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.

Being, Listening, Hearing

Matters of taste reflect cultural conditions as well as individual discrimination.

The content of culture changes, as do the perceptions and processes by which culture is understood and engaged.  Simplistic and materialistic attitudes and philosophical and conceptual perspectives are always in opposition.  The contention between historical forces such as these is reflected in current events, concrete artifacts, artistic representations, music, and in the written transmission of culture.

The transient material world rises and falls, while the poetic forms remain universal.

Sound Perceptivity

Perceptual sensitivity to sound may be enhanced or degraded according to various internal and external conditions.

Granted the individual has particular expectations regarding sights and sounds, and these influence attention and focus, certain perceptions may go unnoticed if not for peculiarly receptive states of mind, that is to say, of the neurological system, and the processes of thought and emotion.

Such heightened awareness and lucidity may be stimulated by sounds, especially those designed to defy anticipation, emerge and expand without reference to temporal events, or otherwise engage one's consciousness in extramundane experience.

Aural Prescience

There are myriad shared musical environments, and among them are found widely diverse cultural variations.

As listeners, we may become conscious of being thoroughly conditioned to our familiar atmospheres, and, rejecting facile conformity to general values and expectations relative to sound and art, we may find our inner ear is more attuned to the sounds of futurity.

This attitude is shared with the composer, and is a matter of natural curiosity. To engage in predictive analysis about the ways sounds and sonic structures may evolve creates conditions for speculative music to engage the imagination, potentially to be realized in concrete forms.

Movement and Expansion

There is no "stasis" in aural imagery.

Vibratory waves extend and develop in perpetual transformation as they encounter others, to defy illusions and anticipations of linear, temporal movement.

Imprint Time Past

Early memory informs present impressions.

What begins as direct perception informs, in the moment now, as meaning.  In sound apprehension, this is hearing, and listening, as passive and active attention, respectively.

Of the Far Margins

Listen for sounds heard at the edges of consciousness.

At the extreme limits of perception sounds defy identification, suggesting possibilities.  Hear and reach for them; make these undefined aural images emerge in the compositions, and allow their evocation of the uncanny.

Stillness, Knowledge

At the core of sacred places is the sense of universal being.

Within and without may be heard the sounds of the soul.

Sound Works

The existential phenomena of nature and human character are originative and controlling forces.

The process of structuring dynamic combinations of sounds, tones, patterns and clusters designed, as are works of art, as reflective and representative of the influence of these universal and personal phenomena upon perception and temperament, is a continuing and challenging purpose.

As a composer, I consider auditory images as the peculiar elements through which meaning emerges and expands, in creating contemplative contexts through which meaning may evolve.

Rippling

Listen to the world and hear its music.

Observe the pervasive nature of sound, and its constant influence.

Whether carried by wind in rushes and reeds, human voices or machines in action, its course is through nerve and bone, dream and being.

Turn, Turn Again

Lose originality, and there is only repetition.

Lose innovation, and there remains only genre.

Exclude individuality and idiosyncrasy, and the artist is invisible.

But neither art, nor artist, will cease.

As Waves Intersect

In terms of sound imagery, a definition of music is unnecessary.  It is beside the point.

Vibrations set in motion produce others, and interactions continue as other effects are produced.

Sound, Being, and Becoming

Sonic imagery alters perception and broadens perspective.

Where reality and the imagination intersect in sound, in the performance of a musical composition, tone poem, or other form of aural art, the listener may observe a sense of a continuum of temporal events, as opposed to a perpetual movement of linear time.

For this effect to manifest itself, the composer must not work according to expectations, nor against them, but outside possibilities of anticipation altogether.

Part and Whole

Every sound perceived within an environment produces effects.

Some will communicate significant, profound, or extraordinary impressions; some will suggest the uncanny, or the presence of something ineffable; many will not be noticed at all.  Listeners discern, and, as poets and composers, they manipulate.

Listen, and all things rise and descend.  Hear, and all things emerge and pass away.

Shapes of Aural Events

Physical reality is immersed in sounds.

Heightened perceptions of listening and hearing sense ideas of distances, placements in space, external forms, and such concepts as the aural imagery of shadows and colors.

