Distances, Temporal and Aural

Music is more than connectivity to varied emotional states.

Reflect upon how little is done to extend boundaries so narrowly defined.

Time Past, Now Future

View time, hear sound, as perceptual continuum.

This is presence of mind for the artist as composer: past and future surround a single moment, and there is no beginning, middle, or end.  The word "nonlinear" is weak, incomplete.

I call it real life, as experienced and expressed.

Ways of Being and Will to Create

The reality of nature neither speaks nor instructs; its lessons are learned by observation.

Human reality observes, conceives, expresses, and acts. Yet of both realities, only one is always true.

Picasso, Eliot, Warhol, Burroughs

The modern becomes the traditional, and tradition is reconsidered.

Think. Nothing exists without precedent and foundation. Only ignorance is unmoored and adrift.

Permanent Loss

Complacency is a prison.

To embrace innovation in technology without accepting innovation in cultural expression is a complete waste of potential, a contemptible surrender to profound and prolonged cultural stagnation.

What has vanished before reaching fruition can only be imagined; work that will never be brought into being because creative thinkers will refuse to participate in efforts deemed existentially worthless is unimaginable.

The Power

Universal condemnation of artist and intellectual portends evil.

There can be no doubt that suppression of speech, perspective, and artistic expression signals the worst sort of calamity, one that drives culture underground and into the wastes.

The artist and intellectual must defend themselves. No one else grasps the force of moral reason that is necessary to overcome the rage of the ignorant and benighted, for whom nothing is acceptable but the extinction of light.

Struggle

Culture must reach beyond contrived ignorance and brute materialism.

There is always a need for enlightened perspectives, even if they conflict with each other.

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.

Time Vanishing

Any extended observation of culture will witness the diminishing and extinction of certain shallow, once dominant, yet short-lived forces in society and the arts.

Unlike the personal effects of a deceased individual, the artifacts that remain have no connection, however brief or tenuous, to a past reality that is gone as surely as if it had never existed.

This is a defining principle of the arts: to lift perception, and thus experience, beyond the common currency of bombast and poorly engaged ideals, into a realization of abstract, permanent things.

Ahead, Beyond, and Alone

These sound works represent elevation.

Better to explore the silences with genuine curiosity than accept the mundane simply because it conforms to common ideas of being "impassioned".

Beam in the Eye of Imagination

The artist's fund of experience informs expression.

Yet, if all that enters within the perception of the artist is understood to be the appearance of reality, expression will reflect the underlying nature of reality, or else, illusion.

It is the difference between any individual's mastery of life and the "demands" of society and culture at any given time.

Past Shadows

There is no such thing as a tragedy with a happy ending.

Apologists for prolonged cultural and intellectual decline invariably claim the "necessity" of bellicose and "transgressive" reactions to fundamental expressions of human dignity. These arguments are not only absurd, but intentionally destructive.

The good is self-evident, its enemies easily distinguished from the merely ignorant by their slavish adherence to failed 19th Century ideologies, beginning with "scientific materialism" and extending throughout all the mindless drivel associated with it.

Art, Reality, History

The word "narrative" has come to mean any amalgam of lies and propaganda.

This changes nothing. Work, for its own sake, with or without acceptance or respect.

Perception and its Opposite

Light and sound elevate life.

Yet nothing can be done for those who refuse to see and hear, who call day, night, and night, day.

Arts and Sciences in Shadow

Consider the dearth of rational perspectives in contemporary expression.

It is common to see and hear works that express a kind of specious rebellion against a non-existent "oppressor", one generally conceived to represent a kind of traditional, often "religious" authority that seeks to crush some sort of vague "self-realization".  The truth is nothing so romantic.

In point of fact, the true evil is ignorance, and it is manifest as nothing more than a refusal to think, as opposed to acting without consideration for others, or for the consequences of cause and effect.

Philosophy of Composition II

Reason and honesty inform acts and expressions of permanent value.

