Stillness, Then Action

Change lingers in echoes.

To reflect is also to advance.

Walk / Don't Walk

For artist as composer, choice is change involving gain and loss.

Essentially, gain and loss cannot be issues:  each sound will exist in juxtapositions of similarity and contrast, and each note, tone, line, or movement will alter the listening experience.  The total effect, therefore, is the prime consideration, and all choices and changes must contribute to that outcome, much in the same way as do each of the painter's strokes on canvas.

After Cage

Action without effort is a little understood virtue.

It remains a rarity in the composition of sounds.  It creates neither a musical event nor a concrete presentation of art, but rather formless dimensions of aural perception intersecting being.

The Air of Creation

Art does not cease to exist because it ceases to be valued and supported.

Creative expression is a foundational element of culture and civilization.  It bridges past, present, and future time.  There have been periods, recorded throughout history, when the arts of certain societies were diminished, repressed, looted, and devalued.

Without exception, these serve as warnings.

Imaginative Probity, Elevation and Decline

Perspective, like the arts, both engages and endures cultural change.

The artist does not steal fire from the gods to see it snuffed out, whether by thieves or princes.

Event, Percipience

Listening to sounds in a setting, consider what happened before and what is to come.

To observe is to know circumstance, and what can and can not be understood, or imagined.

The manifestation of mystery begins before the artist appears and continues ever afterwards.

Force and Substance

In art, as in life, emptiness will be filled.

As the novelist and film-maker envision narratives, as the visual artist sees concepts, so does the composer hear what approaches and is revealed in the imagination.  The creative insight must be brought into being.

Mass Media and Mass Mind

The artist as composer directs perceptions beyond appearances of things.

Modernity asserts the virtue of autonomous perspective, but rarely is it developed.

As if everything is known. As if there can be no more curiosity, no more questions or mysteries.

Haunt and Habitat

Folklore suggests that every setting has a personality, or spirit.

It is a small step of the imagination to say the sound of that spirit is found in atmospheric tone of place, and that it can be impressed upon the composer to be conveyed to the listener.

Perceptual Impression and Meaning

The listening experience must be unburdened of preconceived judgments.

Rather than be led to conclusions, one may rely on awareness and insight to determine the value and aesthetic significance of artistic works.  This is the result of listening, and hearing, with the inner ear.

Discrete Transformations

As sound travels, its vibrations alter according to environmental variables.

The acoustic properties of various settings are more or less appropriate to what we know as music, which is meant to be experienced as directly as possible, whether as recordings or in performance.

What I am interested in creating are atmospheric sound designs intended to merge with environments and blend throughout them, thereby establishing aesthetically enlivened settings to be experienced in their entirety.

Abstract to Ethereal

The modern thinker engages historical concepts creatively, and with facility.

The contemporary, media-directed individual simply confuses emotion with thought, and, at worst, conflates ideology with intellect.

These musical works, from Elevation to Prescience, are conceived, produced, and brought into being with the purpose of creating atmospheres conducive to the virtues of contemplation and reflection. To view them as having effects of a mystical nature is akin to the belief, held in the Middle Ages, that the ability to read was a form of sorcery.

The Mysterious

Consciousness, perception, knowledge, culture.  All interwoven.

Things are as they are because events came to pass in certain ways.  Changes small and large led to the moment now.  What follows is not fully apparent, and cannot be predicted.

This is a formula for the creative composition of atmospheric music, if means are utilized to apply it.

If One, Then Another

Technological advancement implies perceptual change.

Beginning with the individual and personal, understanding may expand on a grand scale. Novel ideas, experiences, and intensity of communications undo limits on the imagination. Things previously known become starting points, rather than ends.

For the composer, these things suggest the exhaustion of cultural norms and the struggle for means of expression concomitant with a transformation in listening awareness.

Aural Presence

Consider entering into a musical atmosphere as a journey.

To associate sound solely with emotion and physical feeling is to lose cognizance of its spiritual qualities, those that illuminate and clarify perception, equanimity, and insight.