As painting and drawing may render objective and imaginative events visible, put forth such forms in sounds.

Periphery of Music II

Set an emotional and intellectual paradigm for the understanding of music as an experience.

Turn from that understanding of music, toward an idea of no music, in contrast to something that can be called non-music; then consider sounds outside those common models or frameworks of music, with environmental aural imagery, tones and patterns serving as the the fundamentals for such sonic designs as they may be heard in diverse contexts.

Sever the significance of time, then place all these perspectives into simultaneous flux.

Sonic Archetypes

Sound motifs represent, through tonal quality and pattern, symbolic realities.

Ethereal heights, storms and floods, places hidden and abandoned, mystic waters, deserts and hills all have their representative sounds, and with them suggestions of stasis and movement.

Atmospheres embrace listening and surround perception, opening the mind's eye and the inner ear.

Universal Patterns

Where rhythm is not apparent, it will be found through expansion of understanding.

The moon turns the tides and its force is perceptible.

There are vast rhythms pulsing in the cosmos.  Draw these into awareness through representative musical sounds.

Connection, Control

Atmosphere, environment, perception, thought.  These are interrelated.

Some things are within the scope of a composer's or listener's will. Others can be imagined.

What sound may express may then be understood, and thus more possibilities, real and concrete or imagined and abstract, may be brought to light.

Drama and Ease

To perceive and to reflect embrace intensity and intimacy.

Things happen and are apprehended; as understood, perhaps reconsidered, perspectives emerge. The composer brings aural imagery to such perspectives, manipulates, juxtaposes, stylizes.

Feeling yields designs, tones, dances and dreams.  What is otherwise is merely music.

Reach, Again

To explore memory in its depths is to find perceptual impressions, thoughts, and feelings.

Sudden cold October wind, waving shadows against lights of home; cheer, misunderstandings, disillusionment; exiting a film into blinding daylight; view through strange windows; long gaze at distant boats, stars, mountains;  photographs, then direct experience of art, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, say, or an exhibition of works by Modigliani, Seurat, Warhol-- or unknowns.  Hospital sheets, flickering fluorescent lights, sidewalk bright with dusty chalk drawings, restaurant in early morning rain.

Sounds, smells, all the sensory impressions of street, school, job site, field, highway.  There. Within, find the notes and tones and aural imagery, the sonic impressions that sing life to the inner ear.

Detach

Time, a measurement of convenience, is not fixed and universal in perception.

The listener may be fully or partially engaged in a musical work or sound design, and still be completely immersed in experience.

So it is with the temporal world:  a moment, now, in motion, within the vastness of reality.

Sensing the Real

Sound creates a panorama of perception.

Listen.  Hear.  Images form, delineating environment and atmosphere.

Here one may recognize objects, distances, relative locations, and connections to feeling as well. More will be experienced.   Move within sound, as sound moves within consciousness.  By such means compositions may be envisioned and designed.

Mere pretension can neither conceive nor express the ineffable.  Awareness must extend beyond the ego to sense what any medium can-- and cannot-- represent.

View, Mood, Meaning

Every composition designed to be contemplative in nature calls up extraordinary circumstances.

Each day and hour evolves; each moment suggests time past and time future.  Both clarity and imperfection in art and consciousness speak to the reality of existence filtered through limits of awareness and understanding.   Sound is resonant energy, coming into the range of listening perception and moving beyond it.

Every life is singular in its being and effects; every sight and sound experienced from the vantage point of the moment now is unique beyond measure.  Impossible to capture, it may nonetheless be reflected in the arts.

Ideal and Real

Concept comes alive once exposed to actual application.

When real forces come into contact with ideas, both are altered, and released, to determine outcomes.

Given any number of possibilities, thought that merges with reality through sound as its artistic medium now responds to its own nature, and the will of the composer must assent.

Variables

Expansion also indicates the choice of limits.

 It is possible to take into account the addition of any number of elements, large or small, in such compositions as these.   Rhythms, percussive components, vocals, natural sounds and melodious harmonies might be developed according to these paradigms and be equally atmospheric as well as heightening to the listener's consciousness.

Ideas and energies contain the essence of their opposites, with measured limits giving rise to equilibrium.

