Shadings

Art in any field or setting is creative vision.

Art is not static; it ultimately refuses to be defined, and its final destination is always beyond the moment now.

Manner and Methods

Nothing meaningful is effortless.  To devise an original, personal technique is a challenge in any field of endeavor.

Concepts, principles, and the ways and means of bringing these into being are not always apparent, and thus demand development and experimentation fraught with implications of failure that are to be expected.

There are any number of ways, for instance, of manipulating sound as an art medium, but the creation of desired effects- the expansion of atmospheric spaces, a degree of unpredictability similar to that of sounds in a real, natural environment, aesthetically pleasing arrangements of non-linear, yet cohesive, tones, notes, lines and clusters- is contingent upon factors that must be independently advanced and realized.

Such a perspective encompasses the work of a lifetime, demanding patience, persistence, and the long view.

Walk Through a Room

First see the obvious.

Notice how the attention is directed, and for what purpose.  Now perception and will are engaged.

Look where focus is not emphasized.  Take in the small details.  A piece of red thread, paperclip, cobweb; age of the furnishings, textures, stylistic features; regard how these offer a sense of human presence and unseen activity.

Why, then, are these elements present?

Following the same pattern, listen. Hear each sound and its identifying aspects.  Consider intention, reason, the tone and mood of the setting, and how these may be translated and brought into being as musical designs.

Locality

Occasionally I hear the river, and across it, the Westminster chimes of the village clock.

To the southeast, a steam-driven electrical plant drones, and sometimes roars like a waterfall.  Traffic on the surrounding highways is light, growing sparse in early evening.  This is a refuge for birds and wildlife of all kinds, a well-kept habitat.  Above, commercial and military air lanes hum with passing flights while thrush and woodpecker, chickadee, whippoorwill and hawk scatter calls and songs.

It is not these sounds, but the ways in which they rise and fall, emerge, expand, and dissipate in the environment that are of constant interest in structuring atmospheric sound compositions and designs.

Provoke the Mind

Engage unaccustomed sights and sounds.

It is the common viewpoint, rather than the common lot, that stultifies.

While the impressionists and cubists and composers of tone poems observed with human senses, they engaged cultural, scientific, and philosophical ideas regarding light, sound, and relationships of a temporal and spatial nature according to personal and unique perspectives.

Capture

Color the air.

Set aside cultural associations and emotional connotations, experiencing sound as environmental art.

Limits and Expansion

Consciousness of sound, like its effects, depends upon individual perspective.

Cultural and environmental factors place demands upon point of view.

For listener and composer, this implies a choice between the given currency of genre music and styles or sounds that spark individual curiosity.

Experience and Imagine

See and hear with the mind's eye and the inner ear.

The sound of tea roses spilling over a garden wall.  Deserted street in evening mist.  Summer lightning, early starlight, scent of salt water and wood smoke.

Voice says, "Listen..."

Sound as Music, Sound as Art

Sound is an art medium to be manipulated like any other.

Put plainly, this perspective has little to do with the fundamentals of musical composition--  melody, beat, rhythm, harmony, tempo, and so forth.  Rather, the fabrication and juxtaposition of sounds has everything to do with utilizing the principles and elements of art: lines, textures, values, forms, space, and things of this nature, with emphasis given to their relationship to tone.

As such a composer, I remain ambivalent as to whether such works should be considered music, even given their intended aesthetic appeal.  Such debate is of no importance to the listener's inner ear.

Time, Mind, and Ear

Historical perspective engenders foresight.

Hear, listen, apprehend, and approach.

Ambience and Environs

Atmospheres encompass unique variables.

Sound compositions designed to reflect and express the effects of these variables require methods and strategies altogether removed from musical processes in general, being more akin to recording and combining environmental events than arranging instrumental and vocal music.

Yet these are not random processes, but relate to the more expansive and subtle configuration of human perception and the totality of all things.

Confrontation, Contradistinction

The phenomena of existence present themselves, to be perceived and apprehended as real.

Certainly this is clear, yet it does not go without saying because appearances may be misinterpreted, sometimes intentionally, to support one's perspective or world-view, for example.  And nothing good can come of it.

Rather than stoke the fires of temperament, my intentions are to design sound works that may, in fact, subdue emotion; rather than create linear music, I establish aural settings and allow sounds to emerge as they are perceived in everyday life.  Though these pieces are directed and stylized toward enhancement of aesthetic effect, the more contrived and artificial nature of linear music, in contrast, can be distinctly observed and noted by the interested listener.

Reinvention

Tone and mood will not remain static in the rise and fall of things.

Integrity is continuity.

Stylized Points of View

Art presents perspective.

Whether visually, or through sound, movement, poetry or sculpture, representation of perception creates communication, and thereby emotional connotation, ideas, and perceptual feeling may be conveyed beyond the obstacles of distance and time.

Whether simple and direct or sophisticated and finely wrought, the value of experience is given new reality through shared personal expression.

Spirit II

These recordings represent sounds and patterns I hear in surrounding environments as accurately as I can delineate them.  

