Sound, Sense, and Psyche

The same songs, again and again. Saturation and predictability numb and stultify. Experience is dimmed in dull, thoughtless fogs.

The world around echoes with stunning potential and blinding beauty, nonetheless.  The way of the artist is to envision with clarity, to listen and hear the flux and stream of being, and to express the ineffable while the future follows.

Like Rain to Dusty Lands

A moment's pause, to engage perceptive feeling.

Envision the sounds of the sublime and assemble them according to their natures.  Follow their patterns, pursue them in their improbable symmetry and anomalous, yet ordered, forms, until it becomes impossible not to listen and hear their illumination of the senses, and the spirit.

To Walk Through Walls

Approach creativity dispassionately, without bias and self-interest.

This is constancy in motivation and outcomes, effortless application of power, and restraint yielding elegance and grace.  

Sounds of Place and Perspective

Musical designs evocative of auditory imagery as it is perceived to emerge and evolve in the natural course of everyday activities need not be any less interesting than those that bring to mind particular experiences in the imagination of the listener or composer.

Previous Black Mountain School recordings, inspired by particular times and places, suggest the end of summer (Phenomena), the atmospheric settings of urban and rural China (Night Traffic and The Celestial Way), and perspectives altered by technological and transcendental viewpoints (Delmarva and Elevation, respectively).

The next album, Environs I, is the first of a series composed in a manner complementary to the previous extended ambient pieces without reference to specific settings and events. Thus, as far as possible, these works may enhance the environment and imagination of the listener directly. 

Tone Poems, Ambient Atmospheres

In the course of history, when empires collapse and are lost to memory, their ruins are many times believed to have been the work of giants.  This photo, taken in the Central Bohemia region of the Czech Republic, suggests such a scenario in an abandoned construction left behind with the fall of the Soviet Union.

It also provides the inspiration for a work of atmospheric music currently being developed by the Black Mountain School project, in keeping with the sound and content of the previous albums.

The content of the classical tone poem is designed conceptually and musically to suggest such ideas and events, and to encourage the listener to imagine them.  Among numerous examples are Debussy's La Mer, Finlandia by Sibelius, and An American In Paris by Gershwin.

Clearly, electronic ambient music lends itself to similar, if modest and minimalistic, applications.

Territories of Sound

Varieties of experience are associated with sound-- musical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual come to mind first.

For many with open, perceptually engaged and contemplative natures, atmospheric aspects of sound heighten or intensify these experiences. Unlike predictable elements of rhythm and melody, however, they are not generally the fundamental components of musical compositions.

The composer and listener are linked in the same explorations, searching beyond the given and the obvious for the uncanny, the extraordinary and the elevated.

Sound Merging with Light and Image

All the arts intersect in countless ways.  While music is most often created according to traditional theories, it may also be based upon any number of artistic ideas and philosophies.

Today's image has been selected by Brian Eno and his team as one of the featured images on the LUX - Day Of Light website. It will appear on the large main photo display and within the live streamed video on http://lux.brian-eno.net .  It also lives within the 'View Submissions' tab, complete with a special red dot to signify that it was featured.

Please spread the word:  http://lux.brian-eno.net

Changing Recognition

The material and physical in nature are impermanent, undergoing constant transformation.

Recorded compositions that are designed to evolve gradually around the listener reflect this reality.   As in the case described by the aphorism that says it is impossible to cross the same river twice, because the river and person crossing it are different, the attention one gives such musical works varies and is modified with each listening.

In becoming acclimated to aural atmospheres of this type, the listener may gain diverse perspectives on music and sounds. Old biases may be set aside, altering approaches to listening and hearing.

Shift Perspectives, Devise Doorways

Simply postulate music as combined sounds that emphasize elements other than those of rhythm, percussion, melody, harmony and the standard arrangements of genre fare, and approach it in the manner of mixed media art.

In concept and execution, set aside the sour, narrow pretensions of the amateur, striving instead for the beautiful and elevated, focusing on aesthetic arrangement of tones, textures, colors and shading, form, space, depth and total effect.

Listen.  Hear.  Allow the atmosphere to become what it is; without interference, bring it into being.

Combinations, Effects, Outcomes

Experimentation is a matter of process.

In the arts, when experimentation leads to desired effects, progress is made in the development of methods; when these methods result in works that meet the criteria upon which they are conceived, and, when evaluated, they meet aesthetic standards of completeness, the works are no longer to be considered experimental.  They are then, in the sense of reaching successful conclusions, finished, and the ways and means of their design and construction may continue to be refined.