Settings, Atmospheres, Elements

The aesthetic sense is reflected in the ways we conduct our lives.

It's absence signifies a dearth of self-knowledge; if too rarefied, a lack of humanity.  Between these extremes of taste and perception, the arts exert influence on the senses, intellect and emotions.

The artist in sound is a painter of color through vibrations, and an explorer in search of the truly beautiful.

Outside, Within-- Pop and Other

Experience is pattern, vibration, vision, sound, and being.

Exposure to diverse musical styles and environments yields receptivity to perspectives beyond those of one's more familiar settings, offering contrasts to both popular and refined sounds with the exotic and obscure, while also inviting comparisons.

There is always more to hear, more to stir curiosity, and more to know.

Audible Emanations

As the perception of music is released from emotional attachments and culturally standard patterns, the auditory faculties may tend to increase in acuity, and the sounds of one's surroundings grow more interesting.

Clear the mind of preconceptions, bring sounds into juxtaposition and balance, and allow for the emergence of compositions that move in all directions, ultimately into their meaningful forms.

Hearing Time Dissolve

Listening, like memory, is selective.

Losing significance, some memories dissipate in fading impressions while others return with force of meaning; similarly, atmospheric sounds of seemingly no import dim to apparent silence in the course of everyday activity, unless sudden changes in volume or tone bring them to the attention.

Observe these minor auditory images and they are suggestive of the uncanny realities of dreaming.

Heightening

Social contexts favor culturally familiar musical forms, while personal environments tend to reflect the state of mind and mood of the listener.

Satellite radio channels, for instance, attract the particular interests of specific audiences, as clubs and coffee houses do their clientele.  Individual audio players, on the other hand, invariably contain highly personalized playlists.

Contemplative music and sound designs are distinctive in their appeal to both public and personal contexts.  Such works are essentially representative of serene and elevated perspectives, whether in conjunction with ceremony and ritual, artistic productions, or in simply enhancing the atmospheres of living spaces.

Narrative, Perspective, Echo

The sounds of nature and civilization encompass concrete auditory imagery; conceptual imagination postulates sound, music, and atmospheric aspects of this reality, and others.

Prehistoric imagination brought thunder to life through drumming, conjuring the rhythms of existence, and found ways to summon the sounds of wind in the reeds by the rivers.  Words came to be shaped in chants and exhortations.  Sounds deep and high, wide and ringing came within cultural expression, vibrations refined over time by human creativity and following the courses of human longing, myth and legend. Simple and sophisticated, crude and sublime, sounds form signs, signals, and symbols of perceptual reality.

Time past, time present, time future are within the inner ear.  Listen, and hear.

Conditions

Perception influences perspective.

Any set of circumstances that impacts society directly will be reflected in widespread culture.

With war and plague emerge the flagellants and the danse macabre; the advent of the printing press increases literacy, then captures and conveys the oral tradition, particularly the ballad form; elevation of reason brings forth a reaction in romanticism, as skepticism and scientific materialism challenge the status quo of faith.  Impressionism, aestheticism, decadence, cubism, abstract expressionism, and pop art follow.  T.S. Eliot expresses disintegration, first shoring the classical ruins with poetic fragments, and ultimately envisioning renewal of psyche and culture.

And as the Age of Empire brought about vast cultural diffusion, so contemporary technology provides for it today, as well as for the greater democratization of communication wrought first by the movable type press.

What comes next, even in modernist terms and the context of very recent history, is beyond what came before, and is already happening.

State of Mind and Sound Art

Ways of listening change with cultural, technological, and social developments.

As forces set in motion by historic ideas meet possibilities engaged in the moment now, so they are fulfilled in the cultural arts.

What the composer hears with the inner ear emerges into being within the atmosphere of the modern, connected world, and will come to influence perceptions in everyday life.

Motion and Repose, Modernity and Tradition II

Sounds connect across the temporal spectrum.

Set aside the known, and what remains is nameless; unformed, yet closer.

Diffusion, Dispersal, Convergence

Atmospheric conditions alter sounds and their impressions on the listener.

