There is always a distance between art and audience.

It is sometimes necessary to extend one's perspective beyond the limits of ones experience altogether and perceive from such an unexpected point of view.

In the deck of the Tarot, the card of The Hanged Man.

Choice

Life filled with mysteries.

No easy answers.

Many questions, many based on wrong ideas, beliefs or information.

Bad premises.

Many situations provide few opportunities for freedom to act with integrity and dignity.  One's only recourse is to extricate oneself in the due course of things.  If we cannot be free, we can at least act wisely and rightly.

Walk Through Walls

Unformed ideas flash momentarily and leave a long after-image.  A school room, a schoolhouse hall.  But there are unspoken ideas, fully formed yet buried beneath emotion and confusion.

Five years, ten years-- these are not lifetimes.  Live with intensity but the facts do not change.  Anything and nothing happens, as days are measured out.  Some live for attachments that will not be, grasp at pleasure, pain, joy, anger, resentments, truths, lies-- real or imagined-- as if these phantoms exist perpetually.

There are times when the only reasonable and appropriate act is condemnation of ignorance, apathy, imitation and self-indulgence.  People who have nothing, as well (and as likely) as those of material wealth, will choose to remain in darkness, as is their right.  The former will do everything possible to appear to be the latter, but it is an intolerable spectacle.

Lao Tsu, it is said, disappeared into mountain mists.

And Thus We Sleep

Fragmentary nature of perceptions.

Consciousness of heat, cold, scent, sound, emotion, idea, impulse, color, light, texture, mortal limits of time and space.  Sounds of wind in the trees: yours, mine, ours, belonging to none.  Passing thought, offered prayer, creative act. 

The idea, the fact, that some never transcend the narrow limits of self, or complete subjectivity, astonishes, and yet is prevalent.

Reuters News Service:  ...both survivors report the assailant said he meant to kill them because they appeared to be happy people, and there was "no room for happiness in his world".

Phantoms of the Living

In the world of ghosts, we never understand our true motivations, act only on the impulse of passion and selfish desire, and, ultimately, behave as though we are alone, not knowing we are dead.

We interact with others as though they are who we want them to be, never knowing who they really are, because we cannot know ourselves.  We exist in a netherworld of images and ideas that our failures of perception and understanding create for us.

Such a shift in individual and cultural consciousness, while readily apparent, appears to go unnoticed.  We do not speak of such things.

Invest meaning in words that are not understood.  Create, and haunt, an empty prison. 

Cast a Cold Eye

If everyone is an artist, only the exceptional and the very strange leave an impression.

Culturally, an intellectual fascination with the idea of chaos prevailed for many decades.  Naturally it became prevalent in popular culture and remains so, to the degree it is commercially viable.  And it remains an issue of academic or quasi-intellectual importance, particularly in the arts, in which the "transgressive" is viewed as having value for its own sake, or conferring value to the artist.  Such value is so rare as to be almost nonexistent, as the so-called transgressive has become no more than redundant repetition of the clichéd act of shocking the bourgeoisie.  It has committed the cardinal sin of becoming boring.

The idea of order evolves accordingly.

Rain in the Grail

No ideology is a replacement for Reason.

Ignorance brings wrack and ruin, and the dead walk the earth.  Can we be fully alive in the darkness of subjective shadows?

Light of Reason

To be passionate about something is to be emotionally attached to it, even to be mentally overwhelmed by it.  Some people do not possess such a temperament.

Over time, agility of mind is more potent than experience, the latter being of lesser consequence in dealing with the unpredictable, the unforeseen, and the unknown.

Heroes

There are times when rebellion against social and cultural norms proves itself right or wrong, viable or absurd.

There are times when the only thing worth rebelling against is the decline of civilized life.

Expansion

There is something about music repeating itself in one's consciousness, unbidden, that is not to be welcomed.

It is as if one's thoughts might be suppressed, one's emotional state might be compromised or falsified.

As a musical arranger involved in recording studio experimentation, and moving away from the creation of music using guitars, drums, vocals and "hooks", I grew interested in music that did not conform to the framework of popular songs or function as a setting for improvisation.  The nebulous and unpredictable appealed to my sense of form, as did a tone and mood most conducive to contemplative listening.  Utilizing developing technology, I grew capable of fabricating generative and ambient forms that sustained attention while enhancing the environment for listening and activity as well.  In this way what I think of as "my music" evolved into an effort of continuing interest, particularly as it contributes to a state of mind that is both focused and at ease.

What I consider to be Futurist music, given its origins in ambient music as an art form, appears to be without boundaries, not limited by genre, and unburdened by common definitions of music.

Echoes

Some people go around with "songs in their heads", or say "I have this song stuck in my head".  Some music, though obviously not all, dominates the listener's attention, then is internalized.  One may judge for oneself the value of this.