The statement is a fundamental position, beyond technique and process.

Civilization, the Known, and the Unknown

The mere subjective moment is not enough.  In terms of elevated thought and being, it is nothing.

Aesthetic perception, the imaginative sense, reveals what ideology will not, that is to say, the ways of cultural, spiritual and intellectual vision are illuminated by art, not by temporal power.

This is the truth of the free world, and it is difficult to attain, essential to sustain, and at all times and by every means it must be defended.

Truth, Art, and Delusion

The value of art, and particularly that of the evolution of music into the art of sound, is in its power to illuminate, by logical extension, the future.

Current social conditions are always the results of causes and their effects, and to simply envision them clearly makes it possible, with courage, to avoid much that need not become problematic.

Whenever the human condition is held to be something it is not and never will be, paroxysms of hubris emboldened by ignorance follow. One cannot allow absurdity to go unchallenged without knowing what to expect.

Cross Talk

Clearly, perceptivity stands in opposition to nihilistic insensibility.

Yet the latter perspective always takes contemporary precedence by dint of incessant clamor, appeals to ignorance, and mob mentality. The sleep of reason yields monsters; their attempted expressions are nugatory, and absurd.

That which will be must conform to reality, and reality will not be coerced.  Contrived eccentricities create neither power nor individuality, and the quest to make them do so has rendered them common, pointless, vapid, and impotent.

Art Under The Boot

The presence of propaganda means one thing: the presence of chains.

In a totalitarian, politically correct culture, the artist must be self-reliant.  Or there will be no art.

See, Express, or Grasp Nothingness

Art collapses in the hands of the unfinished intellect, the ideologue, and the timid.

This is a failure of vision as well as intellect. A failure of recognizing the human condition, it is disabled further by a lack of critical foresight.  Yet it is sustained by the like-minded, until definitive revolt can no longer be restrained.

Divergence in Direction of Sound and Idea

Put plainly, music is one form of creativity involving sounds, and there are other forms that do not necessarily conform to the categories generally considered to encompass music.

Music is an art and a science. The creation and expression of aural imagery is a different kind of art, and a different application of science, one that analyzes environments for the purpose of replicating their varied atmospheric elements in stylized forms through processes of sound manipulation.

Art and Accord

Expression serves greater possibilities.

Things will not always be as they are. Change will come. Elevation inevitably parallels decline.

Consciousness is a rarity in the universe, and expression in every form speaks to its permanence.

Aesthetic Constructs

There are perspectives from which cultural expression is unnecessary.

This does not alter the fact that every human idea and action reflects a perspective upon reality, and that existence itself shapes that view into one form or another of expression and meaning.

Active Thought

Thinking ahead is essential to progress, and it is not difficult.

What is, in fact, nearly impossible is for a culture immured in material attachments to undo the belief that there is nothing more to live for than the present moment now, and thus recognize innumerable possibilities-- with the understanding that many of these are already within reach.

I see the experience of listening to sounds dancing in the air.

Loud, Bright, Fast, Inferior

Conditions that reduce art to spectacle are entirely artificial.

Such conditions follow a prolonged period of decline and apathy. The central focus of culture is no longer attached to spurious ideas and expressions.  Interest is lost, change is difficult to recognize.

But authentic art never varies or loses force, and draws change toward future reality.

Auditory Frame Theory

Sound is constant.  Perception is context.

The composer chooses a theoretical setting in which sounds are arrayed as they occur in perceptual consciousness and sets them in motion.  Patterns, therefore, are not established beforehand, but are the result of fluidity and juxtaposition as the work progresses. This is listening, and hearing, as it takes place outside the context of "music", its paradigms, and its arrangements.

Crossing

Culture provides context.

Nonetheless, the role of the artist is beyond that of validating or contradicting culture.  Let all those incapable of detachment do those things.

The point is devotion to the work, to the progression of ideas, and to the force of vision greater than the vanity of ego.  The finished works, with their impact in total effect, speak for themselves.

