Vibrations and Consciousness

Music is more than sound patterns, narratives in song, inducement to dance or even artistic expression.

There are those who deny music produces effects on temperament and attitude and so forth, but one obviously hears, sees, and experiences these effects.  Various kinds of music, from the subtle to the bombastic, create impressions within environments, and may give the surroundings a particular emotional and aesthetic appeal.  Just as the listener desires to hear certain music, the musician desires to create it, and sound is associated with sensibility.

Permutations of Sound and Listening

Waterfall, highway, morning in distant foothills, avenues in Krakow, Shanghai, San Diego; fishing pier, railroad crossing, theater lobby, campus, grocery store, low country farmer's fields.

Combine these sounds, tones, and their associated patterns into events, aural metaphors, and reflections; they generate a dynamic and series of movements that coalesce, unfold, disperse and return. 

These represent nuances of human movements and perceptions of environments, a kind of musical journey within a psychic field. 

I think of Futurist music as a kind of "transformation ambient" or  "sketch" sound art, designed with these general fundamentals in mind, with the intent of reaching the listener's unconscious and natural awareness.  This is why the typical elements of beat, rhythm, melody and so forth are not apparent, or left undeveloped, in these long-form musical pieces.

Observer and Observed

So much forgotten in the next moment's breath.

Hold on to scraps of phrases, mental photographs, moving pictures of the imagination.  What do they say about you, about me?

Half-formed thoughts, held or let go in the passing of green fields, power lines, graveyards, accidents, laughter and radio talk.

What we have and know, and what we deny ourselves, rests with us alone.

Creation

What is magic?

Whatever begins in solitude.

The babble of the street and the rambling of mixed media recedes to silence and the doors of a wider world seem to be ajar. 

What did Plato know of shadows on cave walls in comparison to "virtual reality"?

Archetypes

The pace of life is often subjective.  The absence of what is called "excitement" need not mean "boredom".

Consciousness rooted deep in history is different from consciousness rooted in "the now". 

It is the difference between living in the universe and living only in a narrowly limited environment.

Patterns

Think of dreams, and the attendant sensory perceptions so far removed from reality.

Time and space, both distorted in such ways as to be meaningless, are inconsequential to the dreamer.

And what of music, of the sound of dreams? 

Absence of Light

With a decline in reason and free will, the spiritual faculties become hopelessly dull.  Conscience, and with it the soul, or the center of our being, becomes lost to our experience of life.

One cannot say it has died, this conscience or moral sense, or if, in some people, it ever exists at all.  Empirically, one might dispute its very reality, but, ineffable though it may be, one knows one's own.  It is a quality of character that can be recognized in others, as can its absence.

Still, when the senses are continually overstimulated by impressions both real and artificial, directly and indirectly, the end result is a kind of suspension of connectedness, a diminution of awareness.

Night Side of Nature

Ask if it is possible to believe in the existence of ghosts, even now, in the twenty-first century.

Ask, on the other hand, if the quality of our lives renders our awareness of such problematic things as wandering spirits possible.

If the natural world escapes our notice, the phases of the moon, the turning of the tides, the subtle dynamics of the progress of the seasons, such that most of our perceptions are attuned to artificial environments and representations of "reality", how likely is it that anything other than the mundane to which we are acclimated can even capture our attention?

Noise, blinding brightness and frenetic activity being the norm, who can see into the quiet, still shadows?

Shape-Shifting

There is always a distance between art and audience.

It is sometimes necessary to extend one's perspective beyond the limits of ones experience altogether and perceive from such an unexpected point of view.

In the deck of the Tarot, the card of The Hanged Man.

Choice

Life filled with mysteries.

No easy answers.

Many questions, many based on wrong ideas, beliefs or information.

Bad premises.

Many situations provide few opportunities for freedom to act with integrity and dignity.  One's only recourse is to extricate oneself in the due course of things.  If we cannot be free, we can at least act wisely and rightly.

Walk Through Walls

Unformed ideas flash momentarily and leave a long after-image.  A school room, a schoolhouse hall.  But there are unspoken ideas, fully formed yet buried beneath emotion and confusion.

Five years, ten years-- these are not lifetimes.  Live with intensity but the facts do not change.  Anything and nothing happens, as days are measured out.  Some live for attachments that will not be, grasp at pleasure, pain, joy, anger, resentments, truths, lies-- real or imagined-- as if these phantoms exist perpetually.