Between Artist and Listener

Artistic disciplines confront the gulf separating culture and the creative spirit.

Visual representations, words, and physical action narrow the distance between creator and percipient.

Still, no other medium has the reach or carries the impact of sound, and this becomes especially potent when combined with other media in the execution of difficult and nuanced communications.

Vanishing

Artless sounds form atmospheric environments.

The composer must remain invisible, yet do so through subtlety of method and technique.

Vision, Sound, Movement

To express the inexpressible.

There will always be the distance that exists between the real and those who view art as insignificant, without meaning or value.  But in the end, the artist has a single quest, goal and purpose.

Art and Influence

The composer must enliven, advance, and uplift the imagination.

Otherwise, the sound of reality reflects no more than the moment now in transit to obsolescence.

Elementary

Tones create simple metaphors.

Combined, tones expand, in the manner of ideas expanding into concepts.

Atmospheres illuminate settings; settings contribute to perspectives; aesthetic pleasure and communication between composer and listener grows deeper, wider, and more elevated, ultimately altering perception and refining the art of listening.

Horizon Sounds

Set value where vision presses forward; listen for the approach of the unexpected.

Accolades and opprobrium are indifferent things.  It is the art and the creative act that are essential.

Without these, there is only the dull path of the willfully ignorant, who hold that the objects of their attachment are of such eminence that they can never be surpassed.

Now Events, Now Relics

Every speculation about time future involves a perspective on time past.

This is a consideration of historical forces and their currency, or viability in the moment now, as applied to any cultural context-- science, politics, religion, the arts, and so on.

Rather than look ahead, creative interests insist I listen. What I hear are manifestations of clarity and chaos, as one might expect.  But the sources of each are peculiarly significant, in that disorder emanates from the trend towards exhaustion of the patterns and standards associated with "music", while clarity evolves out of a different perspective on the aesthetic quality, nature, and perception of sound itself, as associated with the historically modern avant-garde.

This sense of the evolving order of things is evinced in my methods and compositions, and thus some may illuminate and others obscure an ambivalence toward what is generally understood as music.

Tone of Being

Certainly it is understood that music does not imitate nature, but is based upon symbolic knowledge that is applied through learned behaviors in various forms and musical genres.

But I am interested in taking note of the perception of sounds as they occur in diverse settings, both natural and "man-made", and creating works that complement the ways one actually encounters and experiences sounds, that is to say, by hearing passively in ordinary circumstances, yet simultaneously being able to take time to listen actively and contemplatively to the unique character of atmospheric environments as well.

Coarsening

Noise, chaos, nonsense, and ignorance contribute to sensory failure.

To be conditioned to anticipate bombast and extravagance and melodrama is to lose perception of the subtle gesture, the minor alteration in tone, the modest change in nuance of atmosphere.

But perhaps that is the point.

Singular Atmospheric Perspectives

These compositions represent impressions of sounds realized in solitude.

Contemporary culture, as idealized by communications media, actively opposes such perspectives.

Portrayals of everyday life as a constant, interactive immersion in the lives of others are patently untenable and dehumanizing.  For reasons that are obviously commercial and political, people who conform to such thinking and create such conditions are easily led to dubious, even infantile, cultural fads and obsessions.

To pause and contemplate life with a moment's solitude is to resist the transparently false.  This, from my perspective, is a critical purpose of sound and vision.

Antipodes

The romantic desires and expresses.

The realist perceives, and, in expression, reflects.

Sound as Art

The visual arts convey idea and emotion through representations to the sense of sight.

Simply put, the composer does the same thing through sound, not by adhering to the principles of music as they are commonly understood, but through arrangement of sonic elements according to aesthetic variables.

It is a method primarily concerned with the perception of sounds according to any number of environmental or atmospheric perspectives that change with movement or the passage of temporal events.