Question Motive

Some refer to "the broader culture" in terms of gaining acceptance. This is oversimplification.

Impulse to create reflects a sense of meaning and direction forward in experience. Nothing more.

Burning Drafts

In theory, aesthetic perception elevates experience.

That one may realize such elevation in experiential reality is fact, yet it is not effortless, requiring some critical thought with regard to multifarious ideas. and therefore it is the common experience of but few.

It is revealing how often those who lavish praise upon the "elite" athlete are quick to condemn the arduous efforts and work of the thinking individual, whether in the arts or other fields of endeavor.

Expression as Disputation

Consider the possibility of irreversible intellectual decline.

Contrast present cultural perspectives with objective experience.

Expression, Conscience, Permanence

Certain arts reflect nothing more than the transient character of culture.

Other, more noble arts, speak to the elevation of culture and the individual, together and separately.

Stand, Fall, Rise

Art will be, or it will not be; brazen attitude will not hide failure, nor timidity grasp success.

Cultures and societies may be oppressed, or coerced into self-censorship, but art obeys the law of the individual artist.

Expression, Impact, Integrity

Reality and the artist's imagination are the sources of art.  This is my judgement.  Others are free to deny it, whatever their inclination may be towards the subject.

I am the originator of the work, and the work is my responsibility.

These are things within my power, my knowledge and my control.  Among the things outside my power are the opinions of listeners, the intellectual and emotional projections they may place upon the works, and the manner in which the works are received generally. This is to say that I bring forth the works as they are, and that whatever they may become is out of my hands.

One may well assert that such points are given, and unnecessary; one will be reminded, however, that it is effortless indeed to call day, night, and night, day.

In point of fact, such is the nugatory perspective of the foolish and the intentionally false, those who would indiscriminately influence the easily led for their own ends.

And this, certainly, is not the way of art, but of something else entirely.

Choice, Pressure

There is subtlety of expression, contrasting spectacle, to be experienced.

But culture everywhere at all times falls short of the visions of art.  This is nothing new.  No culture is viewed by objective standards as thoroughly "enlightened", and it is for the wise artist to grasp that the mediocre is the regular fare, and mundane, whether in extravagant or casual forms. It is only over extended periods of time that cultures acclimate to forward-thinking and visionary expressions.

Undreaming

The modern artist cannot fall prey to complacency.

Art reflects and expresses the failures of human cultures as well as their aspirations.

Rates of Change

Create with the effects of change over time in mind.

When the original can no longer be recognized, the work is finished.

Now, apply this concept to that of "music".

Learn by Impression

Perceive clearly.

But this demands refined awareness of sensory information, directly experienced and unmodified by emotional bias.  In this way it becomes possible to listen, and hear, in ways that allow understanding of aesthetic sound composition that neither depend upon nor express musical paradigms.

Well Aware

What is imperceptible is not beyond reach.

Give attention to what merits it, remove the attention from the vast number of things that do not, and be attentive to whatever becomes apparent as a result.

Orientation and the Creative Act

Mundane cultural paradigm: one perspective contrasted by another in opposition.

Real forward-thinking leads to entirely unexpected, even unknown, directions in cultural evolution, most radically in the arts uniting sound and vision.

Promoveo, promovi, promotum.

Too Starved an Argument...

The appeal of many aspects of popular culture is the same as that of numerous political ideologies.

They generate attitudes among their adherents that negate the need for thought; they eliminate the necessity for questions; they substitute, in point of fact, for educated, even literate perspectives.

And the result is a ceaseless cycle of ignorance, contention, and a host of ills easily done away with by refusing to acknowledge and support atavistic totalitarianism masquerading under the elitist banners of "progress".

Open Question

One is not given to thinking in terms of "enlightened culture", yet it is never an impossibility.

Rather than making demands upon culture, many appear to be in the position of allowing culture to make demands upon them. This is an untenable position, and the results are everywhere apparent.