Between humorless mediocrity and mindless absurdity there are numberless variables, and outside either extreme may be found sincere gravity on the one hand with keen wit on the other.  Within the dynamic between the real and the spurious lies the balancing point of personal perception and artistic representation.

Completeness reveals itself in total effect, in art and in life.

Pareidolia

Giving significance to sounds is a function of emotion and intellect.

Experiencing aural imagery in the inner ear of imagination to complement the sights and sounds of the surroundings, I work to bring these peculiar impressions and perceptions into compositional and concrete forms.

Part, Whole, Monad

Every change effects every other change.

The totality is glimpsed, heard in fragments, felt within and without, rather than experienced directly.

If and When

Culture will not long conform to the expectations of those who attempt to manipulate it.

The myriad aspects of cultural relationships rise and fall according to the totality of their diverse natures, limiting possibilities of domination and control by virtue of impermanence and change.

Those who realize this act accordingly, in the arts and in every aspect of human endeavor.

Changing and Changeless

Consciousness is music, the vibration and pulse of being.

The river remains the same, being in a continuum of change.  This is life in the moment now through all times and places, at every age and in every direction, and it is so in the eye of imagination.

Now listen to the river, and hear it flow with the inner ear.

Clarity, Simplicity

Beyond interminable expression of inflamed passions, set expansion of consciousness to music-- that is to say, design sound works complementary to the opening of the mind, in harmony with the satori of spiritual, intellectual and aesthetic realization.

Everyone experiences various degrees of direct perception from time to time; those for whom it is a rare event sometimes err in believing it to be of a mystical nature.  It is no less an epiphany, even so, to set aside ego, symbol, perspective, emotion and world-view to gain wider, deeper, contemplative awareness with its associated insights.

The art of sound may indeed convey such engagement with life, as well as other concepts beyond those of emotional attachment and obsession.

Wind Through Clotheslines

Mundane views of music are self-perpetuating.  The art of sound may represent more, for example, than crude, naive emotions and transient attitudes.

Look up from the work of the day, drawn, not by a distraction, but by an irresistible perception.  It is an epiphany leading to a contemplative state of mind; some see it as awareness of the unity of self, soul, and reality.

To convey such experience through sound is to uplift and intensify meaning, consciousness, and being.

Seeing, Listening. Being, Patience.

Observe the unexpected.

Awareness of the emergence of patterns that develop at a distance from those deemed regular and constant demands foresight.  Discernment balances idea and action, envisioning possibilities in the progress of experience through sense perception, symbolic thinking, moral reason, and restraint.

Meaning must be made manifest within the artist to be revealed through the arts. Finding the unique within one's experiential setting, though arduous, opens the eye of imagination and the inner ear.

Insight is not effortless.

Fundamental Vision

Every composer's work is predicated upon choices.

One need not make extraordinary personal efforts to keep the words and work of, say, John Cage, alive.  Technology will serve that purpose.

But how does one keep ideas alive?

By giving them form.

Originative Will

The independence of the creative imagination in inviolable.

The artist experiences, perceives, apprehends, chooses, and expresses.

All else is secondary to expression and total effect.

Displacement, Transformation

The unconscious mind conveys perception, emotion, and idea in symbolic forms.

These are the impressions of dreams and heightened states of consciousness, and may be at times absurd, portentous, and uncanny.

Artists who seek meaning will experience and express it in their chosen milieus, as will those only capable of meaninglessness.

Echo and Illusion

Not all sensory perceptions have clarity; not all artistic expressions convey an apprehension of the real.

Delusions persist about the nature of reality long after formative memories are forgotten.  Not all meaning is derived from material experience; abstract values are not scientifically measurable and quantifiable, but such things as honor and mercy exist, are perceived, understood, and comprise knowledge of life.  As conveyed through the visual arts, for instance, or through writing and poetry, music, and dance, moral reason is elevated.

To seek and express the ineffable with probity and lucidity is both philosophical challenge and artistic obligation for those who envision the unity of all things.

Listening with Care-- Pop and Other II

Many enjoy being constantly surrounded with music.

Others-- including numerous listeners, musicians, composers-- prefer to listen on their own terms.

Those in the latter group focus on sound differently and approach music consciously, for their own reasons.  Some have personal and emotional viewpoints, or listen contemplatively; the creative musician will often have an analytic ear for technique and style, the theorist for effect and insight.

While virtually everyone listens from time to time just for fun, it is the way of the artist to hear possibilities, to think ahead, and to reach for unique moments of perception and perspective.

Hearing, Not Hearing

In activity, following the motion of events, take notice of the limitations of perception.

Boundaries to sensory awareness are not always related to issues of concentration and distraction.

Consider lack of will, failure of intent, the self-absorbed mind and unrestrained emotions that cloud consciousness, given the changing conditions and flux of being common within everyday reality.

Every creative endeavor, whether in living well or in artistic expression, demands conscious, individual choice.

Déjà entendu

As memory and experience reference sound events in the context of immediate perception, a sense of ambiguity may arise.