While it is not reasonable for any artist to expect a landmark revolution in listening to take place in the public imagination, and particularly one that will make compositions of this nature accessible to a broad audience within the course of his or her lifetime, it is nonetheless essential to produce such works, and thus set the stage for their appreciation.

Journeys Near and Distant

Listeners recognize meaning.

The composer means to communicate, to convey expressions of experience.  Some will listen, and hear, and know, with the inner ear.

Life's Blood is Not Free

What is taken for nothing is worth just that: nothing.

It is the way of the artist to be responsible to one's work.  The alternative is to imagine life with no more art, with nothing left besides billions of "free" relics of a time when artists and musicians were treated like human beings.

Pop, Tone

Consider auditory imagery in terms of visual imagery.

There will be stylistic sonic repetition as long as it is tolerable, that is to say, as long as an audience exists for nostalgia, the veneration of things past their time.

These sounds may be regarded as fashionable forms, and the attitudes they represent will be repeated as patterns filling various contexts engraved in the popular imagination as musical genres.

From this perspective, of course, there is no comprehensible future-- such impossibly distant sounds can only be envisioned and created outside cultural and commercial norms.

Persuasion, Against Conformity

Art distorts with intent to clarify.

As music may be viewed as reflecting culture at large, sound environments mirror the culture of the listener for whom individual perspective is of primary importance.  This is a point of view unmoved by collective and populist influences, for both composer and listener.

Path and Power

Patterns occur spontaneously in the rise and fall of things as well as according to design.

Rather than follow the established patterns of music, create according to the unfolding of sounds as observed in the course of nature and human events.

Not to Follow

One listening to the common fare hears but a single gesture.

To simplify is not to denigrate; to represent facts clearly and authoritatively is not to engage in supercilious trivialities; to create is not to destroy, but to attend to the necessities of existential reality with the survivor's stark knowledge and wit.

Aural Continuum

Movement is constant and continually changing within atmospheres.

Atmospheres are in constant sonic flux as well, and auditory perception adapts with the subtleties of spatial orientation to various sounds.  Although sound compositions may exaggerate and reflect the sensual nature of such phenomena, technology does not, as yet, allow the composer to "place" diverse sounds in listening environments and manipulate them to the extent the imagination might suggest.

But imagination will make such developments possible.

Creative Environments

Purpose and expression are of equal moment.

The universal sounds of life contribute to cultural settings and perceptions.  For the composer, this means an aesthetic of impressions and atmospheric effects brought into being in accord with the phenomena of listening and hearing.  While such compositions are neither linear nor "musical" in the traditional sense, they are nonetheless executed according to the composer's authentic experience and the peculiar designs and methods that give them form.

Enigmatic Pursuit

New and unformed roots inevitably take hold.

When music and audience are altered irrevocably, pivotal changes transform expression of sound.

Preservation

The art of sound exists as a result of processes abstract and concrete.

Through immersion in aural imagery, listener and composer experience emotion, thought, and perception.

In the ebb and flow of cultural consciousness, cognizance of the depth of the past and the possibilities of futures to be may become lost in the mediocre and mundane. But the artist as composer refuses to enter shallow waters, and holds to those things untouched by time.

Generic Feeling

Music is often used to enhance emotional states, to minor effect.

Of greater significance is the potential of sound in sustaining contemplative perception.

Idea and Impact

The objective of a work of art is realization of expression.

Yet the aesthetic beauty of a work is also a goal, and not an afterthought.

Expansion and Opposition

Speculative sound composition establishes a mean and proposes extremes.

Sophistication, once gained, develops in the direction of simplicity. Out of simplicity, the creative synthesis moves toward complexity.  Juxtaposed, the extremes may come into balance, there to be sustained in a long-form work that challenges ideas of the "musical" and the "atmospheric".

Process and Progress

Technology provides exceptional creative opportunities.

For the artist, composer, and speculative thinker, coming to terms with the numerous technical aspects of media entails establishing limits as well as exceeding them, particularly when aspects of technology afford far more than is necessary to realize specific concepts and create desired effects.

