Strange Tales

There are those who suggest self-expression is not a "right" and should be "controlled".

In one direction, horses are hauling manure; in the other, they are being bred for war.

Order and Flux

Observe the elimination of culture, and its replacement with ideologies.

Certainly this is never desirable, yet it is nonetheless within the rise and fall, the ebb and flow, as it were, of all things.

Patience, Repetition, Discovery, Sound

Perspective alters aesthetic.

Aesthetic alters perspective.  But the final understanding is personal.  Listen, and hear.

Foreseen, Unexpected

Engagement with change reveals innumerable potentials.

Therein lie choices, amid the impossibilities.

Unspeakable

The most direct expression often results from wide-ranging, complex and subtle understanding.

But there is a progressive globalist agenda everywhere in effect, most transparently in academics and the media, that obviates cultural expression which does not serve its purposes.

Thus the apparent void from which the arts have been excised.

Force Majeure

Necessity illuminates objective facts that will not be subsumed under ideology or narrative.

Reality, rightly understood, yields to both reason and the imagination, to the sciences and the arts.

History and Impulse

Improvisation, atonality, minimalism.

These are means to creative perspectives, nothing more.  Audience and composer have perspectives of their own.  Other forces are in motion.

Conditions

Culture, character, and temperament impact artistic works.

This extends to audience expectations as well. The extent to which the artist allows these various pressures to be exerted upon the work is not always a matter of conscious choice, but it can be.

This is not to say that everything can be reduced to a matter of individuality, originality, and the ability to discern nuanced expression, but these are no less qualities of authentic significance, and as such they are not to be merely cast aside in the name of conformity to the social and cultural trends of the moment.

Duration

Immersed in cultural settings, many, including large populations, refuse to reason altogether.

The impermanent contemporary norms are neither questioned nor challenged; the sole real need of one and all so subjected is to conform.  In such a benighted state one cannot even comprehend the previous sentence, and the very idea of becoming engaged by an authentic experience of art or the critical perception of challenging music is ludicrous.

The artist who is not cognizant of these facts is doing no more than wasting time.

Only the individual is capable of realizing the gravity of the situation through objective observation, and only then is it possible to take the difficult steps necessary to remove oneself from these chains.

Craft, and Drive

Perspectives are innumerable.

Every point of view is, to some extent, flawed.  This is, regardless, the value of objectivity, and also of imperfection.

Clear

Complicate or simplify art, to any purpose whatsoever.

In either case art remains unchanged.  Perspective alone is altered.

Interest, Apathy, Darkness, and Light

This is an era of prolonged cultural void, lacking in intellectual and artistic vision.

The virtue of the empty vessel is that it may be filled.

Exercise II

Find patterns, tones, colors and dynamic forms in apparently unconnected events.

Translate these into representative artistic expressions utilizing sounds or the artist's palette.

Phantom Time

Give regard to arts unbound by time and place.

These are universal visions and sounds. When these are altogether absent from contemporary culture, there is only trouble, dissolution, and waste.  But one sees, one continues forward.

Curious, If True II

"So lacking in moral reason are they, that art is mere decoration and nature offers nothing more than occasions for self-indulgence."

Certainly no one would desire to agree with such an assessment.  Observation, nonetheless, lends difficulty to the act of devising argument to the contrary.

Dispatch from Afar

Where there is subtlety, transfix the attention.

What remains of the idea of the sublime depends upon such awareness, lifted by imagination.

Aesthetic Perspective

Art is not life, but life engaged with art sustains strength and resilience of attitude.

Art, and most certainly, to my mind, the art of sound, elevates awareness. It ultimately intensifies perception, reinforces critical reason, and reveals the reality behind the appearances of things that offers insights into the human condition.

Art spurs creative consciousness, and suggests the ways and means by which one may move beyond the shallow and mundane spectacle that falsely represents what life has to offer. This brings about a state of being capable of grasping what is, one that makes it possible to bring about what can be.

Survivals

It has become necessary to think beyond present-day experience in every cultural context.

At issue is the suppression of free expression and individual effort, and the dawning idea that the multicultural climate is being used as a tool to eliminate the existence of any common culture in order to consolidate ideological control of social and economic systems. It is against any and all such abominable developments that one has a duty to rebel, first as a free human being, and beyond this responsibility as any sort of visionary artist.

Transformation

Consciousness, perception, thought, action.

Give form to thought, shape to significance, sense to sound.

Exercise I

Visualize sound.

Reverse the process, by combining sounds suggestive of the visual.

Note: abstract, static visuals suggest sonic possibilities that may differ from direct perception of environmental atmospheres. This reflects the sensibilities of any artist, to one degree or another.