From concept to conclusion such processes involve risks and obstacles, and may take many years. But this is the way of the artist in the pursuit of bringing visions and expressions into being.

Inner Echoes

Sound is by nature intimate.

Sounds are internalized; their embrace is emotional, spiritual, cerebral and physical.  Their imprint is felt in character and attitude, and in the aesthetic and moral senses as well.  Combinations of sounds and their manner of presentation engender feelings and states of mind with lasting effects.

Such are the impressions the composer offers the listener.

Stir of Impressions

The artist perceives, and expresses.

All the senses interact with the reasoning, emotional and spiritual faculties to weave the threads of personal experience.  Drawn together and given form in sound, these threads convey the realities glimpsed by the composer through musical images and aural gestures.

To listen in accordance is to hear the impress of being and meaning.

Spirits of Place

All settings possess distinctive properties suggestive of their counterparts in sound.

Every atmosphere exhibits dynamic possibilities, whether they may be expressed with the intensity of thunderclaps or the subtlety of gradually fading voices.  Accordingly, through aesthetic choices involving selections of tones, forms, patterns, and manners of combining and manipulating diverse elements, the composer releases these lyric qualities of locality and perceptual narrative.

Waking Moments

Perception, memory, and knowledge inform experience.

Consciousness may be engaged subjectively, and may transcend subjectivity as well.  Thought and perception move between these states of awareness in apprehending reality.

The ear perceives specific sounds in the context of others that evoke ideas or emotions in the listener of which the composer cannot be aware.  Nonetheless, the tone, mood and atmosphere of ambient musical works are designed to enhance the conditions for such contemplative listening experiences.

Choice, Context, Sensibilities

Without reasoned and desirable limits, meaning is obscured, then extinguished by the absurd.

The space between one extreme and the next appears empty; close attention dissipates, drawn only to the excessive.  Depth of feeling is not called upon, and critical discernment declines.  If noise does not dominate experience there is apparent silence.  Yet the mind passively demands to be filled.

Art is not intended to serve as a replacement for moral reason and spiritual emptiness.  Still, art can, and often does, offer perspectives in sharp contrast to those that are culturally stagnant, banal and enervating.  And while such artistic works may be delineated within limits emphasizing subtlety and grace of expression, for example, they are by no means intellectually and existentially confining.

Mind, Symbol, Sound

Reason suggests; imagery portrays.

Depict perceptual experiences of settings and events through sound designs that evoke sensory impressions.

With elements of tone and pattern and color, explore the range of the real, as do the painter and poet.

Multiplicity and Unity

Absorb the sounds of the surroundings.

Taking care to listen, becoming engaged in hearing, and giving attention to the near and distant, the observer gains increasing awareness of the completeness of aural atmospheres.

Seek this completeness in listening; in composing, bring all the elements and variations to this fullness.

Painted Air

The composer sets vibrations in motion, to emerge and evolve as visions.

Sounds, patterns, and tones combine, bringing aural imagery into being in the physical environment and the inner world of the listener. 

Awareness and Obstruction

The ambient music listener often senses increasing acuteness of aural perception.

Prolonged exposure to noise and distraction dulls the senses, and it is easy to lose sight of the fact that such conditions, universal though they may seem, are, in fact, unnatural, even debilitating.

Consider the capacities of ancient peoples for distinguishing the qualities of environmental sounds and recognizing their implications.  Such refinement of perception and reasoning is not lost in the modern world, but certainly clarity of this nature declines, if neglected, in the general noise and rush of everyday events.

My own interests lie in the composition and production of ambient atmospheres that contribute to enhanced penetration of thought while appealing to the listener's depth of feeling and aesthetic sensibilities.  

Variation, Transformation

In the creation of the electronic tone poem and transformation ambient work, the goals are balance and aesthetic beauty; the means to the these ends are continuous processes of experimentation, improvisation and revision.

By these means structure gradually forms.  Thematic elements undergo permutations as they rise, fall, and return, juxtaposed with changing tones, patterns, clusters, and densities of sound.

While reference to the symphonic tone poem is a matter of convenience, it nonetheless reflects the roots of electronic and minimalistic music, in that these forms are evocative of atmospheres, ideas, moods, events, and other non-musical sources of inspiration.

These compositions bring into being the ways I perceive the simple, complex, and, at times, uncanny experience of the sounds of modern life.