Beyond Boundaries

Aesthetic action defines art; culture and institutions absorb and expand its impact, yet ofttimes reduce its clarity and potency.

For the artist or composer, the exigencies of vision and creation call upon some resources found within the scope of social and academic order, but others-- elevation of reason, self-discipline, curiosity, erudition and experience, as examples-- must be sought within, and outside common ground.

Style may be imitated, and beautifully so-- but art cannot be.

Sound, Passion, Perception

Subjective emotion is of paramount importance in most musical pieces, from simple pop songs to elaborate symphonic works.  Listeners are to some extent conditioned to expect deeply personal, highly emotional expression in music across all genres.  But there are distinct differences between artistic works focused upon the vicissitudes of emotion and those manifesting clarity, perceptivity and constancy of vision.

As singular auditory impressions, or infinite combinations thereof, may evoke various sensory images and perceptions rather than subjective emotions in a listener, so may a composer create in accord with principles of emotional reserve and restraint to bring about these impressions. 

Simultaneously sensual and detached, such works offer aesthetically pleasing musical diversions for listeners of balanced and temperate sensibilities, and for those who enjoy a respite from music filled with overwrought passion and mundane melodrama as well.

Drawn From Life

A landscape, a walk through a town or drive through the mountains, an hour spent in an outdoor cafe, or groups of photographs like those presented here, with the memories they evoke and the sounds they recall or suggest, become the composer's art. 

Perceptions associated with such experiences as these are the source materials for the sketches and transformational ambient music of Black Mountain School, reflecting these electronic works' similarities with tone poems and other programmatic music forms that represent non-musical ideas, incidents, environments, and so forth. 

This is in keeping with the stylistic elements of the sound designs as well, as they are focused substantially on aspects of pattern and texture as opposed to rhythm, percussion, and melody.

Together, the ideas behind these works and the ways and means of producing them lend themselves to a total effect intended to stimulate and liberate the thoughts and perceptions of the listener, rather than to merely convey the emotions of the composer.

Asymmetrical Rebellion in Music

Ordinary experience overlooks much that is marvelous, the perceptions obscured by habit and the expectations clouded by commonplace hyperbole.

It is and was ever thus that the clamorous and hysterical extinguish the understated and refined, but only insofar as one surrenders to the former and fails to give consideration to the latter. 

It is not enough to simply take a position in opposition to the musically trivial and mundane.  The composer must listen, envision, bring forth and make possible a dynamic presence in sound that moves transcendentally beyond the probable and expected, and makes perceptible the uncanny.

Intricate Simplicity

Artistic expression represents impressions of the imagination.

Direct and contemplative experience may be seen, in artistic terms, as the observation of perceptions-- subtleties of  shade and color, for example, or the patterns of particular sounds, with their qualities of tone and texture-- for their aesthetic interest. 

Such observations are by nature subjective, as reflected in the artist's works, yet the extent of that subjectivity will often depend upon what is most important to the creator, and whether it be art or ego.

Phantom Cities

There is an understandable tendency to ascribe ethereal, otherworldly atmospheric sounds and strangely serene conditions to exotic climes and distant pastoral or desert landscapes.

This predisposition, perhaps, makes the sudden silences that seem to descend within the urban environments, and the sensory adjustment as hearing acclimates to the aural subtleties of these surroundings, all the more eerie and striking.

In the role of composer I listen to all settings and regard them in rational, emotional, and imaginative ways.  I seek a direct and contemplative perception of reality, whether at home, at work, or traveling, and, when composing and recording, refine to the fullest extent possible methods and means to express experience as it presents itself to me.

Extramundane Intimations

Constructs of imagination may be brought into being through sound imagery.

Consider an approach to worlds outside waking or physical experience by way of music.  Give regard to the dreaming senses, disembodied, observing appearances of things unreal to material existence, and, all the while, listening.

Atmospheric Forms

Sound environments encountered most often characteristically merge natural and human elements.

Artistic creations reflecting the qualities of these environments share fundamental aspects in common with numerous and diverse means and methods of expression.

Fabrics are woven, dyed, cut, shaped and sewn together; colors are combined on the palette to form new shades and tints. Words are chosen for subtlety of meaning in organizing communications, prose, and poetry.  Movement with gesture conveys emotion and intensity in dance, while motion with focus and applied force embodies the discipline of the martial arts.  Musical stylings are combined in creative ways to bring the most appealing rhythms, melodies, and harmonies to life in the various music genres.

Atmospheric sound designs reflect selective combinations of aural tones and textures in compositions that lend a sense of beauty and interest to the human environment and make possible a contemplative mood within the listener.

Design, Ambiguity and Awareness

Music in memory is auditory imagery, a form or pattern of thought.

Consider being unable to access recorded music for an extended period of time-- or actually choosing not to do so-- and the possibility of a resulting change in perception of sound, auditory memory, and consciousness itself. 

Numerous implications come to mind in regard to such a situation, with respect to clarity of thought, accuracy of memory, capacity to listen with various degrees of attention, and changes in point of view or other conditions of the psyche.

Postulate, then, music composed to reflect the perceptions of sounds as they are encountered in journeys through myriad surroundings.  Such music is not meant to represent the environmental sounds themselves, but to allude to the ways in which they are apprehended as they occur naturally, through both active listening and passive, or less intense, hearing.

Transformation ambient music designed in this manner neither dominates consciousness nor leaves the listener to later experience the sensory illusion of involuntary audio imagery.  Rather, it enhances atmospheres, stimulates perception and the imagination, and elevates the listening experience itself.

