Potential Musics

Everything related to aural perception may be considered music.

By engaging perception and approaching expectation in diverse ways, listening for pleasure--  and information-- expands and becomes more acute.  Imagine extravagantly; hear symphonic works and concertos developing through the composition of atmospheres.

Shifting Forms

Impressions of formlessness, though briefly perceived, reflect the intrinsic beauty of nature and the mind's eye of imagination.

Apply the concepts of art to sound constructions, and strictures are loosened; predictability is not as important as process and aesthetic effect.

Input, Output

Apply one set of ideas to another concept.  Sustain this pattern of thought and action.

Representations form according to a different order of thought, perception and meaning.

Art moves according to historical forces, but does not follow.

Appearance, Impression, Interpretation

Auditory sensations, with the responses of the mind and emotions, yield meanings.

Listener and composer realize, reflect, and transmit these meanings, in personal and cultural terms.

Contemplative Ear and Spirit

Move outside the current, rather than with or against it.

Music is considered mostly in terms of active listening, although some music is designed for passive awareness, as background music, or "aural wallpaper".

When neither perspective applies, both happen, by the composer's intent.  For the listener, this may bring about changes in perception, and consciousness, enhancing ways of listening and hearing.

Essential Order

Avoid the extraneous; if a sound does not contribute to the total effect of the work, eliminate it.

When a composer establishes limits, the tendency to be limited by ideas and events outside the composer's range of experience and influence can be mitigated.  This is of peculiar moment when assessing the considerable impact of a superabundance of information and continual technological progress on the development of a body of work.

Shock of the Real

Aesthetic richness is measured by simplicity as easily as extravagance.

In a state of lucidity one perceives directly, unfiltered and unadulterated by cognizance of self and culture.

Transformation Design

Developing electronic music through generative processes alone places the composer at a distance from sonic events and their final forms, often resulting in works of serene and highly nuanced beauty.

Transformation designs are the result of direct and indirect involvement on the composer's part; the object is to create conditions in which sound structures evolve while directing that development in such ways as enhance the total aesthetic effect of the work.

Echos, Reflections, Waves

Learn, perceive, think, and contemplate.  Action emerges.

In painting with sound, as it were, tones are mixed and set in motion.  Among innumerable things, they blend, spread, coalesce, dissipate, develop patterns, move in and out of focus, fade, become darker or lighter, and take on the ultimate form composed with the artist throughout the dynamic processes.

Art as Sound as Art: The King Krill

As discussed here in variable contexts, diverse sound elements may be presented in asymmetrical manner, designed in ways that defy anticipation.  The King Krill is a recording by Diode and Rick Holland that synthesizes unique elements of poetry, vocals, percussion and electronica to create an experience of rare aesthetic beauty.  This is a work that draws the future into the moment now.

The King Krill, featuring I am Fya, Beth Rowley, Chris James, Onallee, and Andrew Plummer, as brought into being by producer Old Man Diode and poet Rick Holland

Listeners familiar with Drums Between The Bells and Panic Of Looking, Rick Holland's 2011 collaborations with Brian Eno, will note the distinctive qualities shared by those works and The King Krill in combining musical and poetic elements. Each approaches and explores sound settings for voices from various artistic perspectives that bring to life diverse atmospheres and moods, and all three reflect creative interaction and experimentation seasoned over the past decade. As a poet of critical imagination and integrity, Holland proves at ease with both the ethereal atmospherics of Eno's arrangements and the elastic sonic power Diode wields with energetic bravura.

Read more of my review of The King Krill at The Quietus.com:  http://thequietus.com/

MP3 Album of Old Man Diode and Rick Holland: The King Krill at Amazon.com:  The King Krill

Sounds of Shadows

Sensory perceptions conceal as well as reveal.

For the artist to render honestly, a degree of subjectivity may palliate or exaggerate the reality fixed as a representation of objective experience.  This individuality suggests personal and demonstrative perspectives brought into being in any medium.

The inner ear of the composer must have the free reign of the eye of the visual artist, and the balance of lucid imagination.  Clarity of style and execution reflects coherence of concept, most peculiarly in emphasis of the more subtle elements of sound.

Auditory Imagination

The sounds of experience may evoke the broad vistas or small corners of the world.

The aural events and atmospheres of these settings may be expressed by the composer in all manner of ways.  Microcosm and macrocosm may be still and serene, or seething with activity.

But there is an essence of vision that the listener and composer must share, one difficult to define yet glaring in its absence, that of integrity of expression.

Emergence, Depth, Presence

There are sounds that can be heard only within the inner ear.

Such sounds form the narratives of mystery and epiphany, of insight and the unknown.

Past the Future

There are distant sounds, given no thought today, unheard and as yet unimagined.

Some are present even now, crossing the gulf, yet going unnoticed in the passing of events.

Being, Listening, Hearing

Matters of taste reflect cultural conditions as well as individual discrimination.

The content of culture changes, as do the perceptions and processes by which culture is understood and engaged.  Simplistic and materialistic attitudes and philosophical and conceptual perspectives are always in opposition.  The contention between historical forces such as these is reflected in current events, concrete artifacts, artistic representations, music, and in the written transmission of culture.

The transient material world rises and falls, while the poetic forms remain universal.

Sound Perceptivity

Perceptual sensitivity to sound may be enhanced or degraded according to various internal and external conditions.

Granted the individual has particular expectations regarding sights and sounds, and these influence attention and focus, certain perceptions may go unnoticed if not for peculiarly receptive states of mind, that is to say, of the neurological system, and the processes of thought and emotion.

Such heightened awareness and lucidity may be stimulated by sounds, especially those designed to defy anticipation, emerge and expand without reference to temporal events, or otherwise engage one's consciousness in extramundane experience.

Aural Prescience

There are myriad shared musical environments, and among them are found widely diverse cultural variations.

As listeners, we may become conscious of being thoroughly conditioned to our familiar atmospheres, and, rejecting facile conformity to general values and expectations relative to sound and art, we may find our inner ear is more attuned to the sounds of futurity.

This attitude is shared with the composer, and is a matter of natural curiosity. To engage in predictive analysis about the ways sounds and sonic structures may evolve creates conditions for speculative music to engage the imagination, potentially to be realized in concrete forms.

Movement and Expansion

There is no "stasis" in aural imagery.

Vibratory waves extend and develop in perpetual transformation as they encounter others, to defy illusions and anticipations of linear, temporal movement.

Imprint Time Past

Early memory informs present impressions.

What begins as direct perception informs, in the moment now, as meaning.  In sound apprehension, this is hearing, and listening, as passive and active attention, respectively.

Of the Far Margins

Listen for sounds heard at the edges of consciousness.

At the extreme limits of perception sounds defy identification, suggesting possibilities.  Hear and reach for them; make these undefined aural images emerge in the compositions, and allow their evocation of the uncanny.