Perhaps such events, which are not external yet give the impression of being auditory, impinge or intrude on consciousness, superimposing their presence and emotional connotations, and perhaps they diminish clarity of perception.  One is left to one's own assessment of such things; that they are real is undisputed.

Soundtrack Assemblage

In the course of events broken by dreams remembered or lost on the edges of consciousness there is music.

A musical narrative emerges, a collage arriving along the labyrinthine routes of noise and rumour, melody and hearsay, rhythm and folk-tale, movement and legend, tone and myth.

No. 22 Golden Lane

Literacy itself was once considered a form of magic.  To look an an incomprehensible text that appeared no more than random markings and then, from these, to be able to know and speak the words and thoughts of kings and priests was surely the art of a sorcerer.  Something of that magic and mystery remains, embedded in human consciousness.

Certainly there are confusions of word and object and idea, problems of emotional connotation and comprehension of figurative expression in forms concrete and abstract, and mysteries of linguistic apprehension that provoke thought and debate.  Language nevertheless moves, challenges and stimulates reader and listener.

Logos

The virtue of the written word is its power of transmission across time and space.

The tongue asserts meaning and absurdity but briefly, while these letters express memory, ideas, description, instruction, imagination, and many of the vagaries of human thought over continents, over lifetimes and generations.

Human Nature

--to believe oneself above law, beyond criticism; to demand everything, produce nothing.

Accept no responsibility, act without restraint, and use any means to attain any self-centered end.

The Mask that Covers the Eyes

Ghosts of the living.  The persona, the mask, is the reality, and the self is unknown.

The persona becomes all, and the individual, the spirit, the soul, is cut adrift.

Lights

Some seek silence, solitude, reason, inspiration.  They are ready to act according to their best judgement.  They tend the ground they must tread.  Forces of history may touch them, or leave them to their ways.

The past may be darkness to some, light to others.

Passion Flowers

Our perceptions lose all subtlety, our apprehension and understanding of reality is numbed, degraded, stultified, and our days are made up of such relentless distraction and nuisance we see nothing.  Or nothing beyond our responsibilities or diversions.  Reason disintegrates in bedlam, and most are acclimated to nothing more substantial than transient and untrustworthy emotions.

The supremacy of emotion is everywhere visible.  It trumps a critical regard for facts; it trumps analytical assessment of our character, of our thoughts and actions.  The word "passion" is used far too often, as though it confers a kind of nobility to our pursuits, which may have nothing more than selfish and self-serving motivations.

Neuroscientists assert virtually all political belief is inextricably bound to parts of the brain associated solely with emotion.

And the brain is not the mind.

Timepiece II

To live in a timeless state of being.

To detach oneself from the mundane world of transient things and to live in the world of permanent things.

Transmission II

Culturally, one is engaged from an early age with a fully realized world view.

It is now likely that this world view encompasses postmodern perspectives which may be in opposition to traditional and historical cultural values.  One may not even be aware that those norms which comprise the latter perspective exist, or remain in existence as forces of history.

Camus

At the end of memory a jungle of unresolved threads.  Deaths that complicate and simplify.  Extraordinary circumstances, existing only briefly, apparently disconnected from common cause and effect, which lead nowhere.

That which cannot be explained is a prime indicator of the nature of reality.

Inquiry

From the past:  myth, legend , folklore, fairy tales, theater, ritual, ceremony-- the convergence of culture and community in shared experience.

From the present:  hyperbole, satire, exaggeration, propaganda, scapegoating, contradiction, obsessive ideologies-- convergence of nihilism, depression, narcissism, scientific materialism, repression, failure to thrive.

The former leads to questions; the latter asserts there can be no more questions.

Balance

The Golden Mean.  Temperate attitudes, a sense of order, avoidance of the excessive and irrational, clarity of thought and action, all these things that do not happen naturally, but through reason and free will.

They are contrary to base human nature, must be learned, applied, reflected upon.  But to do so is to apprehend the path to greater vision, deeper perception, and an understanding of reality beyond the given and the mundane.

Timepiece

When it is possible to slow the pace of life it becomes possible to increase perceptual awareness and expand the limits of consciousness.

To live more fully, let time pass in the way of nature, experienced as a continuum.

Consider all we are capable of doing when we are not rushed, when it is within our power to pursue our interests and focus our efforts unhurriedly.  Fine craftsmanship, artistic vision, reason, contemplation and reflection are within realization, as they may not always be otherwise.

Abstract, Concrete

Certainly the things of the spirit are of greater value than those of the merely material.  Why?

The spiritual things are permanent.  Honor, love, wisdom, reason, justice, and so forth-- these things which are good.  They are not limited by material nature.  They may be inspired and made manifest by their representations through the arts, yet their existence is beyond containment and measure.

Forces of History

--what individuals made possible in the past, often by virtue of persistence and arduous labor, makes mastery of such things possible more quickly-- or at a young age-- for people of the present day.