Essence and Artifice

The real and substantial change and gain force over time, while false clamors forfeit their sting. 

Everywhere the same artistic elements, fashions, and habits are preserved without growth and development, that is, without any attempt at originality or critical and constructive interpretation, the forms they represent lose force and influence, whether through repetition or reversal. 

It is when the arts, grounded in potent tradition, expand beyond their boundaries and move in unforeseen directions that the future arrives in mere moments.

Distances

Time and place, viewed from historical perspective, yield artifacts that illuminate culture, and among these are arts, ideas, and sounds.

Common objects become brightened or burdened by meaning.  Some knowledge, clear and detailed, contrasts in other cases with a void of information about which there can only be speculation. 

Yet the arts speak, written words resonate, sounds make their presence fully known.  In contemplating these, their pneuma, that is to say, their breath or spirit, is revealed.

Within the spirit of such sounds and visions lie any number of possible futures, and all their implications for the living.

Environment and the Inner Life

Observe surroundings, circumstances, and settings; consider these external conditions of the psyche, environments of existential moment to range of perception, emotion, the intellect and consciousness.

Mind, meaning, awareness and knowledge evolve in subtle ways within parameters of perceived reality and perpetual change.  The composer contemplates these processes and the sounds that thereby suggest themselves, selectively combining them in textures and patterns complementary to the inner and outer worlds of experience.

Through atmospheric music of this nature, sensibility and sound converge with time and place.

Music for Dream States

In periods of altered consciousness prior to sleeping and waking, sensory perceptions offer up curious sights and sounds that sometimes resonate in memory and imagination.

The closest analogy I am able to make to these auditory sensations is one of hearing a piece of music at some distance and being unable to recognize it.  After failing to identify the work for a noticable length of time and listening intently and analytically, it suddenly-- instantaneously--becomes absurdly familiar, as fixed in the mind as the alphabet or the primary colors.

Before that recognition, detached from previous experience, emotion, and intuitive grasp, the sound might be described as otherworldly, strange, and fraught with mysterious beauty and potency.  It exists outside the common ground of rhythm and melody; it has no reality outside itself, and unfolds as if bathed in mystic effulgence until it is struck down by the shock of mundane awarenss.

Transformation ambient music-- its appellation indicating direct input of the composer-- is designed and produced in long forms and shorter sketches with the intent of capturing and sustaining that dreamy, detatched and transcendent presence of the imaginary.

Motion, Action, Conception

In combination and interpenetration of aural, verbal, and visual images, worlds are discovered.

Impulse, intuition, impression, idea, emotion, sensation, expression, representation, existence.

Through the workings of imagination, poets, painters, and composers who reveal these worlds differ only in the materials they choose to express their visions.

Art and Essence

Listen, and a multiplicity of subtle relations emerges. 

These aural images combine in ways that are not typically recognized as musical.  Cultural prejudices and predispositions are obstacles to such a realization.

Remove them.

Atmosphere, Sound, and Signature

Inescapably, art reflects the psyche of the artist and the times in which it is made.

The sounds of this day can be any number of things in any set or series of combinations, and the previous century's ideas regarding order and chaos must be viewed in terms of a striking increase in information technology, creative applications, and concomitant changes in ideas regarding both excellence and absurdity.  Nevertheless, it is a combination of personal vision and cultural forces at play in the realization of a work of artistic merit.

In an age of intellectual wealth, it is possible to associate and unite a wide range of diverse elements and develop unique approaches to issues of method and style in creative endeavors.  These are the possibilities that give the future immediacy and presence.

Illuminated Sensations

Consider the myriad impressions and connotations of tone in any form-- tone of voice, of literature, of a painting or in sounds-- and it is clear that these evoke ideas as well as emotions. 

Color and imagery, the picturesque and elevated, the musical and mystical and intimate, shaped through sensitivity to sounds and dynamic intensities, warm and cold, sharp and misty, deep, forbidding, cheerful, soft pastel and fiery bright, all in admixtures of the numinous and earthy, convey mood and suggest connections of thought in every imaginable nuance of expresssion.

Sound Poems

The concept of sound as art has few limits, yet it is so broad as to be essentially indefinable.

In musical terms, there are numerous variations between styles and genres and starkly evident differences between music and noise.   Fundamentally, however, most listeners will easily identify elements of rhythm and percussion, melody, harmony, lead instrument lines and repeated phrases as musical.

Compositions emphasizing various degrees of formlessness, unpredictable patterns, instrumental colors and shadings, diversity of textures, and collage effects in place of the aforementioned elements are also possessed of beauty and charm to listeners, particularly in ambient modes, while they do not conform to traditional ideas associated with the experience of music.

In literature, the characteristic distinctions between prose and poetry are clear; with music, perhaps a similar differentiation will be made, in time, to contrast traditional musical forms with those designed to be appreciated and enjoyed according to other paradigms.

MInd, the Senses, and Antiquity

The deeper the historical perspective, the fuller the understanding of originality.

Observe, and it becomes possible to hear; listen, and it becomes impossible not to see.

Pythian Impulse

A vision emerges in the imagination.  Perhaps it is directly inspired by perception and experience, or vaguely, out of a dreamlike scattering of sounds and other images in the unconscious mind.

At the center of this oracle is meaning.  It communicates and is conveyed through analogy, contrast, comparison, and inference; it is made manifest and realized through instinct and intellect, idea, emotion, and will.

To grasp the intangible, however briefly, is to see and hear and feel the motion of the soul.