The outcomes technology may produce must not come into being at the expense of imagination.

Attitude of Listening and Inquiry

The good and the beautiful are self-evident.

Music is recognized according to culturally defined terms, then personal experience engenders preferences, whether narrow and biased or broad and general.

The skeptical mind, capable of considering the traditional and historical with incisive acumen, rarely seeks to question the contemporary, whether its representations are abstruse or dull and mundane.

And thus the same patterns continue to repeat, until vision, listening, and being progress beyond what is merely given to be common understanding.

The artist cannot presume, but must take action.

Fulfilling Expectations

Generic music is easily identified.

The appeal of the various genres lies in predictability.

Since technology has rendered music a disposable commodity, there is nothing to be gained by satisfying the demands of an audience that has everything.

The composer, therefore, is motivated by art, perception, belief, and the aesthetic act.  Nothing more?

Nothing more.

Commission

The Black Mountain School project creates sound environments.

These sound environments are designed to complement diverse settings by replicating the paradigms of spontaneously occurring aural phenomena, both "natural" and "man-made".  As such, these works are not predicated upon concepts that are traditionally "musical", but rather upon the perceptual qualities of active listening and passive hearing.  Such perspectives are associated with apprehension of tones, patterns, and myriad variations of sonic impressions, some based upon aesthetic constructs of the visual arts.

Peculiar methods and techniques necessary to compose sonic atmospheres of this nature originate solely with the Black Mountain School project and continue to be developed in our studio.  While the listener may detect a host of artistic influences, these are unavoidably displaced in the course of the work by the intent and goals of the compositions and recordings.  In objective terms, the discriminating listener will find no other "experimental" or "mainstream" productions that are analogous to the work of Black Mountain School.

Were it otherwise the case, the project would have no purpose, and no raison d'être.

Vibration, Perception

Like words, sounds possess meanings.

Tones, in particular, convey qualities that impress themselves upon the senses.  These impressions evoke both personal and universal associations, thus cultural and individual responses vary from the predictable to the uniquely inspired.

There is no permanence.  The future establishes itself, whether in accord with mediocre expectations or in terms of sudden, unpredictable visions.

The Existential Reality

Either music must be, or it will not.

No reasons are needed, and no expectations are possible.

Sound as Mirror

As culture is reflected in the arts, so is consciousness.

Regard the contents and emotional conditioning of the mind in the context of social order and disorder.

Now listen-- give attention to the various surroundings in which one finds oneself.

The artist and composer have singular and personal visions that are not always congruent with the public imagination, and for this fact, given the perceptions and attitudes that dominate the ubiquitous media and the commercial marketplace, one might well be grateful.

Shapes of Reality

Imagination conceives representations of the real and the unreal.

Given form in artistic media, these sights and sounds define, and at times determine, frames of reference regarding life and its myriad possibilities in cultural terms of greater-- and lesser-- value to others.

There is nothing interesting about the absurd, the repulsive, and the excessive.  I am interested in bringing into being works of atmosphere and aural imagery that illuminate reality, with all its danger, risk, fear, hope and beauty, according to perspectives that open the mind and spirit through the gates of the inner ear.

Creative Impulse

Nothing is conceived of nothing.

Reality, culture and the evidence of the senses provide the raw materials necessary to engage and come to terms with life's mystery.  Grasped, manipulated, and combined, they emerge out of consciousness in new forms to the extent the mind and imagination allow.  This is the synthesis of idea and vision out of which emerges expression of every type, whether in the arts or the sciences.

All else is simply information, leading to nothing, in and of itself.  And nothing happens without imagination, inventiveness, innovation, and individuality.

Setting and Soul

Arrive at the understanding of balance.

Equilibrium and moderation clear the mind, enhance emotional well-being, and elevate the spirit. This sense of symmetry will be reflected in artistic representations that convey clarity of perception as well as aesthetic principles that lend completeness to the work, whether it be a visual or musical piece.