Things do not remain undone or unfinished; ideas continue to unfold in a variety of ways, and unforeseen connections are made in the collision of concepts and events.

Sometimes they come back to haunt you.

Insight

Strange, disconnected fragments of texts from a time called the Dark Ages.  Yet they are linked by marvells, physical appearances of the known dead, apparently traveling great distances together in the night.  Witnesses show little or no fear and approach, make contact with wary courage.

The earth, not the ego, was once believed to be the center of the universe.

Before Herodotus

Time measured by days, nights, moons, seasons-- leather, saddle, boots, spear of the hunter, necklace of pointed teeth, flower petals cast in the burial mound.

Rediscovery

Some require scientific proof for acceptance of what is deemed real; others find the potential for metaphor to direct a vision of understanding, one which holds within the framework of language a perception of truth beyond that which can be weighed and measured, to be more intellectually satisfying.

Each perspective has power, and both demand more than subjective emotion.

Virtue and The Good

Ideas flow throughout culture over time; some run dry, others permeate the social and cultural strata.

If what the philosophers say is true, happiness is a life of virtue according to reason.  Its pursuit engages the spiritual faculties, which are Reason and Free Will.  The Good being self-evident, all else is illusion, delusion, vanity, pride, conceit-- obstacles to the quest.



Phenomena

Yellow and white balconies on apartment buildings, orange tile roofs, red and white smokestacks trailing light gray smoke into morning clouds through beads of condensation on the windows-- construction cranes rising beyond stone bridges built four hundred years in the past.

Wildflowers in early spring blur down the line, suggesting possibilities of who we are and how we live.  All these things comprise, with all things, our being and reality, the lives we burden with name brands and ideologies, information useful and trivial, personalities and problems of people we will never meet, seen every day in combinations of word and image, reportage and commentary and endless opinion, much of it pointless.

Transmission

The train leaves every morning for Berlin.  Look through the eyes of the new country at the old.

Every laugh, every cry, conveys personal meaning in any language.  Say too much and never say enough.

Reasoning

Philosophy turns on self-knowledge.  Who are we?  How do we live?  These are fundamental questions-- who has time for them, or interest?

Art that reaches beyond the transient and impermanent has an existential purpose.  It breaks ground, suggests possibilities, suggests permanent things. 



Landscape

Everywhere you look consciousness fragments into separate and distinct perceptions-- Hotel-- Restaurant-- Bar-- Time-- Distance-- Voices-- Music--

In a hotel room in Prague children leap into a Greek sea, drug cartels battle police and thousands are killed, ideas about "leadership" are cast about, Internet romances influence elections, diamonds are sold to spite family members.

Non-linear

"Read books that bite... that sting." -- Kafka

Nothing to Remember Now

Listen to the music.  The women sound like machines.  Familiar noise without the novel connection; empathy between the performer and listener is not present.

Songs imitating emotion, rather than expressing feeling, evoking specious intimacy, projecting contrived and transparently false precociousness.  The sterile gloss of poorly imagined, relentlessly repetitive imagery reflects little direct experience.

So, increasingly, direct experience appears less valid, less 'authentic', than emotional or intellectual or spiritual reality defined outside oneself: the perspectives of one's peers and personal engagement with media narratives supersede individual perception.

The Saints, It Is Said, Traveled Far

Past the last settlements and human dwellings there is only barren land, where feathers continually fall from the cold sky, where the sun circles the horizon, neither to rise nor set.



Certain of the Stoics say the natural extension of poetry is philosophy.

Prescience

Drama resolved in tragedy or comedy-- meaning death and meaning or life and action, both dealing with consequences of choices...

Enamoured with the vicissitudes of style and fashion, remaining in darkness,surrounded by reflections in the surface of unformed night.

Dogs bark, horses panic, looking towards things we cannot see.

On the Sidewalk

Replicants, revenants, doppelgangers, and the repetition of history, birth and death, ceremony, ritual, honor, tradition, gunfire, bugle call--

Look at the way the light falls in photographs, as if these unknown and unknowable people are blessed, caressed, confessed divine or favored by forgotten gods, heroes, torch-bearers, crowned by the tribe, the culture--

While with these words anyone and no one may be joined, linked, connected through magic beyond warriors, farmers, women, offspring, into settings of clerks, scribes, those who have the king's tongue and ear and are uplifted and buried in the embrace of civilization.

We call on those things to which we are attached-- coins, radios, salt, voices, scandals, dangers, pleasures, sea changes of consciousness in bottles bearing messages over tides, waves generated by brain or mind or transmission towers--

Upon these we stake our reality (do we not?) and create all those impossibilities that never existed.



Warhol

Popular culture is to culture what popular opinion is to sound judgement.

It can be a hit-or-miss proposition.

Bio

Press kits are necessary, it would seem.  Horrible things.

Who I am depends upon who sees, who listens.