Anticipation is confounded as expectations are defied by combinations of sounds and tones that imply familiarity yet go unrecognized.  This state of mind and emotion, merging the known and the utterly strange, evokes an awareness of the uncanny.

Such phenomena may endure until a sound or musical piece is recognized, whether within moments or over the course of years, and additionally in the form of sounds once experienced that are never again heard in the same way.

Sonic Artifice

Brightness, shade, temperature, and other atmospheric conditions have their equivalents in sound.

Surfaces dappled with sunlight suggest different tones than those in bright light or deep shadow. Textures and colors bring to the mind and inner ear diverse auditory images, as do gestures and movements.  

Instrumentation and composition cannot replicate these perceptions with exactitude, but may imply the sounds of their reality.

Resurgam

Originality is an imposition of will athwart the mundane.

The artist is the individual who will not be subsumed into mediocrity and mere chaos.

Every stroke of pen or brush, every release of note and tone, sound and pattern, is an existential act.

Sounds of Future History

Listen forward.

Predictive analysis always suggests combinations of the real and the potential, out of the deepest possible past and through the broadest present awareness.

Listener and composer lift wind through reeds to the Anemoi, and upward to the spaces between the stars.

The Angel Passing Through

In the sudden silences, the inner ear acclimates to surroundings.

For listener and composer, this is simply the continuum of aural imagery and the moment now.

Aural and Sensory Clarity

In large measure, external motivation fuels attention, narrowing perception and focus to objects of immediate desire.

This concentration on the appetites, essentially limitless in nature, diminishes awareness, being, and meaning. A deficit of moral reason will not be replaced by the transient and temporal, nor will these supplant vision.

Begin by taking notice of the surroundings, giving consideration to those elements of the outer and inner worlds that are disregarded; as directly as possible, perceive without subjective distraction, and contemplate experience and atmosphere with the mind's eye and the inner ear.  See, hear, and listen in such ways as heighten awareness and consciousness across the sensory spectrum, refining and bringing lucidity to feeling and thought.

The way of the artist demands intention, force, and balance.

Shaping, Restraining, Releasing

Sound and vision cohere in art through systematic approaches.  Even so, spontaneity, improvisation, and experimentation are critical elements to original concepts.

The nature of atmospheric sound composition includes selective input, shading and juxtaposition of tones, and flexibility in ordering processes and arrangements; the extemporaneous and unexpected bring vivacity to these methods and applications.

Ultima Thule

The sounds of urban environments tend toward the metallic, electronic, strident, pale, and brightly reflective.  Street, shop window, old brick and new concrete, restaurant, business, hiss of elevators, radio night air traffic.

Suburbs bring voices, automobile society, games, radio and television, air conditioning thrum, floor plan, patio, murmuring landscapes constructed for pleasure and altered by weather conditions.

Rural sounds flow with wind, wood, water, and wildlife.  But there is asphalt, railroad, shopping center, institution, home and garden.  And, like the cities and their environs, the sounds of cultural order and disorder-- intellectual and emotional, physical and spiritual, social and personal.

But even yet there are sounds at a distance to all human contact, beyond society, media, and culture --unimagined geographies, uncanny and otherworldly.  The real challenge is to perceive, discover and bring these atmospheres into being.

Potential Musics

Everything related to aural perception may be considered music.

By engaging perception and approaching expectation in diverse ways, listening for pleasure--  and information-- expands and becomes more acute.  Imagine extravagantly; hear symphonic works and concertos developing through the composition of atmospheres.

Shifting Forms

Impressions of formlessness, though briefly perceived, reflect the intrinsic beauty of nature and the mind's eye of imagination.

Apply the concepts of art to sound constructions, and strictures are loosened; predictability is not as important as process and aesthetic effect.

Input, Output

Apply one set of ideas to another concept.  Sustain this pattern of thought and action.

Representations form according to a different order of thought, perception and meaning.

Art moves according to historical forces, but does not follow.

Appearance, Impression, Interpretation

Auditory sensations, with the responses of the mind and emotions, yield meanings.

Listener and composer realize, reflect, and transmit these meanings, in personal and cultural terms.

Contemplative Ear and Spirit

Move outside the current, rather than with or against it.

Music is considered mostly in terms of active listening, although some music is designed for passive awareness, as background music, or "aural wallpaper".

When neither perspective applies, both happen, by the composer's intent.  For the listener, this may bring about changes in perception, and consciousness, enhancing ways of listening and hearing.

Essential Order

Avoid the extraneous; if a sound does not contribute to the total effect of the work, eliminate it.

When a composer establishes limits, the tendency to be limited by ideas and events outside the composer's range of experience and influence can be mitigated.  This is of peculiar moment when assessing the considerable impact of a superabundance of information and continual technological progress on the development of a body of work.

Shock of the Real

Aesthetic richness is measured by simplicity as easily as extravagance.

In a state of lucidity one perceives directly, unfiltered and unadulterated by cognizance of self and culture.

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.