Such experiences of sound are infinite in variety, yet can be difficult to detect when the perceptions are dulled by the myriad external pressures and distractions to which listeners may be inured.

These effects are to be pursued toward refinement of awareness, whether subtle or bold, ethereal or uncanny, and whether in the course of everyday events or in the process of sound design.

From a compositional perspective, they awaken the aural sense and the imagination, expanding the range of consciousness, and, in turn, depth of intellect and feeling.

Sound and Intention, Sound in Space

What is considered music generally conforms to traditional standards and ideas.

Sounds representative of the observable reality of settings, atmospheres and phenomena are most often considered to be other than music.

These are reasonable, if inaccurate conclusions.  Musical designs that intentionally replicate the patterns and movements of naturally-occurring sounds for aesthetic purposes combine aspects of both, yet conform to neither.

Except for Brian Eno's term ambient, or a broad (and generous) interpretation of the designation tone poem,  such designs are nameless and undefined, fusions of aural imagery on the periphery of music.

Musical Futurity

Directed developments in music and expansion of sound as art tend to diverge in the direction of "progression" for the former and "evolution" in the latter case.

While the first is heard across the spectrum of musical culture, the second process is more gradual in gaining widespread acceptance, reflecting its different aims and perspectives.  Both are interesting viewpoints, and often both are equally academic in nature.

The progression of music may be seen as a form of modernization, or essentially improving existing styles and methods.  Evolutionary developments, on the other hand, generally tend to advance toward undefined or uncategorized expressions.

Rightly, what is important to listener, musician, and composer is the artistic integrity of the work, which ultimately contributes to its universal appeal.

Wave, Sound, Movement, and Light

To fall prey to distraction is to lose touch with the beautiful.

This is a spiritual loss, a failure to appreciate life.  It is akin to drowning within sight of land.

Art reaches out, and one may grasp and be drawn back to the simple realization of the magnitude of being.

Sounds Before and Behind

At any given moment it is quite possible to pause and take notice of sensory perceptions previously ignored, unseen, and unheard.

Reflections may be heard as well as seen.  Changes in atmosphere may be felt, and nuance of voice will indicate attitude and emotion. All such things may be consciously perceived, just as they may be afforded conscious responses, heightening experience immediately and over time, if broader, deeper consciousness is desirable enough to warrant attention.

Elevated awareness of this type is within human capacity, and not merely a lost "survival skill" of our human ancestors.

To be regularly removed from chaos, confusion, and the burden of disorderly surroundings, even if for short periods, results in clarity and lucidity becoming predominate in approaching the phenomena of existence.  The senses gain acuity, as do intellectual and emotional perspectives.

As composer and percipient, I desire to design musical sounds that excite the sensory and reasoning faculties.  Now, as always, these are essential to fullness of being.

Mystic Apprehension

Intuitive understanding worthy of the term presupposes refinement of wisdom and perceptiveness beyond such measurable qualities as age and education, even given their intrinsic importance as contributing factors.

Apply predictive analysis to the arts. Communications and media change, becoming at once more broadly effective and more intimate in reach.  That which is personal is more clearly universal.

Thought, idea, emotion, creativity, judgement and imagination are consequences of consciousness.

Listen, hear the future.  No machine will ever do these things.

Still, Aware

Contemplative attention to sound takes notice of incremental change, does not anticipate, and does not follow, but rather becomes immersed in the calm dynamics of atmosphere.

This is childlike perception, uncannily clear in its directness, as compared to awareness distracted by external pressures.

Unattached to idea, emotion, imagery, and the vicissitudes of experience, a state of absorption in sound and setting invites composer and listener alike to engage the real and the imaginative with lucid grace.

Concept and Effect

Perception influences consciousness and state of mind.

Conscious awareness of subtlety and nuance may be learned, developed, and practiced through expression and communication, and not only in the arts.  Everyday circumstances are laden with opportunities to see, listen, hear and know reality and the forces that propel events both large and small.

These are matters of choice, and desire.

Within Being, Within Atmospheres

Perceptions, conveyed to consciousness, inspire memories, emotions, and ideas.

These, in turn, may inspire expression and representation of things perceived and things shaped by experience, in forms concrete and abstract.  These are gestures of sound and vision.