There are times when the only reasonable and appropriate act is condemnation of ignorance, apathy, imitation and self-indulgence.  People who have nothing, as well (and as likely) as those of material wealth, will choose to remain in darkness, as is their right.  The former will do everything possible to appear to be the latter, but it is an intolerable spectacle.

Lao Tsu, it is said, disappeared into mountain mists.

And Thus We Sleep

Fragmentary nature of perceptions.

Consciousness of heat, cold, scent, sound, emotion, idea, impulse, color, light, texture, mortal limits of time and space.  Sounds of wind in the trees: yours, mine, ours, belonging to none.  Passing thought, offered prayer, creative act. 

The idea, the fact, that some never transcend the narrow limits of self, or complete subjectivity, astonishes, and yet is prevalent.

Reuters News Service:  ...both survivors report the assailant said he meant to kill them because they appeared to be happy people, and there was "no room for happiness in his world".

Phantoms of the Living

In the world of ghosts, we never understand our true motivations, act only on the impulse of passion and selfish desire, and, ultimately, behave as though we are alone, not knowing we are dead.

We interact with others as though they are who we want them to be, never knowing who they really are, because we cannot know ourselves.  We exist in a netherworld of images and ideas that our failures of perception and understanding create for us.

Such a shift in individual and cultural consciousness, while readily apparent, appears to go unnoticed.  We do not speak of such things.

Invest meaning in words that are not understood.  Create, and haunt, an empty prison. 

Cast a Cold Eye

If everyone is an artist, only the exceptional and the very strange leave an impression.

Culturally, an intellectual fascination with the idea of chaos prevailed for many decades.  Naturally it became prevalent in popular culture and remains so, to the degree it is commercially viable.  And it remains an issue of academic or quasi-intellectual importance, particularly in the arts, in which the "transgressive" is viewed as having value for its own sake, or conferring value to the artist.  Such value is so rare as to be almost nonexistent, as the so-called transgressive has become no more than redundant repetition of the clichéd act of shocking the bourgeoisie.  It has committed the cardinal sin of becoming boring.

The idea of order evolves accordingly.

Rain in the Grail

No ideology is a replacement for Reason.

Ignorance brings wrack and ruin, and the dead walk the earth.  Can we be fully alive in the darkness of subjective shadows?

Light of Reason

To be passionate about something is to be emotionally attached to it, even to be mentally overwhelmed by it.  Some people do not possess such a temperament.

Over time, agility of mind is more potent than experience, the latter being of lesser consequence in dealing with the unpredictable, the unforeseen, and the unknown.

Heroes

There are times when rebellion against social and cultural norms proves itself right or wrong, viable or absurd.

There are times when the only thing worth rebelling against is the decline of civilized life.

Expansion

There is something about music repeating itself in one's consciousness, unbidden, that is not to be welcomed.

It is as if one's thoughts might be suppressed, one's emotional state might be compromised or falsified.

As a musical arranger involved in recording studio experimentation, and moving away from the creation of music using guitars, drums, vocals and "hooks", I grew interested in music that did not conform to the framework of popular songs or function as a setting for improvisation.  The nebulous and unpredictable appealed to my sense of form, as did a tone and mood most conducive to contemplative listening.  Utilizing developing technology, I grew capable of fabricating generative and ambient forms that sustained attention while enhancing the environment for listening and activity as well.  In this way what I think of as "my music" evolved into an effort of continuing interest, particularly as it contributes to a state of mind that is both focused and at ease.

What I consider to be Futurist music, given its origins in ambient music as an art form, appears to be without boundaries, not limited by genre, and unburdened by common definitions of music.

Echoes

Some people go around with "songs in their heads", or say "I have this song stuck in my head".  Some music, though obviously not all, dominates the listener's attention, then is internalized.  One may judge for oneself the value of this.

Perhaps such events, which are not external yet give the impression of being auditory, impinge or intrude on consciousness, superimposing their presence and emotional connotations, and perhaps they diminish clarity of perception.  One is left to one's own assessment of such things; that they are real is undisputed.

Soundtrack Assemblage

In the course of events broken by dreams remembered or lost on the edges of consciousness there is music.

A musical narrative emerges, a collage arriving along the labyrinthine routes of noise and rumour, melody and hearsay, rhythm and folk-tale, movement and legend, tone and myth.